At the onset of baseball's indefinite pandemic delay, the White Sox and other teams were able to thrust their wired, personable young stars into the limelight via the MLB The Show tournament and other social channels.
There's no more baseball here at Memorial Day weekend than there was then, but it seems like the attention is fragmented in a bunch of different directions, putting players and their personalities in the backseat. There's the start of the season in South Korea, there's the safety and economic negotiations between Major League Baseball and the MLBPA, there's the draft, there's the tracking which teams are paying what employees. The White Sox also got a boost from "The Last Dance," allowing them to partake in Michael Jordan nostalgia while those on the outside poked at Jerry Reinsdorf's legacy.
While the draft stands on its own merits, none of the other elements are all that compelling ... yet they're all more novel than young men amusing themselves on social media for a second straight month. I'd make a note of which teams are the most aggressive in furloughing scouts (the Angels, to start), if only because that could foreshadow some unusual spending patterns.
But back to the players, outside of Eloy Jiménez supporting a Little Village bridal shop that shifted its operations to mask-making earlier in the month, it's been fairly quiet among the big names on the White Sox. The news vacuum has allowed some lesser-known members of the White Sox organization to garner some headlines.
*Evan Marshall appeared on the White Sox Talk podcast to talk about the position players find themselves in, which is preemptively on the defense. The league hasn't formally proposed anything to the players, but that doesn't stop a narrative from forming.
“From the business side, we haven’t heard anything directly from (the owners),” Marshall said. “It’s an interesting back and forth. For all of the amount of information that is out in the media about proposals and things like that, us as players really haven’t gotten much. It’s been leaked out to the media for this or that reason. It’s like they’re testing the waters to see maybe what the public’s reaction to their ideas are going to be.”
Marshall lays out the MLBPA side of the issue fairly cleanly -- the players and league had a previous understanding the league should have to honor. Owners understandably want to do what they can to limit their losses. Players haven't benefited in any special way from recent gains, so there's no reason they should be as susceptible to risks when things aren't going well.
That said, Marshall is ultimately optimistic about the two sides reaching an agreement, and Chuck Garfien has one way players can move without giving in -- by allowing some of the 2020 payments to be deferred. Major League Baseball is expected to deliver a new economic proposal on Tuesday, for what that's worth.
*Hunter Schryver probably thought his elbow picked an awful time to blow out, what with it being at the start of his first spring training in big-league camp. As it turns out, there are worse seasons. He's three months into rehab, and he talked to The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa. about what's a monotonous but smooth rehab to date.
*Danny Mendick always gets the "local boy makes good" treatment from the media in Rochester, N.Y., but the text of a segment's transcript has a way of flattening a folksy TV news kicker into a straight-faced announcement.
And as for what he's doing until people can watch him play baseball again?
"I’m big on Netflix, I play a lot of video games and actually I play a lot of golf," Mendick said. "I'm excited to watch the Tiger, Phil, Tom Brady and Peyton Manning golf match, put an X on that day, I ain't doing anything that day, got to watch that."
Let it be known that Mendick will be unavailable this coming Sunday so he can watch that golf match.
(Photo of Evan Marshall by Joseph Weiser/Icon Sportswire)
