Let's start with the three original White Sox spring training injuries ...
Gio González: He reported "big-time progress" with his shoulder after throwing on flat ground on Sunday, and he backed it up with a 20-pitch bullpen session Thursday.
Lucas Giolito: He threw sliders and curveballs during his bullpen session on Tuesday as he builds up after a chest muscle strain, and he's scheduled for a side session today.
Yasmani Grandal: He was seen taking batting practice off Dallas Keuchel Wednesday. Daryl Van Schouwen just provided an update.
Grandal said the calf, which he injured about two weeks before the start of spring training while running, is not sore, but tests show it’s not 100 percent.
“That’s the problem,” Grandal said. “We want to get it sore and we can’t. So we’ve been hammering it out as much as we can and trying to see if I get tired or get sore.”
... followed by two new ones:
Jace Fry: We'd heard plenty about Aaron Bummer, but little about the White Sox bullpen's presumed second lefty. It turns out he's been dealing with a sore back, but he hopes to get back on the mound by the end of the week.
Edwin Encarnación: He was scratched from Thursday's game with a stiff back, which opened a temporary spot for Nicky Delmonico, and theoretically clears a pathway for Yermínmentum! to build inertia.
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Keith Law left Nick Madrigal off his top 100 prospects list, and also off his roundup of honorable mentions, making him an extreme outlier in a community that otherwise locked Madrigal in their top 50s.
Law eventually got around to writing up Madrigal with his top 10 White Sox prospects list, but just like Madrigal's strike zone, it's still lower than you think. His list is the first to slot Madrigal fifth, one behind Jonathan Stiever.
The rationale:
Madrigal never strikes out — his strikeout rate last year was just 3 percent, less than half of that of the second-hardest minor leaguer to strike out, No. 1 overall prospect Wander Franco — but the tradeoff is that he’s a singles hitter who struggles to get his isolated power figure over .100. He’s an above-average runner and plays solid defense at second base. I think he’s a longtime big leaguer, but he has to hit well over .300 to be more than just an average regular, and major-league pitchers are going to attack him in the zone because he doesn’t pose any threat of power.
This doesn't necessarily strike me as disrespect for Madrigal's game, but rather that Madrigal is an extreme example of the primary tension underneath prospect lists, especially ones that prioritize upside. Madrigal seems likely to have a top-30 career out of that prospect list, but that's not what these lists really measure. Otherwise, you'd probably see Danny Mendick ahead of Andrew Dalquist. Madrigal poses an issue because his floor is very high, but his ceiling doesn't offer much clearance. If you think Madrigal is a 2 WAR second baseman at heart, those guys are available on minor-league contracts.
I think Madrigal is weird enough at the plate, and effective enough in other facets of his game, to be more than that. But I can appreciate the value in imagining an underwhelming outcome, then reverse engineering how it got there in order to strain the sentiment from the mix.
Remember Tyler Danish? Scouts inside and outside the organization wanted badly for him to succeed due to his attitude, work ethic and unusual delivery. Some just couldn't convince themselves that his delivery would stand a chance against advanced left-handed hitters without a jump in velocity, and sure enough, he could never find a way to pitch to lefties at Triple-A, or during his few cups of coffee.
With Madrigal, the told-you-so postmortem would say, "He's undersized and couldn't pull the ball in the air with any authority. What did you expect?" Most people are giving him some benefit of the doubt, but having a holdout or two paints a fuller picture.
