A few good reasons to trust Williams

My first inclination was to question the White Sox' sanity in acquiring Alex Rios.

More than $60 million is an awful lot of money to invest in a baseball player who essentially underachieved the past couple years.

Why would anybody want anybody that another team was willing to surrender for zero compensation anyway?

So much indicated that the Sox were nuts for taking Rios.

Then one thing balanced the scales in the Sox' favor: General manager Kenny Williams wanted Alex Rios.

Williams receives so much credit for being aggressive, it obscures that he has been a talented evaluator of baseball talent.

Being aggressive sometimes means a general manager just keeps coming at you to recover from his myriad earlier mistakes.

Well, every GM makes mistakes he has to overcome. The key is Williams has many, many more hits than misses. That's why the Sox won the 2005 World Series and remain relevant in their division even in a transition season like this one, although it's true the AL Central isn't exactly a tough neighborhood.

It's about time to acknowledge that Williams, assistant Rick Hahn and their scouting staff have been right on players much more often than they have been wrong.

More than that, when they were right, they were really right. They wound up with not only good players, but with really good players.

Every miss like Mike MacDougal is offset by three hits like A.J. Pierzynski, Jermaine Dye and Bobby Jenks.

Between the acquisitions of Jake Peavy on July 31 and Rios on Monday, I was trying to figure out Williams' most impressive player transaction.

It's a pretty good testament that it wasn't easy to pick just one. Don't forget getting Gavin Floyd and John Danks in deals for breaking-down Freddy Garcia and Brandon McCarthy.

Trading prospect Chris Young for Javier Vazquez seemed for a while like a wash at best and maybe even a loss.

But the Sox squeezed a couple decent years out of Vazquez before flipping him for a better prospect in Tyler Flowers. Meanwhile Young received a nice contract from Arizona before being demoted to the minors this week.

So perhaps Williams' best acquisition is yet to surface - maybe Flowers if he's all the Sox think he will be, or maybe Rios if he becomes all he was supposed to be, or maybe someone else.

What sets Rios and Peavy apart from the others are the financial commitments the Sox acquired along with them.

The other trades and signings essentially were for inexpensive youngsters, like Floyd and Danks, or abandoned veterans, like Dye and Pierzynski.

If Williams was correct on those guys, the Sox received something for nearly nothing. If not, little was lost.

Rios and Peavy are outsiders the Sox brought in at a substantial financial risk.

Williams earned the privilege of taking that risk and Sox Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf gave it to him.

So, yes, Rios is owed a lot of money. Yes, his numbers don't seem to justify his contract. Yes, it's harder to judge a player in another organization than it is to judge one in yours.

Evaluating Kenny Williams' previous player evaluations, however, it's only fair to give him the benefit of the doubt.

mimrem@dailyherald.com