USA Today's Bob Nightengale sald the White Sox would exercise the $16 million option on Craig Kimbrel. ESPN's Jesse Rogers reported that the White Sox declined the $6 million option on César Hernández.
The White Sox confirmed both courses of action on Saturday, leaving only one other item from those initial declarations -- Nightengale saying the Sox will trade Kimbrel over the course of the winter -- up in the air.
The #WhiteSox have exercised the $16-million club option on the contract of eight-time All-Star right-handed pitcher Craig Kimbrel for the 2022 season and have declined the $6-million club option on infielder César Hernández for 2022 (no buyout).
— Chicago White Sox (@whitesox) November 6, 2021
It's banal to take a wait-and-see approach to this move, saying that we can only reach a verdict of this decision if the Sox can move Kimbrel without paying a chunk of money that prevents the Sox from acquiring players who can help more, but allow me to offer a couple of benefits for banality:
No. 1: I advocated for a similar delay in reacting to José Abreu's contract extension, which probably prevented me from writing something that Abreu's subsequent MVP would make me regret.
No. 2: Kimbrel seems like somebody who might have unique value if the next collective bargaining agreement includes a salary floor.
I mentioned this in our discussion of Dallas Keuchel's Gold Glove nomination, but if a team like the Pirates needs to spend $20 million to meet a certain requirement, an erratic closer with elite potential at one end of the spectrum is probably one of the better ways to cover the bill. If he returns to form, that team would be happy to offload him at the earliest convenience to a team in need of bullpen help for a prospect of any intrigue. If Kimbrel's decline is for real, well, that money still had to be spent.
That said, it's worth keeping some healthy skepticism on your person, just because the White Sox are coming off a winter where they invested in the back end of the bullpen at the expense of position-player solutions. Sometimes their spending doesn't reflect the healthiest set of priorities, and it's fine to say so.
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The return of the coaching staff -- including hitting coaches Frank Menechino and Howie Clark -- generated some discontent among those who feared the White Sox wouldn't be able to outrun their alarmingly high ground-ball rate well into October, and thus are wary of the plot repeating itself in 2022.
Menechino in particular drew attention to himself for a quote that carried an immediate risk of aging poorly.
The White Sox believe Andrew Vaughn’s power will show up organically as the product of good at-bats.
— James Fegan (@JRFegan) May 12, 2021
Or as hitting coach Frank Menechino put it, “Fuck the home run. Let’s hit .300”
Anybody who has followed baseball closely over the last decade knows that the home run can't be dismissed so bluntly. The team with more homers in a game went 25-2 this postseason, including a 3-0 record in the ALDS between the White Sox and Astros (they each hit one in Game 4).
I also think there's limited use in harping on individual quotes, especially one like the one above in which Menechino is trying to not ask more of a hitter who didn't get any reps at Double-A and Triple-A before assuming regular duty at a defensive position he'd never played with any regularity. Outside of Jeff Manto eschewing OBP in favor of his own metric that added runs and RBIs, it's hard to fault hitting coaches for what they say, especially when they're defaulting to positive reinforcement.
The offseason is a good time for a verbal resetting. As Menechino, Clark and the rest of the White Sox's hitting apparatus lurches forward, it would be helpful to hear a renewed awareness of the teamwide offensive shortcomings, and Rick Hahn did that in his media conference on Monday. The White Sox never shared the audio, so I'm once again grateful for James Fegan providing the context.
The news that Hahn was ready to discuss Friday was revealed earlier in the week: Tony La Russa’s entire uniformed coaching staff will return. And with that comes a tacit, and eventually overt, endorsement in hitting coaches Frank Menechino and Howie Clark’s ability to reverse those trends with a talented core group of hitters. In doing so, Hahn showed the willingness to not equate disappointing on-field results with a flawed approach or to discount track record for a group that engineered a number of individual turnarounds. Adam Engel’s shift from automatic out to viable hitter, and Luis Robert going supernova with a few leg load adjustments stand out.
“This was a coaching group, or coaching approach, that also led in 2020 to us having three silver sluggers,” Hahn said. “The ingredients are there. Despite the injuries, they still held their own in terms of production. But there’s room to improve. I assure you, no one is instructing anyone to hit the ball on the ground. That is not happening. Obviously with the fair amount of roster turnover and some young guys, we were hard-pressed at times to go to any port in the storm. And perhaps the profiles were a little different of that group than what we envision going forward. I don’t think that the groundball issue, per se, is one that necessarily is going to persist going forward. It’s not, again, anything that’s being taught or anything that’s being emphasized.”
Hahn could merely be offering his own kind of positive reinforcement to get through the initial reaction phase, but that rhetorical approach does put the onus on the front office to acquire some hitters who might be able to offset the incumbent issues with getting the ball in the air. That just means we're left to hope the obligation to Kimbrel that reestablished itself on the White Sox's books won't get in the way of that.
(Photo by Matt Marton/USA TODAY Sports)
