Here's a rule of thumb about following the White Sox casually: If you're hearing people talk about Danny Mendick, things probably aren't going well.
This apparently even applies when Mendick himself is exceeding expectations. He's hitting .290/.333/.484 over 34 plate appearances, so he's one of two active White Sox with an OPS above .800 no matter the sample. He improved that line by going 2-for-4 with a double and two RBIs from the ninth spot in Toronto on Tuesday night.
But he also committed the season's costliest baserunning mistake to date, getting tagged out at second before the tying run crossed the plate on what had all the markings of a standard sac fly by Yasmani Grandal.
🍍 @yunitogurriel's throw
— Toronto Blue Jays (@BlueJays) June 1, 2022
😳 @doinitBIGgio23's tag
HEADS-UP BASEBALL 😤 pic.twitter.com/16phVTV0uK
Tony La Russa said Mendick should've stopped ...
“[Mendick] came in and apologized,” manager Tony La Russa said. “First of all, it was a good play. But when you tag up and have the play in front of you and the throw goes there, you have to stop. You stop.”
... while Mendick sees himself as somebody who never stops never stopping:
Mendick wanted to put the tying run in scoring position with two outs for Vaughn.
“I’m an aggressive player,” Mendick said. “It might not have been the best situation to do that with the runner on third, but if I’m going to make a mistake, it’s going to be aggressive. I saw him going back. He made a perfect throw, a perfect play.”
He's not lying. I've used the "mendick-tootblan" tag on eight different recaps since September 2019, which seems steep for an up-and-down bench player. Perhaps he might want to try making a different kind of mistake, just to see what happens.
Another issue is that Mendick's playing time has been going in the wrong direction as the White Sox have advanced into what's supposed to be the peak of their plans. He's provided diminishing returns for the White Sox since an intriguing cup of coffee as a September call-up in 2019 while seeing more action:
- 2019: 107 OPS+ over 40 PA
- 2020: 81 OPS+ over 114 PA
- 2021: 63 OPS+ over 186 PA
This season's output breaks that trend thus far (135 OPS+), but Mendick has a history of starting strong before overexposure sets in. He hit .265/.405/.441 through his first 42 plate appearances of 2021, capped off by a grand slam in the same game Yermín Mercedes swung 3-0 against Willians Astudillo. While everybody pointed to Mercedes' in-progress slide as a casualty of Tony La Russa's doghouse, perhaps Mendick was the one who took it personally. He hit just .208/.273/.246 the rest of the season.
But even if Mendick figures out how to hold down a job this time around, it's still weird that he's getting a chance to do so, at least for this team. He has at least one MLB skill, but his overall game can be easily improved upon, which is why he gets optioned down to Charlotte at every opportunity.
But he finds his way back to Chicago at every opportunity simply by staying healthy and engaged while others can't. Nick Madrigal went 2-for-2 in seasons with surgeries for the Sox. Tim Anderson is on track to miss about 30-40 games for the third consecutive 162-game schedule. By those standards, the perpetually pained Yoán Moncada was the endurance king, at least until an oblique strain and vague leg limited him to 15 games over the first two months, and one plate appearance over the last week.
With Madrigal gone and Moncada and Jiménez struggling to stay on the field, Andrew Vaughn is the only active bat the rebuild provided (Luis Robert could've been signed without all the excessive losing). And when viewing the struggles through that lens, it becomes more apparent why Grandal's start to the season is crushing the team.
Once the Sox built what they thought was their cost-controlled core, Grandal was the only position player added to the team with the aim of elevating the offense. Just about everybody else* -- Nomar Mazara, Edwin Encarnación, Adam Eaton, Josh Harrison -- was basically brought aboard with the hopes that he wouldn't suck, because "not sucking" would constitute a major improvement over the previous player, who was also acquired with modest intentions. James McCann is the only time this has ever worked.
(*A.J. Pollock is in between. He should be better than this, but was also the best Rick Hahn could do with Craig Kimbrel's option. Were Hahn to have $16 million to spend however he pleased, would Pollock still be on his radar?)
Had Moncada and Jiménez entrenched themselves in the lineup as expected, the Sox could have gradually diminished Grandal's responsibilities until his game comes back, if it does. This is what happened in the rotation, where Dallas Keuchel fell behind Lance Lynn, Dylan Cease and Michael Kopech over the course of eight baseball months, and then fell off the roster. It's slightly embarrassing for everybody that it happened so fast, but the White Sox also produced depth and bolstered it with another ambitious addition, which hastened the decision in a positive way.
It's the opposite for the lineup. Tony La Russa batted Grandal leadoff out of desperation on Tuesday, and it worked as well as it should have. He went 0-for-5 with five stranded. It could've been 0-for-4 with an RBI were it not for Mendick's blunder, which shows how starved anybody is for good news.
Mendick's presence reflects the absence of such positive developments. In a healthier White Sox world, everybody could chalk up his story as a player-development victory, even if he came up short of sticking. Instead, another long look has fallen into his lap, and not because there's a particular reason to think he's shored up the gaps in his game. He's going to run with it, and the Sox have to hope that said running won't continue to matter more than it should.
