If a team adopts the personality of its manager, then might've been more correct than I intended when I called Pedro Grifol "aggressively uninteresting."
The 7-15 White Sox are difficult to write about, not because of the "7-15" part, but because the part of the team that stands the best chance at reversing course -- the bullpen -- is an exercise in waiting to see if the season's second small sample goes better than the first.
(Speaking of which, Joe Kelly is off the injured list, having supposedly healed from the strained groin he suffered from running in from the bullpen during the dust-up in Pittsburgh. "He may or may not help" is all I feel can be said about this.
Every other part of the team is more or less fulfilling the cynical-but-realistic predictions for how a 75-win season might unfold. Tim Anderson and Yoán Moncada are on the IL, and Eloy Jiménez was there until recently. The starters have been OK as a unit, but not good enough to cover massive shortcomings elsewhere. The reason they're 7-15 is that all of these things are happening at the same time, rather than being a 9-13 team that's only plagued by some of the above.
Keeping it simple, you can start by talking about the positions we spent all winter talking about, if not the previous two or three offseasons.
Out in right field, Oscar Colás is 3-for-24 with eight strikeouts over his last nine games, which has dragged his season line down to .233/.303/.300. These early struggles are expected and acceptable for a rookie ...
... except the White Sox also opened the season with Colás as the primary backup for Luis Robert Jr. in center field, which gives Grifol little recourse when both of them struggle at the same time. Colás can take some solace because Robert's faring even worse of late, going 3-for-37 with 12 strikeouts and a swing rate that makes my computer's fan start sparking. Adam Haseley is around, which is about as much as anybody wants to say about him whenever he's been on the 26-man roster the last two years.
Or you can look at second base, which the Sox didn't address until Elvis Andrus was willing to sign for $3 million at his non-preferred position before spring training started.
But when Andrus returned, I tried to set aside the question of how much of his 2022 was a fluke by emphasizing that even a return to mediocrity would serve a purpose.
To paraphrase Miles Davis, this addition is less about who’s playing, and more about the guys not being played. Andrus might be a negligible starting second baseman, but his presence insures the White Sox from being one wrong Tim Anderson step away from having a middle infield of Romy González and Lenyn Sosa when they’re supposed to be contending. Anderson has missed nearly one-third of the White Sox’s schedule over the last four years. The White Sox had the worst projected second-base production before Andrus arrived. If Anderson misses weeks and Andrus isn’t there, the second base problem now becomes a shortstop problem, and the infection spreads.
Andrus is off to a terrible start, hitting .208/.271/.247. The shift to shortstop didn't help his bat, but it at least halted the freefall of his overall value. He's only at -0.1 bWAR and -0.4 fWAR because he's off to a fine start filling in defensively for Anderson.
Yet even at his worst, he's superior to the in-house alternatives:
- González: .115/.115/.115 over 26 PA
- Sosa: .147/.171/.265 over 34 PA
With Sosa, you can at least say that he looks comfortable at second base, and the White Sox didn't spend the entire winter building his case to start. When González broke to his right on a grounder to his left the batter before Brandon Lowe's game-winning homer on Friday ...
... he exhausted the last reason to feature him in anything beyond a pinch-running role. He's faced a staggering 10.7 percent of his total pitches on an 0-2 count. That's second only to Robert, which is another way to characterize just how abruptly his plate discipline abandoned him.
All of these players discussed will bat consecutively when the White Sox open their series with the Blue Jays tonight ...
... while Lance Lynn will try to avoid getting smoked the first time through the order (.374/.444/.813), because this team doesn't have nearly enough going for it to dig out of significant holes day after day. And that gets back to what I mean about the difficulty in having productive dialogues about the way this White Sox team has gone (or failed to go) about its business. It feels almost unfair to zero in on one or two deficiencies, because a third, fourth and fifth deficiency are just out of frame and clearing their throats in order to be introduced to the conversation.
