Following up: Dayton Moore isn’t happening; José Abreu is thriving
Bob Nightengale is usually correct when it comes to breaking White Sox news, but occasionally he swings and misses.
A couple years ago, he oh-so-casually dropped a report that the White Sox were trading for Eduardo Escobar …
… and then that move, just, never happened. Nightengale said it fell apart because of minor injuries on both sides.
Likewise, he didn’t entirely connect in his initial forecast for the White Sox’s general manager vacancy. He was right about Chris Getz being named the next general manager, but he also made a prediction for an assistant/advisor/right-hand man of sorts…
Chris Getz, 39, who spent the past seven years overseeing the White Sox minor league operations and player development after a seven-year playing career, is expected to be named the next White Sox GM.
Dayton Moore, the Texas Rangers’ senior advisor of baseball operations who spent 16 years as the Kansas City Royals GM, could also join Getz in a key front-office position. The two close friends worked together in Kansas City where they won back-to-back pennants and the 2015 World Series championship.
… and Nightengale reported earlier to week that the latter isn’t happening.
Dayton Moore plans to stay with the Texas Rangers as a special assistant instead of joining close friend Chris Getz of the Chicago White Sox. DeJon Watson, formerly of the Nats, would be an ideal fit with his vast experience in all phases of a front office.
At least he couched that report with “could,” rather than a choice of words that reflected an imminent decision. It’d be nice if Getz never truly considered that, and Nightengale just got a little overconfident connecting his own dots (Nightengale is making it seem like Watson is truly his own idea). Failing that, it’d be nice if the blowback from the idea of hiring Moore caused Getz to step back and take account of the White Sox’s crippling Royals addiction, and they settled for Gene Watson as some sort of nicotine patch.
Considering two whole games determined whether the Astros won the AL West or missed the postseason, José Abreu was lucky that his disappointing regular season didn’t result in Houston missing out on October baseball for the first time since 2016.
Abreu has taken advantage of the second life the postseason offers, and if he keeps hitting, he’s going to make Astros fans forget all about his first six months.
Abreu set career worsts in every just about every category during a replacement-level season, hitting .237/.296/.282. But after hitting just 18 homers over 141 regular-season games, Abreu has four homers over eight postseason games, including a gargantuan three-run shot that erased an early Rangers rally and put Houston back on track to win Game 4 by a healthy 10-3 margin.
Abreu’s October didn’t entirely come out of nowhere, because he ended the season on a higher note. It didn’t resemble the August outbursts of his White Sox days because his batting average languished, but he slugged .536 in September. Fourteen of his 23 hits went for extra bases, including seven homers.
Buster Olney wrote a lengthy story about Abreu’s rebound, and one culprit is familiar to White Sox fans, although not when Abreu was involved.
On that May day when Abreu walked with [Reggie] Jackson, he assured Jackson that he was working hard, that he was trying to get better. He apologized for how he had performed. He felt bad about how he was doing, Jackson recalled. And he said how much he appreciated all the support he was feeling, from ownership and the front office and Baker and his teammates.
But it took several more months — and a more drastic intervention — before Abreu’s season turned around. He had a sore back, and staffers talked to him about going on the injured list. Abreu pushed back on that idea. He felt like he needed to stay on the field, something he’d always done with the White Sox; in six of his eight full seasons in Chicago, he played in at least 152 games.
He finally relented and was placed on the injured list Aug. 10, getting a chance to let his body and his mind heal. “After that,” Cintron said, “he was a different guy.”
The only thing that shelved Abreu for any meaningful length of time in Chicago was a pair of groin-related maladies, one of which was testicular torsion. He tried to lead by example with his durability, but part of me wonders if he was exceedingly tough, and his teammates so strangely delicate, and the White Sox training staff lost their ability to properly gauge what could and should be played through. Now that Abreu’s 36, it seems like he’s forced to recalibrate his own expectations.
Author
I wonder if Abreu has any regrets about changing teams. Let’s see, the Sox had one position player with a WAR over 1, the Astros had 8 with a WAR over 2.5. Slight difference maybe? That doesn’t even include a now healthy Jose himself, who had a WAR of zero. But even zero was better than Tim Anderson, Romy, Sheets, Grandal, and Colas.
Jose could have stayed here another 10 years and probably not gotten as much post season action as he has this October. Good for him.
Pretty amazing reversal of fortune’s in the CS’s this year. Just when you thought it was going to be a sweep to the Series, baseball broke out with a special thanks to former Sox (good and bad).
Two things about De Jon Watson:
1) He was with the Nationals when they won the World Series and spent a long time with the Dodgers. If Sam Mondry-Cohen is staying around, I imagine there’s a relationship between the two men.
2) He was also with the Diamondbacks during the La Russa-Stewart reign of error, so I wonder if (over drinks) Tony and Bob discussed the Sox bringing him in.
Well anytime the white sox don’t go with the worst plan, you have to celebrate.
And good for jose, he’s earned some meaningful baseball.
Dipuglio still out there…30 yrs experience in scouting…specializes in Latin America