Hahn practices patience as White Sox rebuild drags into season
The Chicago White Sox have seemingly been in a holding pattern for four months, so what's another day?
On Sunday, the day before the scheduled season opener against the Detroit Tigers at Guaranteed Rate Field, veteran groundskeeper Roger Bossard was asked about the grim forecast.
"There is no window," Bossard said.
With a day off Tuesday, it made sense for the Sox to postpone Monday's game early and make the easy switch.
The White Sox had other thoughts, and they let fans wait in the rain for nearly two hours before calling the game and rescheduling it for 1:10 p.m. Tuesday.
"We waited as long as we could, but we feel like we didn't have a large enough window to do what we needed to do," manager Rick Renteria said.
The frustration that comes with the waiting game played out in the clubhouse and in the stands Monday, and general manager Rick Hahn could undoubtedly relate.
After getting the Sox's rebuild off to a flying start by trading Chris Sale and Adam Eaton on consecutive days in early December, Hahn is still waiting to make more deals for prospects.
"As I've said way too many times, if we had our druthers we would have made some other moves over the course of the off-season," Hahn said. "At the same time, we've known throughout this process that it wasn't going to be our impatience or lack of patience or desire to accelerate things that was going to dictate the pace of the moves."
Current White Sox players like Jose Quintana, David Robertson, Jose Abreu, Melky Cabrera and Todd Frazier are still on the roster, but that could very well change once the season gets up and running.
"As I stated at the time when we made the Sale and Eaton trades, we realized that this is a process," Hahn said. "We realized that we're closer to the start of this process than we are the end, and Opening Day is just one milestone in that process, with another one coming in a few months when we get closer to the trade deadline."
Hahn did say he was close to making two big trades in the off-season, one on Christmas Eve and one shortly after.
"We had two deals with two different players and two different clubs, killed at the (goal) line by two different ownership groups, not ours," Hahn said. "Once those two things cratered, there hasn't really been anything else where, although we've gone through the process and gathered the scouts and gone through the video and had our internal debates, it wasn't anything where we're like, 'This is a coin flip' or 'We should do this or not.'
"It's been pretty clear that we haven't gotten to the level in terms of the offers, and everything we've presented hasn't obviously gained as much traction as those two aborted deals did."
Hahn has been waiting for four months, so he's practiced at the difficult art of patience.
"This is an extended process," the White Sox's GM said. "We're going to be tested at points. We're going to be tested not just from a patience standpoint but also from a competitiveness standpoint. We all - whether they're in uniform or in the front office or White Sox fans or whatever - we want to win. Any individual game we're watching, we're going to want to win that ballgame.
"At the same time, there might be stretches where those are few and far between, so we have to remain vigilant about what we're trying to accomplish for the long term and stick to that plan."