A trip to Minneapolis in August spelled the beginning of the end for Jose Abreu's 2018 season.
Exactly one year ago, Abreu went 2-for-5 with a double and his 77th and 78th RBIs in a victory over the Twins at Target Field. It was a night characteristic of his second half, as he raised his post-All-Star-break line to .330/.394/.652. His season as a whole still lagged behind his career standards due to an ugly six weeks before said break, but one could see a path to his usual benchmarks of 25 homers and 100 RBIs.
Then he went to the hospital for surgery to remedy testicular torsion, the first of two intimate procedures that put him on the shelf for all but six games the rest of the way.
Hopefully Abreu will leave Minnesota in better shape this time around, because he entered this series in the Twin Cities laboring under similar circumstances, and he's doing all he can to correct past wrongs. He raised his August line to .325/.384/.584 with this detonation against Kyle Gibson on Monday:
That's the kind of Abreu swing that so many White Sox fans have named their children after, and they've been in steadier supply as of late. That said, he's going to need many more of them, because he's lagging behind last year's production by and large.
Here's how his 2019 line stacks up against what he was doing before his business became atwist:
These lines are jarringly similar. Some doubles have turned into homers in accordance with 2019 rules and regulations, and the guys in front of him have been on base more, but the biggest difference is in the plate discipline column. Abreu refused to take ball four for a solid third of the season, drawing just four walks total across June and July while striking out 43 times. He's since rebounded in this department with six walks alone this month, primarily because he stopped jumping at every fastball he sees.
That midseason chasm will be just about impossible to backfill, but his efforts to rectify it will loom large the rest of the way, especially if you believe a contract extension is but a mere formality. The White Sox have the worst strikeout-to-walk ratio in baseball, and just about every team to make a jump from also-ran to contender conquered this category.
James Fegan wrote about Tim Anderson following Avisaíl García's path to glory, finding success with the best version of himself:
The forces of regression don’t have enough time left in the season to drag Anderson down from his career bests, and while he can’t maintain a .390 BABIP for the next 10 years, he’s at least doing the things someone who is average-dependent and never walks needs to do. While he’s swinging out of the zone a career-high 44.4 percent of the time, he’s also swinging in the zone at a career-high 89.1 percent of the time and making more contact across the board. His 13.2 percent swinging strike rate is, again, his best ever. It is a reminder of Avisaíl García’s breakout in 2017: Don’t make the aggressive hitter less aggressive. Make him better at being aggressive.
Anderson's being the best at being aggressive in August, hitting .403/.425/.545 with just 12 strikeouts over 18 games and doing his damndest to make me eat my headline. Abreu's license plate frame also reads "I'D RATHER BE SWINGING" -- and he's also confused by the nameless phone numbers pinned under his windshield wipers -- but he's at least drawing some walks when he's right, because he's filtering out some of the pitches he stands no chance of damaging.
When Anderson and Abreu are both on top of their games, the optimism is more than athletespeak. It's just going to be a hard needle to thread until they get more support given their shortcomings, so if Abreu's going to hang around no matter what, hopefully it can be the August version, in both senses of the word.
