Eloy Jiménez entered this White Sox home stand with eight homers to his name, but with zero hit in front of the people who would enjoy it the most.
Jiménez might've showed up late, but not because he forgot about White Sox fans. He was just working on something really special and didn't want anybody to see it until he was done, honest.
Tuesday night was pretty special:
I had hoped that Jiménez would be the one guy on the White Sox who would come into the league making the game -- or at least some parts of it -- look exceedingly simple. That didn't happen, but we're starting to see signs of it in his third month.
Jiménez is hitting .313/.353/.688 over his first nine games in June, and you can shift the front endpoint a few days into May to improve his line further. He's got nine strikeouts over nine games, but only one over his last four, so there's good reason to think he's settling in.
It wasn't just that Jiménez reached new territory in Guaranteed Rate Field, either. He also had a few highlights on Tuesday night that paint the picture of a game coalescing into something that White Sox fans don't have to worry about.
Adopting the NHL's Three Stars of the Game format to break it down, we'll start with:
Third star: This sliding catch.
You may quibble and say his hustle RBI double outranks a galumphing catch that most outfielders wouldn't have had to slide for -- especially since Jiménez almost handcuffed himself with his effort -- but you can't take any play with a degree of difficulty for granted at this stage.
It gets points more for timing than talent. It helped Alex Colomé stanch the bleeding after Aaron Bummer's terrible night, and it occurred in an eighth inning where Jiménez had one more plate appearance remaining. Anything that encourages Rick Renteria to keep his bat in the lineup for another chance to swing the bat is welcome.
Second star: This walk.
Facing Patrick Corbin in the first inning with two on and two out, he fell behind 1-2, then laid off two sliders in the dirt and a fastball up and out of the zone to draw a walk. That loaded the bases for Welington Castillo, who unloaded them with a grand slam that he thought would surely make him the center of attention for the following morning's post on Sox Machine.
In time, much like that sliding catch, he'll hopefully make this part of his game look a little easier over time. None of the two-strike pitches were all that close, but we've seen Jiménez swing at worse, and Corbin probably figured strike three wouldn't have been all that hard.
There was a number going around Twitter that Jiménez gets the worst strike zone from umpires in terms of net wrong balls/wrong strikes called. It's a flawed stat because Jiménez doesn't take nearly enough borderline pitches to have any go his way, and only 36.5 percent of pitches he sees are in the zone, which is the fourth-worst rate in baseball. At-bats like this should eventually fade into normalcy, but it's going to take at-bats like this to bring pitchers back into the zone. It also helps when the guy after him hits a grand slam.
First star: This dinger.
"He reached the stairs!" isn't something somebody says to describe the spectacle of a majestic blast at Guaranteed Rate Field. They're just stairs, but more than that, nobody ever brought them into play before.
However, Jiménez came into the majors with a history of hitting dingers where they normally don't go ...
... and now that he's cleared the batter's eye in two consecutive series in two different stadiums, the White Sox might want to litter the landscape with more things he can doink.
Is that getting carried away? Probably, but Jiménez was supposed to be the guy whose easy power begets unforced hyperbole, and I saw some of those extracurricular effects after Jiménez broke it open.
The guy who managed to track down the homer might be the most authentically charged-up person I've seen at a White Sox game in recent memory. Jiménez's postgame interviews, whether on the field with Chuck Garfien or in the clubhouse with reporters, had that natural confidence that promised encores.
“I know I’m getting better, and that is pretty much one of my best games,” Jimenez said. “But there are more to come.”
Renteria said Jiménez is scratching the surface with his ability, and assuming he's able to follow up with a few more highlights in short order, I think the same can be said of his drawing power.
