Rick Hahn celebrated Labor Day by exerting his power as management.
Hey, nobody can accuse him of forgetting the reason for the season.
Hahn confirmed Bob Nightengale's scoop/relayed message to reporters on Monday, saying that Eloy Jimenez would not be coming up to Chicago this season despite being eminently more qualified to play a major league outfield position than every other outfielder in the organization.
He took the path of least resistance: magnifying a prospect's greatest flaw beyond recognition:
“We’re not looking to develop a 21-year-old DH,” Hahn said. “Offensively, he’s in a very good spot, but we view him much higher. Just as we didn’t view Michael [Kopech] as a bullpen guy, we viewed him as a potential front-end starter, we view Eloy as a potentially elite all-around player, and although offensively he might be in a real good spot, he’s had a very good year offensively, we’re looking to develop him as a well-rounded, impact player.”
This is the first time that I'm aware the White Sox have standards for corner outfield defense.
It's not a ridiculous notion that the White Sox would rate Jimenez's defense below-average. It is a ridiculous notion that 1) Jimenez's defense is worth keeping him down, and 2) the road to improving starts by not playing. That rationale crumbles immediately, although it doesn't really matter if it does. Its importance lies in merely existing, because as Minnesota GM Thad Levine discovered, acknowledging service time as even a factor under a suspicious set of circumstances creates a whole host of problems.
Separating service time from the equation the best I can, Hahn's best argument for sympathy can be found here:
"We view this player as having the potential to be a very special, impactful White Sox for a very long time, and if we're going to err as player development, it's going to be to err on the side of patience."
With Jimenez being so crucial to the rebuild, I can understand why the Sox would never want to be accused of rushing such an important player, even if all the criticism would be of the unfair, ex post facto variety. The Sox have undercooked players before, and James Fegan says it still looms large in their thinking:
For now, the White Sox say that Jiménez’s importance is why they’re doing this, but not in the way everyone is thinking. Catch a member of the Sox front office in an honest moment and they’ll mention that the way Gordon Beckham’s career stalled still bothers them, and that they’re dedicated to not repeating that mistake. In the meantime, they will get hammered with accusations of service time manipulation, and will struggle to convince anyone it’s just a coincidence.
So that does the best to explain why the White Sox might opt for a very conservative path even if the club weren't rewarded financially for doing so. Indeed, Hahn doesn't have a rich history of manipulating service time, and while he doesn't deserve credit for simply acting in good faith -- and it's also partially because the Sox didn't draft and develop a ton of exciting prospects -- he's not some kind of monster.
My sympathy is limited, however, when Hahn treats the advocacy of the opposite course as less virtuous. He opened by reiterating that "patience is going to be of the utmost importance," and later added that, "We are not going to shortcut this thing for good emotion or for positive reinforcement of this process as a whole."
Nobody advocating for Jimenez is doing so simply because it'd be fun and exciting. The fun and excitement is a byproduct of watching a prospect who looks so prepared for the challenge that the front office can't even come up with a legitimate baseball reason for keeping him in the minors. And hell, even if there are fans whose thinking starts and stops with "DINGERS! DINGERS! YAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!" they're still probably correct and way more efficient with their resources.
If the scar tissue from previous failures impinges the front office's range of motion, I can understand that. That's also an argument against retaining all key decision-makers after they botched the first rebuild, but Jerry Reinsdorf can't be changed. It's your fault for not reading the fine print before you signed the contract.
Even after accounting for the givens, the Jimenez situation is profoundly annoying when framed like this. Jimenez came to mind during one of the few grand lines of Hawk Harrelson's speech on Sunday:
"When you take a man's money, you take a man's money. When you take a man's time, you take a part of his life. And I want to thank you all, thank you all, for giving me almost 35 years of your time."
Whether it's Sox fans or Jimenez, Hahn is dealing with people's money and time, and it hasn't been a fair exchange for most of the decade. As he gets tuned up for SoxFest, I'd examine the patter for patronizing parts. He doesn't really have the ground to high-hat Sox fans, because if he were truly going the virtuous route, his leading "reason" wouldn't fall apart under the slightest amount of scrutiny.
