T10YL - Gordon Beckham for (Eventually) Yency Almonte
The White Sox cut bait on a once-untouchable prospect and figure out the return in February
August 21, 2014
The Names: Los Angeles Angels receive: Gordon Beckham. Chicago White Sox receive: Player To Be Named Later or cash (Yency Almonte named on February 4, 2015).
The Team Context: We wrote about the Angels at the July trade deadline and wrote about their first trade of the waiver deadline, which came two weeks before this one. Readers of any of those posts will recall that the Angels were a championship-caliber team who were cursed by sharing a division with the all-in Oakland Athletics.
By August 21, the pendulum had begun to swing in whichever direction best completes this metaphor. The Angels were finishing up a sweep of the Red Sox that put them two games up on the A’s and were going to play seven games against Oakland before the month ended. For the first time in the 2014 season, the Angels had a clear path to bury their competition and move to a dominant position within the division.
We’ve written about the White Sox previously, too, but those posts were both published so long ago that you probably didn’t read them. The White Sox were never really in contention during the 2014 season and were certainly out of it by summertime, but in an optimistic way. They didn’t make many trades at the deadline because most of their good players (Chris Sale, Jose Abreu, Adam Eaton, Jose Quintana) were young and excellent enough to be part of a future White Sox core in hypothetical better days. The veterans that they did have available were sufficiently undesirable to be August trade material (two of the four waivers trades left after this one involve the White Sox).
The Player Context: The American Golden Age of Beckhams came in the late 2000s. In 2007, Major League Soccer kicked off the era when David Beckham joined LA Galaxy in one of the highest-profile moves in league history. In celebration, NFL player Tony Beckham returned to play in 2007 after missing the 2006 season. With the audience sufficiently warmed up by these opening acts, the hard launch of the Beckham Era took place during the 2008 MLB Draft. With the first overall pick, the Tampa Bay Rays selected Tim Beckham, a high school shortstop from Georgia. Seven picks later, the Chicago White Sox selected Gordon Beckham, a shortstop from the University of Georgia. Sixteen rounds later, the Rays doubled up on Beckhams when they drafted Tim’s older brother Jeremy, positioning themselves nicely for what seemed to be a new era in sports.
For the first time since 1903, the first name “Beckham” entered the top-1000 most common names for males born in the United States, ranking as #900 in 2008. Gordon Beckham was at the vanguard of a movement with the potential to reshape the nation.
By comparison, August of 2014 was something of a nadir for sports Beckhams. David had officially retired from professional soccer – he had announced plans to head an MLS expansion team in Miami, but the team that would one day become Inter Miami (and eventually break Beckham’s record with the biggest signing in MLS history) was still in its nascent stages. Tim had sputtered out as a prospect and was just getting back from an ACL tear that cost him the first 60% of the 2014 season. Nobody knew about the rookie season that Odell Beckham Jr. was about to have. The rapid ascent of “Beckham” on the most popular names list had stagnated, with a #532 rank in 2012 followed by a #527 in 2013.
Gordon, meanwhile, had fallen into a pit of perpetual mediocrity. Beckham was promoted to the major leagues less than a year after being drafted, moving to third base in his rookie season and to second base thereafter. The rookie year went well enough for Beckham to finish 5th in Rookie of the Year voting and entrench himself in the organization’s plans as “one of the game’s most valuable young players.” That season would turn out to be the best and only above-average hitting season of Beckham’s career, with a “terrible sophomore slump” more indicative of what was yet to come. To the White Sox’s credit, they attempted to trade Beckham before his value completely collapsed, with Ben Nicholson-Smith saying “it seems likely that more than half the teams in baseball would have some interest in the former first rounder” on November 11, 2010. To their non-credit, this came after they had made Beckham untouchable in potential trade talks for Roy Halladay or Adrian Gonzalez. And they didn’t trade him in November 2010, either.
The next few seasons brought more instances of sporadic Gordon Beckham trade speculation accompanied by continued chiseling away of his trade value through bad play. The terrible sophomore slump turned into an even worse third year, which turned into two consecutive seasons where an OPS under .700 was seen as a “slight rebound.” Beckham’s quick debut in MLB meant that he was still just 27 years old through the majority of the 2014 season, but he didn’t have the kind of youth coveted by MLB teams. For one, the manner of Beckham’s mediocrity was so relentlessly consistent that it was difficult to imagine any further upside from him. For another, Beckham had spent enough time in the major leagues that he was already in his second year of salary arbitration, making the mediocrity he was sure to provide increasingly expensive.
Chicago radio host (and writer, evidently) Matt Spiegel eulogized Beckham’s time with the White Sox in a post titled “The Lesson of Gordon Beckham’s Failure.” Spiegel reflected on the weekly radio hits that Beckham made during his second season with the team, which were “often painful” even though Beckham was “affable, likable, smooth and willing.” But as Beckham “was overwhelmed, experiencing his first athletic struggles at the highest possible level,” he seemed to increasingly internalize the failures. The bad sophomore season got Beckham bumped from the weekly radio lineup (if not from the White Sox actual starting lineup), and Spiegel rejected future attempts to get Beckham on the show with a half-joking suggestion that he “thought our talks screwed [Beckham] up.”
The Trade: In previewing Beckham’s potential trade candidacy ahead of the deadline, South Side Sox concluded that “it’s very likely that he’ll be phased out of the White Sox’ plans in the near future, but his recent performance at the plate has made it pretty improbable that the Sox will achieve this in the form of a clean, dignity-preserving and value-providing trade. Even Beckham’s exit from the White Sox will probably be a disappointment.”
In one sense, this was true, as the White Sox received a player to be named later who wouldn’t be named until February (we’ll get to him in the next section). On the other hand, there seemed to be enough positive sentiment just from getting rid of Beckham that it was hard to call it a disappointment. “The salary relief for the rest of the season is good enough for this Sox fan,” said Reddit user SHINE09. “THERE IS A GOD,” exclaimed Reddit user Whitsoxrule. There are no examples of similar exuberance from Angels fans.
The transaction was announced from the personal account of Eric Kay, who served as director of communications for the Angels. Kay mistakenly announced that the White Sox would receive “a player to be named later and cash,” which he subsequently corrected to “PTBNL or cash. Not both.” This is the kind of error so minor that anybody would ignore it, unless the person who committed it would turn out to be publicly revealed as the team’s opiate supplier, in which case it might make you raise your eyebrows.
The Results: Beckham’s rookie season was his first period as an above-average MLB hitter. The second and final period came in his 26 games with the Angels in 2014. There’s an odd pattern of usage within these 26 games. As would be expected from a bench infielder, Beckham often entered midway through the game or left before it was finished – only 12 of these appearances were complete games. That part makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is that, of those 12 complete games, eight were against the division-rival Oakland A’s, which were the most important games for the late-2014 Angels. Beckham wasn’t getting his starts limited to series-closing day games, he was a regular in showdowns at the top of the AL West. Somehow, the strategy of relying on Gordon Beckham in the biggest moments worked out; the Angels went 6-2 in these games and Beckham hit 53% better against the A’s than his full-season mark by tOPS+.
Beckham made his postseason debut as a pinch-runner for David Freese in Game 1 of the ALDS, because if there’s one thing we know about David Freese it’s that you don’t want him involved in your late-game playoff situations. Beckham didn’t score, but stayed in the game at 3rd base and made his first plate appearance to lead off the bottom of the 9th. The third pitch he saw hit him, but the Angels were unable to bring him home as the winning run. That would be Beckham’s only time on base in any playoffs; he struck out in the bottom of the 11th and never stepped up to the plate in another playoff game.
The Angels non-tendered Beckham after the season, as had been expected for much of the year. The team wanted him to return at a lower price tag and reprise his role as a bench player (and A’s nemesis?), but Beckham remained a free agent as he sought out starting opportunities. It may have seemed unlikely that a team would be comfortable giving a substantial role to a player of Beckham’s proven mediocrity, but fortunately there was one franchise who was quite comfortable with giving Gordon Beckham playing time. On January 28, 2015, the Chicago White Sox announced that they had signed Gordon Beckham as a free agent. He would go on to play 100 more games for the White Sox and have his worst offensive season yet.
Of course, you may note that we haven’t yet gotten to the Later where we Named the Player from Beckham’s trade to Anaheim. Presumably, the return of Beckham to Chicago reminded both teams that they left an item unchecked on their to-do list. One week after Beckham’s return, the White Sox announced that Yency Almonte would be the player they received in exchange for his departure six months earlier. Almonte was a 17th-round draft pick in 2012 who the Angels had signed for substantially more than his slot value. A more plausible reason for the delay in identifying Almonte as the trade return was his balky medical history, which delayed the start of his 2014 season until May 23 and ended it by August 7. Almonte had just turned 20 and was being developed as a starter, a pattern that the White Sox continued in a 2015 season that saw Almonte throw 137.1 innings in the minors.
Waiting to announce the trade return until the player you traded has already returned to the organization is a fun rhetorical trick by the White Sox, but not one that conclusively wins them the trade. After all, Beckham posted unprecedented offense in his small sample size with the Angels and Almonte was out of the White Sox organization after the 2015 season. The scale still tips towards the White Sox because they traded Almonte in exchange for Tommy Kahnle, whose contributions in Chicago were more than worth 26 games of Gordon Beckham.
The Aftermath: Yency Almonte continued developing as a starter as he rose through the minor leagues. In 2018, he made his debut for the Rockies and kept a 1.84 ERA through 14 appearances out of the bullpen, after which nobody ever thought to have him start a game ever again. Almonte was inconsistent across the next three seasons, with his success generally predicted by his propensity to surrender walks and home runs in a given season – he gave up lots of those in 2019 and 2021 (bad), but not very many in 2020 (good).
The Rockies tried to outright Almonte to the minors after the 2021 season, but he had been a professional for long enough to elect free agency instead. It took four months for Almonte to get a new contract, but the Dodgers eventually picked him up on a minor league deal that would pay him $1.5 million if he made the majors. He was in MLB by May 12 and proceeded to post a monster season, with his 1.02 ERA across 35.1 innings tops among all pitchers with at least 30 innings. This wasn’t necessarily “sustainable,” at all, as Almonte’s success was supported by stranding 96% of his baserunners and allowing a .186 batting average on balls in play, but it did still happen. That 1.02 ERA is set in stone. Almonte kept up his pattern of inconsistency by zooming up to a 5.06 ERA in 2023, which demonstrates the pitfalls of letting your strand rate fall by 30% and BABIP increase by .110 from season-to-season (to say nothing of the walks and home runs going back up). The Dodgers traded Almonte to the Cubs after the season and he got off to a good start in 2024 before a shoulder injury shut him down in May and resulted in season-ending surgery in July.
Gordon Beckham signed a one-year contract with his hometown Atlanta Braves after the 2015 season, then somehow got traded to the Giants on September 27. I really didn’t expect to write about a second Gordon Beckham trade (once was pushing it), but we’ll investigate that one to pad the 2026 fall calendar. His subsequent appearances in the big leagues all came after signing minor league contracts, which took him to the Mariners for brief stints in 2017 and 2018 and then to the Tigers in 2019. For a player who flew through the minor leagues on his initial ascent, spending this much time in the minors was “kind of an eye-opener.” Beckham questioned whether he wanted to put up with another year of minor league baseball in pursuit of MLB success that seemed increasingly unlikely. Fortunately for Beckham, he didn’t have to answer that question – for the first time since 2015, Beckham spent the entire season in the majors.
Granted, Beckham still wasn’t “good” at the major league level and had to settle for a minor league contract going into the 2020 season. When the minor league season was canceled due to COVID-19, that probably gave Beckham sufficient perspective to end his career on 2019’s positive note. He didn’t play in 2021, then officially announced his retirement in a January 2022 tweet that he explained was to sync his own Hall of Fame election with good friend Buster Posey. Since retiring, Beckham has done some sporadic broadcast work for the Braves and the White Sox. A couple weeks ago, he indicated that he wanted to help good friend and current White Sox GM Chris Getz as he worked to rebuild the organization, though it’s not clear in what capacity Beckham meant. I’m not ruling out “infielder” — Beckham’s career OPS of .667 is well-ahead of the 2024 White Sox team OPS of .618.
Miscellaneous: Mike Trout attempting to ride the wave of Beckhams (up to #199 most popular boy’s name for 2023) and Gordon (correctly) attempting to take credit for it. Gordon Beckham’s first home run was in the short-lived MLB Civil Rights Game, a feat that no other player ever accomplished. “My apologies: padres deal was with Gordon beckham, not Tim #Mybad.”