A summary of my anti-rants.
1. This sucks.
2. This really sucks.
3. You're right the timing is awful. It would have been great if this happened 3 weeks ago, by comparison. I can be a little open to the argument that keeping him down would avoid service time loss in the event of injury...but literally no one made that. It was keeping him down for service time when he comes up next year, to extend things in 2025, not to protect against losing service time while rehabbing injuries. Furthermore, this happening early next year could darn well have been worse - it might have saved us service time, but it could have knocked him out for most of 2020, with that happening after we had already spent money on the free agent market with the expectation of being good in 2019 and 2020. Imagine signing Machado, giving him a 3 year opt out, and then this happening in early May of next year.
4. Everyone who's struggling to find something the White Sox did wrong...if avoiding these things were easy then someone would have figured it out. The Red Sox got lucky with David Price, congratulations. Why did Jay Groome, their top prospect, not get the same arm saving treatment from their excellent medical staff? The answer is...these things happen with pitchers. Look earlier in this thread, almost every top pitching prospect has now had one this year. You do the best you can to put them on a throwing regimen, to keep their mechanics right, and if you think their mechanics are a risk maybe you trade them. Even if you do all that, you still lose some. You can't detect these things early, even sending guys for MRI scans weekly isn't going to do that. The White Sox have been as good as anyone at avoiding this particular surgery for the last 15 years...that could be luck, but you certainly can't tell me that they're putting these guys at undue risk. Hanging this on the coaching staff or the training staff and wishing we had some other team's trainers is silly.
5. Blaming this on Rick Hahn and the front office, for now at least, is still inappropriate. Literally no one on this site dislikes Rick Hahn more than me, I believe the shame of his performance should taint his children's children's children. This is a major setback and it makes it darn near impossible to compete in 2020. However, The overall situation is still the same, we have a load arriving in 2021 or so, and now we have to plan for that as that should also be the year for full strength Kopech. We may well have dramatically mis-scouted guys. The strategy of acquiring so many pitchers could darn well be fundamentally flawed, and in 2 years we may have said that trading our last assets for young pitching was the final mistake in the career of the worst GM in baseball history. Until then, we've still got to let this play out. Holding onto Chris Sale and letting him walk after 2019, having not been over .500 since 2012, would be just about as rotten as where we are right now.
6. I do think this dramatically changes what we have to do this offseason. A 3 year signing is now a stopgap, not a move to compete. We can't give out 3-year opt outs if we sign anyone big, because the first 2 seasons are now undermanned. We now have, honestly, more motivation to move Rodon. I don't think we'll get the right kind of offers for him until next year's trade deadline personally, but if the right kind of offer comes in, the White Sox now simply won't have the firepower in 2019 or 2020 to make use of Rodon, in 2020 they will be rehabbing Kopech and working Cease into the rotation hopefully and that's just not the strong rotation we will need to make a legit run when so much of our high level talent was wrapped up in starting pitching. Holding Rodon until the right offer comes in makes sense, but if such an offer appears it's time to make the move. Now we have to play for 2021 as a piece that could have been a 2020 all star will now probably pitch 100 big league innings that year if we're lucky. We should consider that when signing contracts and when making moves on other guys, we're underpowered in 2020.
7. This sucks.