ARLINGTON -- Dylan Cease will be making his scheduled start for the White Sox Wednesday night against the Rangers at Globe Life Field.

For a few hours and even for the last few minutes leading into Tuesday’s 5 p.m. CT Trade Deadline, it looked as if the 2022 American League Cy Young runner-up might have made his last start for the South Siders. Rumors connected Cease to the Orioles and the Dodgers, at the very least, and with the White Sox tearing down after a disappointing two-year run, anything was possible.

But Cease was in a different place than the other six White Sox hurlers dealt over the past week. The team has contractual control over its ace through the 2025 season, and could ask for the highest value possible as a return. That return clearly wasn’t met, but manager Pedro Grifol understood that things could change right down to the final seconds.

“Going through so many of these, whether it was in the front office or wherever I’ve been, I’ve learned that nothing is off the table until that clock hit 5:01,” Grifol said. “So, there were all kinds of rumors.

“I’m sure [general manager] Rick [Hahn] and [executive vice president] Kenny [Williams] and our front office, who have been through a ton of these and [have] done really well in these Deadlines, went through a bunch of different scenarios. At the end of the day, there weren’t other ones that came up, and that means it wasn’t the right thing for the organization right now.”

A trade including Cease certainly could be explored over the offseason or at next year’s Deadline. But Cease and Michael Kopech are the only rotation certainties for ‘25, with Jesse Scholtens, who pitched tremendously on Tuesday, and Touki Toussaint also in the mix.

If the White Sox intend to contend in what has been a less-than-stellar American League Central for the last two seasons, they will be adding pitching around Cease, not subtracting.

“Based upon what we were able to do in this year’s Draft and what we’ve been able to do at the Deadline, the organization is much, much stronger for ‘24 and beyond,” Hahn said. “Let’s get to the end of the season and assess everything, performance of the players in the big league level, what we’ve got in the Minors, what our assets are going forward. And as always, you’ll hear directly about what the plan is from the people in charge.

“We still have many impactful talents in Chicago. We still play in a division in which nobody has run away and hid in. Certainly competing for the postseason is viable in 2024. In all candor, sitting here 55 minutes after the Trade Deadline just ended, proclaiming, 'This is how we’re going to get there in ‘24' isn’t exactly our mission.”

As for Cease, Tuesday stood as a wait-and-see sort of day.

“I really didn’t have any other information on that. I was just hanging out and seeing what was happening,” said Cease after his team’s 2-0 loss. “The unknown of it is kind of interesting. I still had other things to do.

“All of us were watching it closely. But at the end of the day, just is what it is.”