CHICAGO -- The Chicago White Sox hope that the signing of left-handed reliever Zach Duke on Tuesday is the beginning of a quick roster retooling this offseason.

While patience might be a virtue, executive vice president Kenny Williams believes there is a benefit to making offseason moves in a timely fashion, and he and general manager Rick Hahn are prepared to act fast if given a chance.

Duke “The only message we want to send at the end of the day is, when our roster is complete, that [fans] can dream again,” Williams said. “The difference is this time, because of how things have transpired the last couple of years, we’ve been able to build up from the bottom up a little bit and we’ve got a lot of youth -- and good, talented youth. If we can supplement the right guys, the right veterans and get some leadership in the mix, I think we can start to have some exciting baseball again on the South Side, but we have some work to do still.”

The addition of Duke, one of the top left-handed relievers on the market, is a step in the right direction for a team that struggled with its bullpen in 2014. Adding a hard-throwing right-hander with strikeout potential is another need, as is other assorted bullpen help, a right-handed starter and a left-handed power bat.

With some of the early moves that have happened in baseball already, from trades to free-agent signings, Williams is optimistic that things will start to move at a speed he and Hahn prefer. Baseball’s winter meetings are less than a month away in San Diego.

“I really cannot remember a time where so many good players have been discussed at the general managers’ meetings [last week] leading up to the winter meetings,” Williams said. “I think it’s going to be awfully fun once the winter meetings kick off. You’re going to have some scrambling going on, and I like it like that.

“If it was left up to Rick and me, we’d have started in September and October filling out the roster, but agents and players don’t seem to be on our timetable; they seem to be on their own timetable.”

It isn’t out of the question that the White Sox will be able to get multiple items scratched off their checklist before the winter meetings even begin.

“Some of the things Rick and I are talking about back there are exciting things, and some days they are more exciting than others,” Williams said. “You kind of go back and forth with the possibilities, thinking something is closer at one point in time, then it kind of backs off, then it gets a little closer. [Signing Duke] is a good first step, and hopefully we can supplement the roster and get back into competition mode.”