December 8, 2010

Winter Meetings

Kenny on Konerko: Deferred Dollars

by David Laurila

Printer-friendly

The White Sox have re-signed Paul Konerko to a three-year deal worth $37.5 million, an agreement which contains deferred money in year three and beyond. GM Kenny Williams addressed the financial implications of the deal following the official announcement:

------

Kenny Williams: “What we need to do next is figure out a way to pay for all of this. We’ve certainly ramped it up here recently and have been very aggressive, and I think that at this point -- as I’ve stated before -- I feel comfortable and confident in the everyday lineup and the defense that we’re going to put out there, as well as the starting rotation and the back four guys in the bullpen. But I think we’ve got to augment that just a bit to make ourselves as strong as possible and contend for the division. So we’ve got some work cut out for us and are at a point where we need to get a little creative, because we’re about tapped out right now. We need to either get creative or we need to get a flood at the ticket counter pretty quickly.”

“Paul Konerko has some good teammates, because one of the things that helped us to get this done was Adam Dunn coming in and caring more about winning than the last dollar -- certainly dollars this year -- because he was more than accommodating in [deferring] some of his money back to the latter part of his deal. A.J. Pierzynski did the same thing, and the rest came together through, literally, our marketing department and accounting people pulling together as many revenue sources as possible. This is something that you have to do when you’re in our situation, and we just thought that we had to capitalize on it. Fortunately we were dealing with a player who really wanted to be here in Chicago and finish his career here.”