Eloy Jiménez returns to a White Sox team that doesn’t need him … yet

When Eloy Jiménez left what had been a perfectly functional pectoral tendon on the left-field fence of Camelback Ranch back in spring training, where did you think the White Sox would be when he returned?

Based on the original timetable of a five to six months, I'd hoped the White Sox would be able to hold their ground in a three-team race with Minnesota and Cleveland. It was possible to imagine the Sox holding their own even without Jiménez, but I'd guessed that his absence was the one body blow the Sox could absorb, and any others would start to accumulate interest at a predatory rate.

It's not necessarily a surprise that Jiménez returns to a White Sox team that's in first place, taking the place of Jake Burger on the 26-man roster. It's also not a shock that he's a month ahead of the original schedule, because such time tables tend to be generous.

It is surprising that the White Sox are in first place by nine games, all while Luis Robert, Nick Madrigal and Yasmani Grandal all underwent surgeries for injuries that cost them weeks, months, or, in Madrigal's case, the rest of the season. The White Sox's 97-win pace has to be a 90th-percentile scenario considering the bodies they've lost.

Left field during Jiménez's absence serves as a microcosm of their fortune. The White Sox's production in left field took a major hit year over year, especially when you extrapolate last year's 60 games to cover 99 to match 2021.

Yet left field wasn't a position that desperately needed Jiménez to return ahead of schedule. Andrew Vaughn's surprisingly competent defense has to raise the standards for the position, because if he can progress to "adequate" over the course of a few months learning on the fly, what's Jiménez's excuse? The tale of the tape on the defensive metrics shows the clear defensive disparity:

So you have Vaughn bridging the gap with a half-win to a win of defensive value alone. There's also the matter that Vaughn's struggles against right-handed pitching over the first half of the season were not in vain. Tony La Russa spent the first three months increasing Vaughn's exposure to right-handed pitching, and it's finally paying huge dividends in Month Four.

By both measures, Vaughn is on track for an average 2 WAR season. FanGraphs allows you to divide by month, and that's where you can see Vaughn truly making a dent.

• April: 0.2 WAR
• May: 0.2 WAR
• June: 0.1 WAR
• July: 0.6 WAR

That doesn't seem like a huge jump until you multiply every month by six. The first three months are befitting of a bench player. That July performance is easily an above-average starter. That's fine without further improvement, and you can't rule out better numbers, or the same numbers over a longer period of time.

Where the White Sox need Jiménez is DH, because that's the position that's been sustained by a series of hot starts. When Yermín Mercedes cooled off, Burger and Gavin Sheets took his place. Now the latter two rookies are a combined 2-for-26 in each of their last 13 at-bats. On one hand, it'd be terrific if any one of these rookies had immediate staying power. In the context of 2021, however, you couldn't ask for better stopgaps. It was more important that they provide immediate relief, not a permanent fix, and they combined to buy enough time for Jiménez to return.

At least I hope that's where Tony La Russa directs Jiménez's return. He wants to play left field, and he played left field for Winston-Salem and Charlotte during his rehab stint, but in the standard scenario where Vaughn and José Abreu are able to man their usual positions, the only party that benefits from upsetting that order is Jiménez's pride. The question appeared to be the only thing that wiped the smile off his face during his Zoom conference just now....

... but he said he'll do it if it's best for the team. That's how it looks from here, and that's how it looks from tonight's lineup.

(Photo by Dennis Wierzbicki / USA TODAY Sports)