The White Sox have released left-hander Tim Hill, according to his transactions tracker at MLB.com. They will remain on the hook for what’s left of his $1.8MM salary. Any other club could now sign him and would only have to pay the prorated league minimum for any time spent on the roster, with that amount subtracted from what the Sox pay.
Hill, 34, was signed in the offseason to a one-year deal. The White Sox kicked off a rebuild in 2023 and had traded away many established players, including relievers like Joe Kelly, Reynaldo López, Kendall Graveman and Keynan Middleton. When the offseason began, they continued the job by sending Aaron Bummer and Gregory Santos out of town.
The hope was that Hill could serve as a solid veteran presence in a relief corps with a lot of uncertainty and perhaps turn himself into a trade candidate prior to the deadline. Unfortunately, he allowed 5.87 earned runs per nine innings over his 27 appearances for the Sox and got designated for assignment last week. Since he has over five years of major league service time, he has the right to reject an outright assignment and elect free agency while keeping all of his salary intact. Those circumstances made it fairly inevitable that he would find himself back in free agency.
Now that he’s on the open market and can be signed for cheap, teams may be willing to overlook his ERA and find encouraging signs in his other numbers. He has always been a ground ball guy, with a 60.5% rate in that department for his career. He has actually been even better than ever at keeping the ball on the dirt this year with a 65.6% grounder rate, well beyond the 42.6% league average for 2024. His 11% strikeout rate is incredibly low, but he only punched out 12.6% in 2022, a season in which he managed to have a 3.56 ERA with the Padres.
Hill may not be as exciting as a fire-breathing closer but he’s a solid veteran with 347 major league appearances and a 4.30 ERA in those. The results this year haven’t been great so far but he had a .436 batting average on balls in play while pitching for the club with arguably the worst defense in the majors. The Sox have a collective -20 Outs Above Average this year, slightly ahead of the Pirates and Marlins, while their -52 is easily the worst in baseball with the Rays second-last at -31. His 3.46 FIP and 3.90 SIERA paint a much more flattering picture than his ERA.
Since Hill can be signed for cheap and so many clubs around the league are battling pitching injuries, perhaps one of them will take a chance on him finding better results in a different environment.