Back in September, the White Sox performed the first genuine overhaul of their front office in over 20 years. There’s an almost endless list of things wrong with the organization, but for the first time in a long time, they seem truly interested in solving the problems they face. Those solutions can seem half-baked (as when the team rather hurriedly hired Chris Getz (a player-turned-executive with deep preexisting ties to the organization) to replace Kenny Williams and Rick Hahn) or odious (in the case of their current push to take up residence downtown and become South Siders in name only), but at least they’re trying some things.
One of the most quietly aggressive and fascinating moves they made came almost right away, too. Getz had scarcely taken his seat before he poached Giants Director of Pitching Brian Bannister, bringing him home to the organization where his father Floyd had been a prized free-agent signee and a successful workhorse for half a decade. The younger Bannister was a teammate of Getz briefly in Kansas City, but that wasn’t the whole reason for his departure from San Francisco. Gabe Kapler was fired at the end of a disappointing season for the Giants, and while Bannister probably could have survived that cull, it was a good time to get out of town.
That’s not to say that what Bannister had been doing wasn’t working, though. The Giants were fourth in MLB in DRA last year. It’s just that they hadn’t quite been good enough to get over the hump in 2023, after a disillusioning 2022 banished any hopes that 2021 marked some reestablishment of the Giants dynasty. When a team doesn’t reach its goals, the level of trouble anyone gets in for it is inversely proportional to the number of risks they’ve been taking—the extent to which they stand out from the field. Bannister wasn’t likely to stay in favor in San Francisco on the occasion of their two straight seasons of falling short of the postseason, because no one has been doing things less conventionally on the mound for the last two years than the Giants, and it’s been largely at Bannister’s behest.
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