Hahn sees brighter days ahead for Chicago White Sox
Before the season started, Chicago White Sox general manager Rick Hahn said the second year of a rebuild is typically the toughest.
He wasn't lying.
The Sox started the season with a bang, winning their first two games of the season while hitting 7 combined home runs against the Royals at Kansas City.
It was downhill from there, and the White Sox didn't reach double digits in wins until May 13, when they were 10-27, the worst record to start the season in franchise history.
The Sox have played better all-around baseball since the dreadful start, but they are still facing a fourth-place finish in the AL Central for the fifth straight year.
"We'll see what the future holds, but traditionally the second year of these rebuilds tend to be difficult," Hahn said Wednesday before the White Sox played the Cleveland Indians in their final home game of the season. "Obviously, we made some very high-profile moves in the first year and you're then in the position of having some young guys develop at the big-league level and having a need to be patient for players to develop at the minor-league level.
"We were no exception to that second year of a rebuild process. There certainly has been a fair amount of positives over the course of the year. There's been an element of progress, not simply with the passage of time, of getting us closer to where we need to be for the long term, but with some of the development we've seen at the big-league level as well as the minor-league level.
"I was, perhaps unfortunately, fairly prescient in thinking that the second year was going to be a difficult year, which it was at times. But there's been many signs of progress throughout the organization, and we're certainly closer now than we were 12 months ago to being ready to contend."
Had Michael Kopech stayed healthy this year, the White Sox could have fortified the roster with key prospects such as Eloy Jimenez, Dylan Cease and Zack Collins next season and possibly been in the race.
Kopech went down with an arm injury that required Tommy John surgery last week, and the promising starting pitcher is out until 2020.
Not much is going to be expected from the Sox next season, but Hahn is looking for a more competitive team.
"We are going to have further progress at the big-league level from guys like (Tim) Anderson and (Yoan) Moncada and (Reynaldo) Lopez and (Lucas) Giolito and a healthy Carlos Rodon as well as some of the other young players that contributed this year," Hahn said. "We are also going to start seeing further additional influx of young talent.
"At some point over the course of next year, either at the start or for the majority of the season, we'll have Eloy Jimenez, who we project joining us, and certainly by the middle or end of next year I suspect there will be some other young potential core pieces forcing their way to Chicago and allowing us to further solidify what this is going to look like going forward."