The Chicago White Sox intend to be aggressive at the trade deadline in their search for pitching — but not at the cost of their top prospects, according to Bob Nightengale of USA Today. It’s the posture general manager Chris Getz has been signaling publicly: as he told MLB.com, this club could be buyers for the first time in his tenure, a sentence nobody on the South Side has been able to say in years.

The context makes the report more interesting, not less. Chicago sits at 47-45 and still technically holds first place in the AL Central — by percentage points over Cleveland, with zero games separating them — despite arriving at that perch on a three-game slide after being swept at home by Boston. The roster’s shape explains the shopping list. The position-player group has held up, and Davis Martin‘s nine wins are tied for third in the American League, but behind him the need for reliable innings and high-leverage bullpen help is the clearest gap on the roster.

The market knows it, too. When ESPN’s Jeff Passan and Kiley McDaniel ranked the top 25 players who could move before the August 3 deadline, the White Sox were linked to 10 of them — including Minnesota’s Joe Ryan, which would mean prying a front-line starter away from a team two games behind them in the same race, and Miami’s Sandy Alcantara. My take: the refusal to move the top of the farm is the right instinct, not timidity. This is a first-place-by-a-thread team, not a team one starter away from October, and the young core is the reason the standings look the way they do. Add innings, pay a fair price, and keep the foundation intact.

For fantasy purposes, the name to watch is Ryan — his value travels fine if he lands in Chicago, and a resolution either way should come before August 3. On the Sox side, any veteran rotation addition would squeeze the swingman innings currently soaking up starts, so treat the back of Chicago’s rotation as week-to-week until the deadline sorts out who keeps a job.