The White Sox officially made the one-year, $3 million signing of Elvis Andrus official today, with the Sox designating Bennett Sousa for assignment to make room. While Andrus' performance as an emergency signing for the 2022 White Sox was unimpeachable, it's fair to debate what he might actually add to Sox as a Plan A in 2023.
You can choose to be charmed by Andrus' .271/.309/.464 performance over 43 games at shortstop that made him the White Sox's third-most valuable position player in just a quarter of a season, or you can choose to stare at the .252/.302/.362 line that came in the 525 games before it.
Even if you only limit the discussion to those 43 games, you can look at the production as a whole, or you can look at the 350-point OPS divide between righties (.691) and lefties (1.038) and wonder whether even his best production runs the risk of being overrated.
You can believe Andrus when he says he rediscovered the power stroke that he lost after breaking his elbow in 2018, or you can side with a market that saw a 3 WAR player and gave him only $3 million.
Like Johnny Cueto, I was prepared to hold only fond memories of Andrus once he signed with another team. Some people make better acquaintances than friends, and Andrus could very well be one of them. Josh Harrison provided a similar profile as a second-base solution last year, and all it takes is two slow months for a drop ceiling to come crashing down.
But as I've previously discussed with the signings of Adam Eaton and Mike Clevinger, timing makes a difference in setting expectations. I wouldn't have cared for the return of Andrus in November, December or January, because his presence isn't worth shutting out the possibility of better options.
As a signing in the back half of February, after staring for weeks at the possibility of nothing? Andrus is fine. Maybe he'll be great again, but even if he's merely adequate, he should do what he's supposed to do.
LISTEN: The Sox Machine Podcast welcomes back Elvis Andrus
To paraphrase Miles Davis, this addition is less about who's playing, and more about the guys not being played. Andrus might be a negligible starting second baseman, but his presence insures the White Sox from being one wrong Tim Anderson step away from having a middle infield of Romy González and Lenyn Sosa when they're supposed to be contending. Anderson has missed nearly one-third of the White Sox's schedule over the last four years. The White Sox had the worst projected second-base production before Andrus arrived. If Anderson misses weeks and Andrus isn't there, the second base problem now becomes a shortstop problem, and the infection spreads.
(He also pushes Leury García one roster spot closer to total irrelevancy, although I'd like to give García a chance to redefine himself. As I wrote last year, while Tony La Russa was the best thing for García in terms of playing time, he was the worst thing for García with regards to everything else.)
We can all agree that somebody like Andrus shouldn't be that important to the 2023 White Sox, because their contention window was supposed to be at full speed, not on life support. We can definitely agree that Rick Hahn shouldn't be selling Andrus' leadership qualities like he's tasked with babysitting a 100-loss team, because that calls into question everything the White Sox front office has been doing to prepare everybody else over the last several years.
Ideally, Andrus is reliable in the field and a potential contributor at the bottom of the lineup, and he frees up everybody to redirect attention back to the season's most crucial questions. If the White Sox come up short, it has to be because Yoán Moncada and Lucas Giolito peaked too soon, or because Anderson and Eloy Jiménez can't stay healthy, or because Clevinger and Andrew Benintendi weren't enough, or because Lance Lynn and Yasmani Grandal broke down. It can't be because guys like González and Sosa were asked to be real, credible MLB starters a year before they're ready, because they may actually never be ready. Andrus should make the conversation simpler. It's up to everybody else to make it more enjoyable.
