How former Blue Jay Chris Getz ended up leading a rebuild of White Sox

TORONTO – Chris Getz was coming off an 0-for-3 day, a seventh straight hitless outing for the Toronto Blue Jays, when he reported to Rogers Centre on the morning of May 11, 2014 and was called into the manager’s office by John Gibbons. The team needed a roster spot with reliever Casey Jansen returning from the injured list and he was being designated for assignment to free one up. Waiver-wire limbo loomed so he and wife Nicole, pregnant with the couple’s first child, headed home to Grosse Pointe Farms, Mich. to wait out the process, and it was there he considered his future. By the time he cleared waivers and was offered a job at triple-A Buffalo, his mind was made up — he was done playing.

“All of a sudden I'm 30 years old, I'm signing minor-league deals, in all reality you're looking at where you are financially, about to start a family,” says Getz, now senior vice-president and general manager of the Chicago White Sox. “I could probably continue to play. Am I still enjoying this? I am. Will I have more major-league time ahead of me? Probably. Regardless, I know at some point I'm going to have to get into the workforce and provide for my family. And so, with all those different factors, I felt like it was it was a good time. …

“And I was a little burned out. The triple-A to the big-leagues and vice-versa can be pretty taxing emotionally and so I decided to close the door and jumped into the baseball operations position with zero regrets.”

A year later he was a player-development assistant with the Kansas City Royals as they beat the Blue Jays in the American League Championship Series en route to a World Series title, starting him on a path that now has him leading a rebuild of the White Sox.

Getz spent that summer of 2014 in Grosse Point, his first at home since he was a teenager, enjoying some unexpected time with his son Luke. At the same time, Royals GM Dayton Moore reached out with some options for the future on the scouting, coaching and front office tracks. 

He took up Moore’s offer of scout school and later helped out at the club’s instructional league. Eventually, that led to the player development gig, where Moore told him not to worry about his specified duties and just to “serve the organization.”

Getz took those words to heart and his star quickly rose. In October 2016, the White Sox hired him as their director of player development and 4½ years later, made him an assistant GM, as well. Under his watch, the system graduated players like Luis Robert Jr., Dylan Cease, Lucas Giolito, Eloy Jimenez, Yoan Moncada and Michael Kopech and they’re among the players that helped the White Sox win a wild-card spot in 2020 and then take the AL Central at 93-69 in 2021. 

At the time, the White Sox seemed to be similarly positioned to the Blue Jays, a talented young team on the rise, with the financial flexibility to augment in free agency. 

But their trajectories diverged when the White Sox hit a wall in 2022, finishing 81-81, and fully collapsed last year at 61-101, leading to the late August firings of executive vice-president Kenny Williams and GM Rick Hahn, with Getz taking over shortly after.

The Blue Jays, who won wild-card spots in each of the past two seasons, are 22-26 after taking two of three from Chicago this week in Toronto, and trying to maintain their competitive window rather than reset the way their visitors were forced to.

“When we finished the season and you're looking at 61 wins, the gap between being a playoff team and 61 wins is a large gap,” says Getz. “So you want to take steps forward, perhaps in the near-term, but truly in the long-term to be a regular competitor for your division and we've had to make some really hard decisions. 

“We felt like because there was such a large gap, we had to dive in and try to multiply off some of the players we have,” he continues. “And that's what we've done with the Aaron Bummer trade, the Dylan Cease trade. To really shrink that win gap, that needs to happen. We have a lot of work ahead of us and sometimes that means you've got to move some players that may help you right now. But you've got to have a zoomed-out, larger mindset.”

To that end, Getz is applying his experiences and lessons as a player and executive as he works to rebuild the White Sox’s foundation. 

During his 10 seasons of pro ball, including 459 games across parts of seven seasons in the majors, he felt fortunate to have been treated well. But at times, he remembers seeing moves being made in a purely transactional way, detached of any connection between player and team. 

While cognizant of the demands of his position and the need to be “clear-minded on what we're really here for,” he’s tried to avoid operating in the same way, an outlook reflected in how he handled the spring-time trade of Cease to San Diego for four players.

The 28-year-old right-hander was in rumours all winter long before finally being sent to the Padres and Getz “had communication with him throughout the off-season and even in spring training, keeping him up to speed.”

“I was very intentional about it,” he continues. “I thought that was important. I didn't want him to start to speculate unnecessarily. I can't say that all players would handle that information that I was sharing professionally like Dylan did. But that's certainly the approach that I would like to take with situations like that. And we're going to have to consider some other players along the way here, too, as we want to continue to get our farm system healthy and growing so we can get us back on track at the major-league level.”

Parting with Cease was doubly difficult because Getz was “alongside his minor-league journey, his major-league journey, becoming a Cy Young candidate.”

Making the deal “was a bittersweet moment, quite honestly, just because I am so proud of the player he's become,” he adds. “But you're looking at, OK, what does this organization need to improve to get us back to being a high-level competitive club. So you acquire players that you're excited about and their opportunity to grow, but you're also saying goodbye to someone that's really had a strong impact on the organization and me personally.”

Sentimentality, of course, doesn’t win in the majors, which is why Getz is rebuilding the White Sox, who were unable to leverage the type of window the Blue Jays are still trying to keep open.