Four-A

Goodbye to Lucas Giolito; Reynaldo Lopez; Lance Lynn; Joe Kelly; and Kendall Graveman. Hello to a bunch of prospects. Goodbye, please, to Tim Anderson and Yoan Moncada, but that’ll never happen. And neither will the White Sox rolling back ticket and concession prices. Forget gutting the pitching staff as part of a rebuild, though Rick Hahn is loath to call it that. Triple-A or Four-A, the team on the field will continue to charge big-league ticket prices to watch minor-league talent. And my daughter, for one, is none too pleased. Clare and Chris went to the game yesterday, as much to hear country-and-western star Jake Owen sing after the game as to watch the without-a-staff Sox play the Guardians. Oh, trust me, she liked seeing Jake Burger hit his fourth homerun in three games, and she didn’t mind Luis Robert Jr. go deep for the twenty-ninth time, either, in a surprise 3-0 Sox win. It’s just that she bought the tickets back when the Sox were a different, ostensibly contending team. Oh, well. Clare being Clare, she found a silver lining—she got to go on the field for the after-game concert. “I touched the grass,” she marveled when they got back home (we were baby-chasing our grandson), and would’ve touched the infield dirt, too, if it hadn’t been covered with the tarp already. She did make eye contact with Roger Bossard, the “Sodfather” of groundskeepers, busy preparing the field for today’s game. And that my daughter considered almost worth the price of admission.