Chicago Bears are everything Chicago White Sox wish they were
The Chicago Bears are spending, the Chicago White Sox said they would spend. One did, one didn’t.
The Chicago Bears are Super Bowl contenders. The White Sox fancy themselves to being on the way to being World Series contenders. The Bears are have a team capable of achieving the ultimate goal. Do the White Sox? Certainly not yet, and they could have made drastic strides in that direction the last couple of months, but they failed.
Ryan Pace became the GM of the Chicago Bears and he didn’t vocally say they were starting from scratch, but if you watched the Bears and saw the moves he was making, it was clear that’s what he’s doing. Pace committed to Kyle Long, but didn’t commit to Charles Leno, Kyle Fuller and Sherrick McManis until they proved their value to his team.
Besides that group of players, Pace started over. He brought in new players at every position. Once he felt he had the core he needed to make the jump into becoming a great team. He went out and spent. He signed Allen Robinson, Trey Burton and Taylor Gabriel. Then he made the mother of all moves and traded for Khalil Mack and inked him to the most lucrative offer a defensive player has ever seen at the NFL level.
The Bears gave Mack a historic contract. That’s what White Sox fans thought they would do this offseason, but as it turns out, there’s a difference between talk and action.
Bryce Harper and Manny Machado were free agents. White Sox general manager Rick Hahn had spoken for over a year about how it was this offseason he was targeting to make a big splash in free agency.
His core was coming into focus with the likes of Yoan Moncada, Eloy Jimenez, Dylan Cease among others. The White Sox were ready to strike. They were ready to make a commitment to their fan base. The only problem is they didn’t.
To land Machado or Harper, Hahn and the White Sox needed to offer a historic contract. They offered a massive contract to Machado, but it wasn’t historic. Harper now owns the largest contract in baseball history.
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Whether Hahn didn’t want to have that much money committed to one of those two players or Jerry Reinsdorf didn’t give him the resources he needed to sign one of them, it’s irrelevant. The White Sox, as a franchise, failed to deliver on a promise to make this offseason something special.
The White Sox are still in the midst of their rebuild and there is no reason to think they are ready to compete this year. The Bears were in the same position in 2017 coming off a bad record, but they decided that the time was right to spend and turn things around in 2018 and that’s what they did.
The acquisitions of Robinson, Burton and Gabriel helped make the offense a solid unit, but the acquisition of Mack made the Bears’ defense a historic unit. The Bears were bold, the White Sox were not. The Bears gave Mack a contract larger than any defensive player in NFL history. The White Sox could have offered Machado a historic contract, but instead they tried to let the market dictate a lower contract for themselves, and when the contract offers rose, they bowed out.
The White Sox have moved on. Fans in Philadelphia spent the weekend buying Harper jerseys and buying tickets. White Sox fans spent the weekend wondering why their team didn’t even make an offer to the $330 million man.
Thanks to last season, Bears fans now know this front office will do what it takes and spend what they need to do to make this team the best it can be. White Sox fans can hope this team is headed in the right direction, but they certainly can’t have any faith that the White Sox front office will do what it takes to win. They had a chance to prove it over the winter and they swung and missed.