Andrew Benintendi is finally having fun being a White Sox, and is starting to hit like it too

Surface-level results offer an easy narrative to settle on after Andrew Benintendi's pinch-hit grand slam Thursday night in The Bronx sealed up a 6-5 record for the White Sox over a four-series stretch that saw them hold their own with the Phillies, Braves, Dodgers and Yankees.

Since Munetaka Murakami has been sidelined with a hamstring strain, the 31-year-old veteran -- often the most senior member of the lineup in games he starts -- has stepped up. Including the May 29 game where Murakami went down, Benintendi has hit .286/.386/.694, lifting six of his nine home runs on the year within a 17-game span. He's even moved up to third in the batting order pretty regularly against right-handed starters since Murakami went down to make the connection even more obvious than it needs to be.

Under the surface, Benintendi is coming off of back-to-back 20-homer seasons that were a testament to the benefits of a competent lefty hitter -- even one with middling raw power -- just selling out to pull and lift the ball in Rate Field's inviting environs. That it wasn't translating to production earlier in the year, despite most of the ingredients being in place, if not more so than before, was confounding.

"His hard-hit rate is like, ridiculously high," said hitting coach Derek Shomon in May. "He's on the barrel, which is huge, important. He had a good stretch here, and then kind of pulled off a little bit. But we know what it is, he knows what it is. It's just a matter of like problem-solving for solutions to see what's stickiest."

As Ryan Blake of FanGraphs unpacked, a lot of Benintendi's new crop of hard-hit balls were on the ground and/or up the middle, and a lot of his new balls pulled in the air were lower line drives than fence-clearing fly balls. This both lines up with some notions he had in spring of spreading the ball to all fields more to boost his batting average and stave off a descent into being one-dimensional, and are also the sort of minor issues that didn't concern Benintendi nearly as much as striking out 35.1 percent of the time through the end of April.

The next time Benintendi actively references any of these datapoints in an interview over discussing just how he feels will be a first, and he's felt like he wasn't far off from getting things going for a while now.

"There's little things that are good and bad to look at when you're going really, really well or scuffling, so hard-hit percent, I don't even know what my numbers are right now, but I think they're pretty high," Benintendi said. "Throughout my career so far, I feel like I've always started out slow. And it always seems like once the weather starts to heat up a little bit, it seems like my bat does as well. It's such a long year, you're going to have ups and downs, and especially that stretch I was going through where I felt like I was striking out three times a game, it's knowing that it'll change."

Indeed, Benintendi is striking out at a very normal 21.1 percent rate with an equally typical 76.9 percent contact rate since May 1. He's also switched back from the shorter and lighter bat he was using at the start of the season to emphasize the bat speed gains his offseason training produced, to his longer bat from the past two years that's aimed at giving him the length to reach and pull whatever his heart desires. But Benintendi mostly subscribes to the traditional meat-and-potatoes concepts of statistical analysis: regression to the mean and established players adhering to the career norms.

That's never truly a given, but especially not when Benintendi's norms have changed a lot this season. In the fourth year of a five-year, $75 million contract, he's mostly a platoon hitter now, often splitting the DH role with Randal Grichuk, who would otherwise shield him from being the oldest member of the lineup on a given night. His 13 pinch-hit plate appearances this season are already a career-high. After reporting to camp 12 pounds lighter and saying he prepared himself physically to play left field every day, Benintendi has started seven games out there all year, and not appeared in the outfield since the end of April.

"They communicated it, but also you can look at the makeup of the team, you know what they value, so with guys who can cover more range and everything's analytics now, they're going to make that move," Benintendi said. "Last year I started to learn how to get a routine as a DH, whether I'm starting on the bench or coming in. Obviously before that I was in the field most of the time, so there was a little adjustment period. But coming into this year, knowing I was probably going to DH more, I've been kinda working on it and doing it more often, I've been able to find what works and settle on it."

"One of the biggest parts of the job for me is to find that balance and to communicate with these guys and be really clear on what their roles are," said Will Venable. "Pinch-hitting for Benny, which is something earlier in his career he hasn't been used to, all those conversations are part of making sure our guys are feeling good, feeling comfortable and confident in their roles. But really, credit to them because they're being selfless."

This could easily be the part of the story where the reader starts grumbling that a player who has spent much of the last three years hovering around replacement-level performance, while being one of, if not the highest-paid player on three-straight 100-loss teams, should just be happy to be part of a winning operation again. Benintendi has already co-signed the part about how frustrating his own performance has been, and now claims to be enjoying the goofy antics of his younger teammates more than his outward stoicism lets on.

"Oh, I love it. That's why we do it. You'll see everybody in here, even guys who have played a long time, everybody's having fun," Benintendi said. "Last couple of years here, we tried to have fun, but I think deep down everybody was not having fun. Obviously, you're losing a bunch of games.

"This year's been awesome. To be honest, I think we could have some more wins at this point. So it's also kind of refreshing that this isn't just a fluke. Guys in here, we think we're good. We don't care who we're playing, who we're facing. Let's go play. It's a bunch of young guys who believe it, too."