Depth exhausted, White Sox offense now needs its fixtures functioning

If there's ever a capital-S Story to be told about the 2021 White Sox, a chapter must be devoted to the chain of guys who weren't expected to be a major component of the plans and offered immediate production. Each time one appeared to be on the verge of running out of gas, somebody else showed up take the baton and sprint away with it.

You can tie together four such players without overlapping dates:

That doesn't include Gavin Sheets, whose best stretch tied together Goodwin and Burger. It also doesn't include Billy Hamilton's sporadic heroics, or the hot streaks from late-arriving semi-regulars like Leury García, Andrew Vaughn and Adam Engel.

Now there are at least two obvious problems with this analysis. The first is that they're not limited to the same roster spot, and players like Mercedes and Goodwin were/are receiving regular plate appearances during the regression periods that aren't covered. It's two levels of cherry-picking, when usually one is too many.

The other is that no such hero has stepped up since July 17.

Here's a case where two negatives make a positive, at least when it comes to the validity of this whole exercise. You can't quite say the Sox pieced together the equivalent of a 5 WAR player from spare parts and duct tape, but the absence of such a heater at the start of the second half helps explain why the White Sox are 9-11 and have scored three or fewer runs in 12 of those games.

The deep-cut heroics have been limited to random outbursts, like Seby Zavala's three-homer game that looks like somebody set the difficulty level to "toddler" before kicking it back up to "All-Star." Take out that 4-for-4, and he's 4-for-34.

With Sheets cooling off (usually a good thing in the summer, but not here), Goodwin fully regressed and Burger and Hamilton on the IL, the attention turns to the guys who were supposed to be here all along. Few of them are playing at their best in the second half:

• César Hernández: .318/.423/.318 over 26 PA
• Andrew Vaughn: .290/.362/.452 over 69 PA
• José Abreu: .209/.329/.507 over 79 PA
• Adam Engel: .205/.327/.341 over 52 PA
• Leury García: .143/.263/.184 over 57 PA
• Tim Anderson: .250/.260/.487 over 77 PA
• Yoán Moncada: .197/.247/.407 over 81 PA
• Eloy Jiménez: .136/.174/.318 over 23 PA

The good news is there's plenty of room for improvement, especially once Jiménez settles in and stops swinging at two-thirds of the pitches thrown his way. The bad news is that they're hard to watch until improvement happens, and it's iffy counting on Luis Robert and Yasmani Grandal hitting the ground hitting whenever they're able to return to the lineup.

Fortunately, the 9½-game cushion offers plenty of runway for struggling and rusty hitters to take off. Also, Lamb is back from the injured list to see if he can summon a second wind. It's not going to happen immediately because the Sox play the next three in a National League park, but every option is welcome.

(Photo by Bruce Kluckhohn-USA TODAY Sports)