Tantalizing Red Sox Slugger Lands With AL Central Team

Bobby Dalbec’s time with the Red Sox has officially come to an end.

The 2016 fourth-round pick is leaving the only organization he has known in his professional career to sign a minor league deal with the White Sox, Chicago announced Tuesday. The move is unsurprising; Dalbec elected free agency earlier in the offseason.

The 29-year-old flashed jaw-dropping power throughout his Red Sox career, but his inability to put it all together at the big league level made him one of the more frustrating and quite frankly puzzling prospects in recent team history. It’s not as if Dalbec didn’t prove he could do it, either. He was a lone bright spot in the lost 2020 season, hitting eight home runs in just 23 games, and he followed that with the best season of his career in 2021. Dalbec in his first full season hit a career-high 25 home runs with 78 RBIs while hitting .240 for Boston in ’21.

It was all downhill from there, largely due to an inability to consistently make contact. Dalbec struck out 384 times over 331 big league games with the Red Sox and was especially ineffective over the last two seasons. He hit just .159 with 71 strikeouts in 58 games spread out over 2023 and 2024.

That led to Dalbec spending a lot of time in Worcester with the Triple-A club. Dalbec launched 53 home runs in just over 900 plate appearances over the last two seasons for the WooSox. That production became increasingly rare for Dalbec with increasingly limited chances in the majors.

Dalbec’s deal comes with a spring training invite where he should get plenty of chances to earn another big league opportunity with a White Sox team that lost 121 games in 2024.