From Tim Anderson sitting the second game of the second half to Andrew Vaughn resting his legs in the fourth, Tony La Russa's lineup cards wasted no time hogging all the time under the microscope.
Even Hawk Harrelson added his baritone to the frustrated chorus during last Friday's Mully & Haugh Show on 670 The Score, except he directed his ire at outside agitators.
“The guys are on the DL all the time,” Harrelson said. “I told a good friend of mine a long time when they first brought in the 10-day DL rule, I said the agents are going to stick it up your ass with that 10-day DL rule. And boy they have done it. It’s just that simple. It’s turned into an agent’s game now. You take a guy like Scott Boras, his combined stable last year, their salaries were ($1.2 billion). And he just turned down a 23-year-old player (Juan Soto) for a $440-million contract. You know, when I broke in, you could’ve bought every team in baseball for $440 million.” [...]
“(I like their outlook), if the guys will play, which they haven’t so far,” Harrelson said. “If they’ll play, hell, all they’ve got to do is they come up every day, ‘Well, my legs are sore’ or ‘I hit the wall, and I’m going to go on the DL.’ And a lot of this is coming from the agents. Because what they’re trying to do is prolong the shelf life of their clients, especially the pitchers. I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s just an agent’s game today, and it’s getting worse and worse and worse. And I don’t know what they’re going to do to stop it. They’re maybe going to have to take that 10-day rule out of play because of the fact agents have abused it. And I don’t blame them that much. Because if you were an agent or I was an agent, we’d be doing the same daggum thing. We’d be trying to prolong the shelf life of our players, especially the pitchers.
I'd be more open to indulging Harrelson here because when it comes to the 2022 White Sox, yes, every day is spent seeing what condition their conditions are in. The problem is that agent-blaming is one of the last rants he overdubbed into his Fidelipac of grievances over the last years of his broadcast career. In one of the flatter moments of his send-off season in 2018, he needed fewer than two full innings with fellow septuagenarians Steve Stone and Tom Paciorek before he started randomly going off on the scourge of guaranteed contracts. He could very well be right here; it's just hard to regard it as a carefully considered opinion when it's far more likely a convenient opening for Corporate Hawk to rehash a tirade.
That said, the guaranteed nature of a couple contracts -- those issued to Eloy Jiménez and Luis Robert -- have captured my curiosity over the last two seasons. I'm sure many of you have sensed that, mostly because I keep wondering aloud why a copycat league didn't follow Rick Hahn's unprecedented pre-MLB contracts for both of them.
The leading answer seems to be "because it's not worth it." As frustrating as Robert and Jiménez have been, they're far more successful than Scott Kingery and Evan White, the only other two players to have signed such deals in the same area code.
- Kingery: .229/.280/.387 over 325 games, five years into six-year, $24 million contract.
- White: .165/.202/.237 over 84 games, two years into a six-year, $24 million contract.
At least with Robert and Jiménez, the answer is simple -- they just haven't been healthy to fully realize the value.
They've been great when fully functional. Jiménez won a Silver Slugger in 2020, but he's required early-season surgeries in each of the last two years. He belted a pair of homers to help the Sox turn an 0-2 hole into a four-game split, but he's trying to thrive while working around the most defined kind of vague leg to date:
But before Jimenez can regain redemption, the discomfort in his surgically repaired right hamstring must subside or allow him to curb the freedom that baserunners have displayed on hits to either side.
The pain “is going to be there for a while,” Jimenez said before Sunday’s game. “It’s normal, but it’s something you don’t want to feel when you’re playing. But I’ll try to do my best, go out there and help the team.”
Robert's last two seasons amount to one very good one ...
- 142 games
- .318/.355/.511
- 35 doubles
- 1 triple
- 25 homers
- 97 RBIs
- 17 stolen bases in 20 attempts
- 5.9 bWAR, 5.6 fWAR
... but it's felt short of sensational because he's missed chunks of time for reasons big and small, with the big one (hip flexor surgery) occurring on a random baseball play. His latest hot streak was halted by a bout of lightheadedness, which is a new sort of invisible enemy holding the Sox down. Rick Hahn hopes he's back for the weekend series in Oakland, but this seems well short of expecting:
Especially when La Russa alludes to a life outside baseball, or after it?
‘‘Keep your fingers crossed — and more for him personally than professionally,’’ manager Tony La Russa said.
The maddeningly opaque descriptions have exacerbated frustrations, and part of me wonders if this is a product of them having signed big guaranteed contracts. Had they been working on year-to-year deals, minor league options would present a pressure release valve for the most troubled times, giving a player to fully recover while stopping the clock.
But considering these are supposed to be the bargain years that afforded Hahn to splurge (after a fashion) elsewhere, the meter keeps running, and everybody can keep looking at it. That generates an sense of ni shagu nazad, no matter how punishing the present. Success through such determination is possible, but this franchise's recent history is one of actions leaving words hanging.
Except Andrew Vaughn pokes a hole in that whole theory, doesn't he? The White Sox are guiding him through the second year of an up-and-down career with his neck free of anything resembling an albatross, and he somehow ends up with the craziest descriptions of his mud-clear condition.
On Sunday, Tony La Russa offered a lengthy explanation as to why Vaughn couldn't play a fourth consecutive day in the outfield, even before a two-off-day week. I transcribed Vinnie Duber's screenshots, including La Russa's brief detour into bar soap slogan A/B testing.
"In Andrew's case, he's (been playing) out in the outfield. I talked to him this morning and talked to (White Sox trainer James) Kruk and thought it would be a good break. We were careful with his legs there for a while, and he's starting to feel himself. So it's a good day to back off.
"Sometimes you need freshness of mind, and (sometimes) you need freshness of body. The case here, it's freshness of body. The guy's not going to go out there when he's all tight and hurt, and he plays and pulls something, tears something. What's the point? He had four days off and three rugged days here. He ran a lot. Believe me, if there wasn't a good reason, Andrew's as good a hitter as we have in our lineup, he'd be in the lineup. There's a good reason." [...]
"(If) you want to C.Y.A. (cover your ass) and write someone in that shouldn't play, that's just not sensible. Vaughn, physically, would be a push we would regret if something happened and then he's out for two or three weeks because he pulled something. The easy one with him is that he just went through a period where he was running at 75 percent. So sometimes it's not a tough call. This was an easy one to give him a day off. And believe me, against anybody, we want Andrew Vaughn in the lineup.
If the rationale were limited to the last paragraph, I'd get it, at least to the extent that I've gotten the umpteen other injuries the Sox have similarly characterized. But when they talk about him having a limited amount of full-speed activity before he needs to recharge, he sounds less like an outfielder and more like a nitro-burning unfunny car.
As a result, whenever he has to exert himself in the field and on the basepaths, I can't help but picture the Excitebike heat gauge melting in seconds.
Except in Excitebike, overheating cost you about five seconds. With Vaughn, it costs him a day or three. The White Sox have had a veritable smorgasbord of leg ailments, but I don't recall one that was so sensitive to the efforts of a given day.
This issue doesn't get any easier the next two days, what with the White Sox's ragtag band of outfielders having to cover the vast expanse of Coors Field. I'm holding out a slight hope that all these confusing, conflicting, confounding combination of audio, visuals and text is just an intricately constructed cry for help that will go heeded. The Sox only have a couple outfielders who don't cause any reflexive amount of concern with basic exertion, and one of them is Gavin Sheets.
The only issue is that once the White Sox acquire a guy, that player becomes a White Sox. There's no way around it. In the one universe where they have the four or five young players Washington reportedly wants for Juan Soto, he'd have to wear the uniform, go to the training room, sit in the dugout, walk and run on the same surfaces, when they'd really be better off having Soto play for the Nationals, import his performances and adjust the results retroactively.
Until that happens, the White Sox are going to have to work on their health. Failing that, they're going to have to improve their health-care communication, because it's never great when Harrelson's conspiracy theories sound just as cohesive as anything the team is putting forth.
