At a certain point, the volume of the non-roster invites who arrived in Camelback Ranch feeling like they have a good chance to make the White Sox will have to collide with the limits of the team's appetite to kick people off their 40-man roster at the end of spring.
Until then, man, Danny Mendick has to feel like he can win a utility infield job. It was less than two years ago that it looked as though he was wresting away the starting second baseman spot from Josh Harrison, hitting .288/.347/.424 in June 2022 until he broke the fibula and tore the ACL in his right leg chasing a 'tweener pop fly down the left field foul line.
"It's not necessarily physical that injury, it's a lot mental," Mendick said. "You've got to grind through different things mentally. A lot of guys that go through injury, they can say that once you get through it, you become a better player because of the stuff you've gone through. That's kind of how I feel."
Despite that interruption and disparate playing time with the Mets last season, the 30-year-old has more big league success in his history than his likely competition Braden Shewmake, Lenyn Sosa and Zach Remillard. He returns approvingly to a White Sox clubhouse that suddenly is much closer to mirroring his career-long mantra of fighting for a spot at all times, with Mendick even name-dropping presumptive starting second baseman Nicky Lopez as someone whose work ethic he hopes rubs off on the rest of the roster.
Anyone who remembers the difficulties Charlie Tilson dealt with trying to come back from tearing his left hamstring would nod in recognition as Mendick said his big battle was trying to avoid compensatory injuries in his left leg while rehabbing his right. It's with a long series of strength assessments in the rear-view mirror verifying the symmetry in his lower half that Mendick declares himself fully healthy.
"I honestly feel like I never had surgery," Mendick said, laying down quite the challenge for anyone seeking to match his spring training optimism.
Assessing Mendick's return toward his old form last season reminds how much his journey from the 22nd round of the draft was built without traditional major league physical tools. He's manned seven different defensive positions despite a fringy throwing arm and sprint speed that Statcast grades out as in line with J.D. Martinez and James McCann. Despite Mendick drawing walks at a below-average clip for his career, he has the chase rate of a seminary student. What he lacks in the ability to wreak harsh punishments for hittable pitches in the zone, he makes up for in generating more opportunities for himself to swing at strikes, and that remained largely intact even amid ugly big league numbers in 2023 in very few at-bats.
Ideally Mendick's disciplined at-bats will be less of a reprieve from the rest of the Sox plate approach than it was in 2022. He might still be able to distinguish himself by level of enthusiasm.
"Everyone has to do their job and that's the mentality brought in from the coaching staff," Mendick said. "Everyone has to come together and if that happens, you can be very successful no matter what kind of team you are. As long as you have that mojo and I think that's how we're going to go about it, that we're going to kick everyone's ass regardless of who is on the field."
Lopez is supposed to serve as the firewall for how far a utilityman with a good plate approach can rise on the White Sox infield depth chart. Superficially, their offensive production can run in similar circles, but Lopez's size and speed allows him to deliver more genuinely plus up-the-middle defense. He's all about making contact, at the cost of much of it being hard or off the ground. It culminated in one perfect season of being a genuine menace, slashing .300/.365/.378 in 2021. It's a performance that Pedro Grifol said he's "challenging" Lopez to repeat.
"Basically, what he's meaning is, he's going to stay on me to be the type of player that I need to be," Lopez said. "The refreshing part is knowing that I've done it at the big league level. It's in there and it's more tapping back into that. Obviously roles change. Going to Atlanta obviously I didn't play that much, but it was being able to learn a ton of stuff and be that utility player. Now that I'm coming here and probably going to playing more than I did last year, it's tapping into what I did in 2021."
Lopez is savvy enough to know to introduce himself to people as "from a suburb right outside Chicago," than just Chicago. But the Sox are counting on him to also be savvy enough to recreate offensive production on speed and baserunning at a later point in his career (Lopez turns 29 this month), and be a clubhouse asset on a team where his level of experience with Grifol is relatively rare.
"I've played for [Grifol] for four years before coming here, and it's just talking to my teammates and telling them 'he expects this,' and if play a certain way, then he's going to respect you," Lopez said. "We just have to buy in and everyone has to go in a certain direction. But playing for Pedro has always been good. I've always loved playing for him."
One of the goals I had for sitting down with Grifol individually at spring training was to give him a chance to respond to complaints, both those memorably aired publicly and quietly reiterated privately, about his efforts to hold players accountable. That effort wound up running up against both his desire to not re-litigate the 2023 season, and his belief that his private conversations with player had to stay private to be effective.
"How would they know?" Grifol countered.
For a team not expected to do all that much, so many people across the White Sox are looking to this season to provide results that put old narratives to bed.
