It was only eight days ago that Patrick hoped the White Sox would place Yoán Moncada on the injured list in order to free up all the playing time at third base that Jake Burger could handle.
Moncada briefly put up a fight with a homer in Yankee Stadium that night, but he fell back into another prolonged slump that finally forced the White Sox to address his shortcomings. They placed him on the injured list on Thursday with lower back inflammation, and Pedro Grifol didn't offer a timetable.
“The most important thing right now is him playing without him having to worry, ‘My back hurts,’” Grifol said. “Or ‘how am I going to feel today.’ I just want him to go out there and be free of pain and just go play. He hasn’t done that this year yet. I give him a lot of credit for what he’s done with how he’s felt.
“We see spurts here. That one day he went first to home in 11-some seconds. Once in a while he’ll show you something really, really good. Other times he can’t do it.”
I feel like it's pointless to enter the name "Wally Pipp" into the record based on the White Sox's general fragility everywhere, but watching the Sox shelve Moncada as Burger attempts to make the All-Star Game by brute force made me wonder what series of circumstances would make the White Sox resigned to relegating Moncada to a bench role. He's hitting .217/.275/.357 since the start of the 2022 season, and that's nearly a full season's worth of games at this point. His defense is keeping him above replacement level by the smallest of margins, but it also seems besides the point now.
For one, Moncada is set to reach free agency at the end of the 2024 season after a $24.8 million salary. The Sox hold a $25 million option for 2025, and it's really a $20 million decision since they'd have to pay him a $5 million buyout, but it's hard to imagine him being reliable enough to be worth either amount. Even his successful season wasn't all that impressive -- a 4 WAR season built on defense and walks that he no longer can draw due to the lack of power.
The other part is that Burger stopped being a butcher at third. He isn't going to challenge for a Gold Glove the way Moncada can, but you no longer see the difference on a daily basis. The small-sample metrics show a guy who's passable to below-average, but if that's the lower end, he's still shored that up. The game looks slower to him, and he's now making all the plays he should make (one error in 22 games, after six over 37 games last year). Errors can only tell you so much, of course, but he's reached the kind of benchmark that affords him the opportunity to see whether there's any other improvement in store.
There are bigger things to worry about, like a strikeout-to-walk gap that's actually bigger than last season's sample ...
- 2022: 10 BB, 56 K over 183 PA
- 2023: 8 BB, 59 K over 179 PA
... which results in a Statcast chart that reflects our country's partisan divide.
But as long as he's pulled his defense out of that extreme territory, then it makes it easier to tolerate the three-strikeout nights he occasionally suffers.
At the rate and direction these individual fortunes are tracking, there's going to be a point where investing in Moncada's future no longer makes sense. The hope is that Burger, who's never been healthy or effective enough to accrue 400 plate appearances in a professional season, can give the forecast at third base a second wind.
Following up: Pedro Grifol's relevance
Besides my heightened tolerance to Nightwashing, I didn't mind Bob Nightengale using Pedro Grifol's ineffectiveness to flatter Tony La Russa because it is worth wondering what exactly Grifol brings to the table.
After a spring where the White Sox praised the Grifol administration as the primary catalyst for change, it's striking how irrelevant Grifol seems to the regular-season proceedings. Sure, La Russa cast such a large shadow that any manager will seem less consequential by comparison, but Grifol is doing little to make an impression.
For instance, Tim Anderson is hitting .237/.279/.263 over 38 games since coming back from his knee injury. He hasn't homered, and he's only stolen two bases in three attempts. Unlike Moncada, his defense isn't buoying his value. He isn't dynamic in any way, shape or form.
Grifol still isn't motivated to make any changes, and while a lack of options may limit what he can do defensively, he can at least knock Anderson down the batting order so he isn'tgetting the most plate appearances every single game.
Alas, Daryl Van Schouwen relayed this quote from Grifol suggesting no changes are coming.
Grifol said he has given no thought to moving Tim Anderson from the leadoff spot, where he was hitless in his last 15 at-bats, “because I know at any given day he could start feeling really good. We’ve got 92 games left, [he could get] 120 hits the rest of the year. I don’t react that way.”
I feel like when you reach the second half of June and there are fewer than 100 games remaining, you can't really lean on the length of the season as the only argument. Even José Abreu finally had enough runway to get his season off the ground in Houston this month (.302/.321/.528, three homers), while Anderson is sliding even further down the hole (.209/.244/.256).
That leaves us with no indication of what it would actually take for Grifol to deem Anderson's play a problem, and that's a problem for everybody. If you take the last line from that quote and remove the last two words, it might not be any less true.
