The season is only two weeks old, and the White Sox have already lost their entire starting outfield to routine plays involving running to first.
Two games in, AJ Pollock pulled up lame while rounding first base with a modicum of aggression. He strained a hamstring and had to go on the injured list. He's since returned, although not to the level where he's playing every day at the height of his capabilities.
On Thursday, Luis Robert tweaked his groin as he approached the bag while running out a grounder to the left side, on a similar play that caused his hip to explode last year. The White Sox are waiting to see if they can avoid the injured list, with a firmer update coming after Monday's off day.
It sounds like Eloy Jiménez won't be able to avoid the IL after his latest episode, as he suffered a hamstring injury on his final step on his own grounder to the left side early in Saturday's game against the Twins.
He required a cart to exit the field, and unlike Andrew Vaughn's spring training hip scare, this one doesn't appear to be precautionary. Tony La Russa made it sound like the injury won't cost him the season ...
“We have to wait for the MRI to get the final diagnosis, but it makes everybody want to break up,” said a somber La Russa, while acknowledging more tests needed to be run on Jiménez. “The injury to Eloy is more important than losing the game. … I feel sorry for him.
“You walk in the training room and you see him, and he’s crying his eyes out. You walk in and everybody cries. He loves what he does. I told him there will be a lot of season left when he gets back.”
... but if he's out for months instead of weeks, it continues a few troubling trends regardless. The Sox lost Robert and Nick Madrigal to similar injuries last season, and as long as the offense keeps scuffling, the more reliant they're going to be on these above-average efforts that keep getting them hurt.
(UPDATE: The White Sox said he's out for six to eight weeks.)
As for Jiménez, his lack of body control makes any ballpark he plays in rife with proximity mines. A lot of our discussion of last year's ruptured pectoral tendon can be applied to this round:
Jiménez wasn’t always this rough. His frame filled out over the course of his minor league ascension, and maybe the added bulk exacerbated the natural inefficiencies in his movements. Once it became abundantly clear that reps alone weren’t closing the gap, the Sox shifted to a more hands-on approach.
But phrases like “finer movements that elude him” and “natural inefficiencies” are a gentler way of saying “clumsy,” and that’s a lot harder to solve. Maybe the Sox can reshape his body into something that accelerates and handles corners better. Maybe they’d have better luck asking him to land a triple lutz.
When you see him lunge with his final step toward first base and land on the back of the bag, he looks nowhere closer to passing his CDL test during a time where this particular truck company will gladly employ and deploy anybody with a pulse.
The White Sox have experience when it comes to life without Jiménez, but that offers limited solace. This will be his third consecutive compromised season, and next year is when he starts making the money that requires the Sox to bank on him ($22.5 million over the next two years). This looming clock is why I kept floating idea of the White Sox trading Jiménez over various episodes of the Sox Machine Podcast.
The Sox also benefited from phenomenal fortune in the wake of Jiménez's injury. The best five weeks of Yermín Mercedes' life bought the White Sox time to get other options in order, after which Jake Lamb, Brian Goodwin, Gavin Sheets, Jake Burger and others helped fill in the DH/corner outfield spot two decent weeks at a time.
This time around, Sheets entered the game in right field, and Byron Buxton immediately took advantage of his inexperience by taking another 90 feet when Sheets threw to the wrong base.
Besides testing my ability to soft-speak a Jiménez trade into existence, I've often wondered aloud what the 2021 White Sox season would've looked like had Mercedes never had his month in the sun. We might be seeing that simulation now. It doesn't seem like baseball is forgiving enough for the White Sox to cruise around so much misfortune two years in a row.
The Sox are fortunate that there's quite a bit of cushion between how they won the AL Central last year and how they can still win it this year. We just don't know whether they can win a rock fight because true mettle-testing has been few and far between, and right now they can't even run 90 feet without the risk of a major loss. When something so simple is that dangerous an obstacle, it's no surprise that actual opponents have sent them spinning into a six-game skid.
