The White Sox announced that right-hander Touki Toussaint cleared waivers and has been assigned outright to Triple-A Charlotte. The righty had been designated for assignment on the weekend when the club signed outfielder Kevin Pillar.
Toussaint, 28 in June, was claimed off waivers from the Guardians in June of last year. The Sox traded away many of their best pitchers last summer, with the trades of Lance Lynn and Lucas Giolito creating two holes in the rotation. Toussaint helped fill in those gaps, tossing 83 1/3 innings for the Sox last year with a 4.97 earned run average.
Even though that was a fairly competent performance, Toussaint’s lack of control was a red flag, as it has been throughout his career. He was once a first-round draft pick, getting selected 16th overall by the Diamondbacks in 2014, and also a top 100 prospect as a minor leaguer. But his consistently high walk rates have prevented him from truly securing a big league job for any meaningful stretch of time.
With the Sox last year, his 22.7% strikeout rate and 49.5% ground ball rate were both pretty close to league average, but he gave free passes to 14.2% of batters that came to the plate. The average walk rate for major league starters was 7.9% last year, so Toussaint was almost double that. He’s walked 14% of batters faced in his career overall, which has played a large part in him not establishing himself in the bigs. He had never previously logged more than 50 innings in a season until he got to 87 last year.
He came into camp with a White Sox club that had a lot of question marks on its pitching staff, but he didn’t do much to take a step forward and answer those questions. He tossed 7 2/3 innings over six appearances, issuing an eye-popping 11 walks while striking out just two batters and getting charged with 11 earned runs.
Since he’s out of options, the Sox had to either keep him on the active roster or remove him from the 40-man entirely. They decided for the latter and no other club was willing to give him a roster spot either.
Toussaint can technically reject this outright assignment but it’s unlikely he will. A player with at least three years of major league service time can reject an outright assignment in favor of free agency but requires five years of service to both elect free agency and retain their salary. Toussaint is at three years and 71 days, meaning he would have to walk away from his salary in order to hit the open market.
He and the club avoided arbitration by agreeing to a $1.3MM salary for this year, so he’ll likely want to hang onto that. Assuming he accepts his assignment, he’ll report to the Knights and look to work his way back to the majors.
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