Jesse Rogers
GLENDALE, Ariz. — One team is a worldwide attraction fresh off its eighth World Series title. The other just lost an MLB record 121 games and hasn’t won a playoff series since 2005. The one thing they have in common?
A spring training parking lot.
Both the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago White Sox reside at Camelback Ranch during February and March, but life couldn’t be more different as the two franchises prepare for a new season.
When Dodgers players reported to camp earlier this month, their clubhouse looked like a who’s who of MLB All-Stars, while a trip through the White Sox’s side of the building required frequent glances at the nameplates above the locker stalls to know who was who.
In the days since arriving, the Dodgers have been asked regularly about the opportunity to repeat. The White Sox are contemplating a host of other questions: How do you restore confidence in the clubhouse? What message of optimism can you deliver after a historic season of losing?
Even the Dodgers’ morning workouts, normally a mundane early-spring ritual, have served as a celebration of the team that ruled baseball last October and dominated the offseason headlines again, with 1,000-plus fans showing up to get a glimpse of their favorite players. On the White Sox side of the facility, ESPN counted only 21 fans taking in one recent workout.
Still, entering a year in which their focus will be on finding the positives wherever they can, the White Sox are looking at the upside of sharing a spring home with the team certain to be the talk of baseball all season.
“It’s a great opportunity to be matched up in a facility with a team that won the World Series, to have something to aim towards,” general manager Chris Getz said. “How do we get to beat them? How can we compete? So yeah, the Dodgers have been a very successful organization. With that being said, we know what we need to do and we’re set out to do that.”
For Chicago, the season will be measured mostly by the steps taken by young players, and despite the ups-and-downs that come with trying to integrate them into a major league roster, the on-the-field results must add up to a better record than last year’s 41-121 mark.
“I do think we’re going to win more games than we did last year,” Getz said as camp opened. “Unfortunately, there are going to be some growing pains along the way that at times is going to challenge your emotions, but that’s part of the development of some of these players.
“Last year provided a lot of clarity for a lot of people, including myself. We had a lot of work to do, a lot more changes that needed to be made, and we were able to accomplish a lot of that this offseason, and that started with hiring Will Venable.”
Venable is the first-time manager who checks all the boxes the front office was looking for when it set out to find someone to guide the White Sox through a fresh start. The 42-year-old former major league outfielder retired within the past decade and has since worked under some of the best managers in the business, including Joe Maddon, Alex Cora and Bruce Bochy.
“It’s really about being present and doing the things that we can control now,” Venable said of his opening message to his team.
Venable’s roster is missing last season’s best player, left-hander Garrett Crochet, who was traded to the Red Sox during the offseason. It does feature a smattering of holdovers, such as Luis Robert Jr. and Andrew Vaughn and Andrew Benintendi (although the start of the outfielder’s season will come later after he suffered a broken hand Thursday), who are hungry for an opportunity to be remembered for something other than last season’s futility.
“When I signed here, I signed for five years knowing that there could be ups and downs, but I’m here for it and it’s my job to go out there and perform,” Benintendi said. “And last year I didn’t do that. And not only do I feel like I let the fans or team down, I think [I let] myself down. You have such high expectations going into a season, and when you don’t hit them, it’s frustrating, but you just gotta keep going.”
The White Sox also added a group of journeyman free agents looking to reboot their careers — including Joey Gallo, Brandon Drury and Michael A. Taylor — who were signed to short-term deals with an opportunity to compete for the playing time they weren’t as likely to get elsewhere.
But the real excitement on Chicago’s side of Camelback Ranch this spring is about a group of prospects — six of whom appear on ESPN’s Kiley McDaniel’s top 100 list, including lefties Noah Schultz and Hagen Smith, the team’s top picks in the 2022 and 2024 drafts, respectively. Both made their spring debuts Wednesday but won’t break camp with the big league club. Also providing promise for the future is catcher Kyle Teel, who was the centerpiece of the White Sox’s return for Crochet, and shortstop Colson Montgomery, who homered in the team’s first spring game.
“We brought in a lot of really good veterans, so it’s really cool just to talk to them, pick their brains, not even about baseball, just kind of how they go about their business, how you go about yourself as a pro,” Montgomery said. “We also have a lot of really young talent, and I think that’s what the fans and everybody should be really excited for.”
Envisioning a future with Montgomery anchoring the lineup while Schultz and Smith top the rotation has helped Getz stay the course in Chicago’s rebuild even as the losses at the major league level have piled up.
“There’s no time to complain. And there’s no one really to complain to,” Getz said. “We got our hands dirty and got to work. There honestly wasn’t a day to get away from it because we didn’t want to get away from it. We wanted to dive in and continue to build this forward.
“Physically, mentally you rid yourself of negative things, but I personally have just channeled it for motivation to get better. And I know that is a cliché, in itself, but it’s the truth of the matter.”
Across the parking lot earlier this week, after watching $325 million starter Yoshinobu Yamamoto throw a bullpen session, Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman reflected on the plight of his White Sox counterpart.
Friedman and Getz sometimes meet on the backfields at Camelback Ranch. Friedman sympathizes with Getz despite the vast disparity between their two rosters, which includes a payroll difference of more than $300 million. L.A. enters the season with an MLB-leading payroll that’s approaching $400 million, compared with Chicago’s 29th-ranked $83 million total, a number the franchise has pared down during its rebuild.
“It’s certainly a challenge, but in a lot of ways there are a lot of fun aspects of it, building up and growing the various departments. And it’s critical for everyone to work well together,” said Friedman, who helped build winning teams in Tampa Bay without high payrolls. “And it doesn’t mean you don’t disagree, but putting those processes in place and being more innovative when you’re at this point, it’s similar to how we were in 2006 and 2007 with the Rays.
“There is a lot of strong foundation you can build during that time period that while mired in it is not fun. But when you look back, when you’ve reached a point of a steady state of success where a lot of that can be attributed to those early years, it can be very rewarding.”
While Getz can only dream of those days for now, he is using his unique spring training vantage point to soak up how a model organization is run. Asked what he admires about the Dodgers, he pointed to the detailed ground-up approach that often gets overlooked amid the franchise’s splashy offseason signings.
“Being a former farm director and being attached to a complex with the Dodgers and seeing what they do on a regular basis, having conversations, seeing the work that’s being done, it’s almost a small-market mindset in terms of really valuing the development of players,” Getz said. “I respect how they go about it. It’s not just spending; they do a lot of little things.”
Of course, it is going to take more than little things for the White Sox to make up the distance between them and the Dodgers — or even most of the rest of the other 28 major league teams — and that was apparent as soon as the curtain opened on a new season of Cactus League games.
Last Thursday, 10,959 fans dressed primarily in Dodger Blue showed up for L.A.’s opener. Four days later, the White Sox played their first home game of the spring in front of an announced crowd of 2,636. The fans who did make their way to Camelback Ranch for the Monday afternoon matchup with the Texas Rangers were greeted with a familiar sight to anyone who followed the 2024 season: Chicago promptly gave up nine runs in the top of the first inning.
“Obviously, you’re not going to meet a fan that wants to be where we’re at right now,” Getz said. “But if they’re sticking by our side, when we get there, it’s going to be a really special moment for a lot of people.”
