Pregame notes: Luis Robert Jr.’s timeline on optimistic side

While fears of a longer absence will persist given the troubled history of Luis Robert Jr.’s right
hip flexor, the White Sox stance has been a 6-8 week timeline for his return, and GM Chris Getz
was publicly even more optimistic during Friday’s pregame media session. He’s now projecting
Robert to return to the White Sox in six weeks, and says the obligatory minor league rehab
assignment is baked into that timeline.

It likely puts the kibosh on Robert repeating as an AL All-Star, but at least in terms of games
missed, is not the season-ruiner it initially appeared to be. Well, at least not for Robert’s season,
personally.

– Robert is the most relevant figure in this whole discussion, since his future with the White Sox
can realistically extend beyond this season. But in updating that Yoán Moncada’s White Sox
career is in fact not over, but now expected to resume after the All-Star break, Getz made an
interesting reference to looking for outside medical insight on his adductor strain.

“Sometimes you go outside of the baseball realm and you look at other sports industries, and
maybe there's a common theme in another league, and in this case we were able to do that,”
Getz said.

– Before Getz could provide an Eloy Jiménez update, Jiménez sort of provided one of his own.
He stalked out to left field with a trainer and began doing a series of wind-sprints of increasing
intensity. At this point, there’s little Getz can offer that’s more specific than watching that. When
he can max out at running intensity without issue, Jiménez can start playing. Pedro Grifol has
previously indicated that Jiménez will likely need a rehab assignment, but since it’s nearly Tax
Day and Jiménez has not had a major league at-bat this month, perhaps that’s something else
you could have worked out on your own.

Getz did confirm that he prefers the term “plateau” over “setback” to describe why Jiménez went
from day to day to on the injured list.

“We don't want to send him out into game action without knowing that this is fully healed, so we
don't have a recurrence of that injury. We just want to make sure this is behind him when he
comes back."

– Since he had a great spring, shown enough pop that he is literally starting at DH in Friday
night’s game, has the best throwing arm of any backstop in the organization and pretty much
pinch runs whenever Martín Maldonado reaches base, a (very) low level conspiracy theory is
that there’s no rush to send Korey Lee back to Charlotte.

But Getz said that Max Stassi’s glove hand absorbed a swing recently during a Triple-A game,
which took some zip out of his recovery process from inflammation in his surgically repaired hip.
Stassi will need to catch back-to-back games with Charlotte before he’s considered to be
activated, but hasn’t played since Tuesday.

– There are actual roster moves to consider in all this.

Getz gave some general words of praise for signs of improvement for Oscar Colás, but his
promotion was temporary and his presence doesn’t jive well with stated plans to play Gavin
Sheets and Robbie Grossman (and Andrew Benintendi) with regularity. Zach Remillard was
called up to avoid Nicky Lopez or Braden Shewmake having to hit left on left. The Sox have too
many marginal hitters to not platoon them. Lopez was wearing a t-shirt in support of Sarah
Langs’ fight against ALS in the clubhouse on Friday.

While Getz accidentally called him Tyler Anderson multiple times, Justin Anderson was
someone the front office thought threw more strikes than his 72 walks in 102⅔ career innings
would indicate, and five scoreless and walk-free appearances with the Knights validated this.
The epitaph given for Bryan Shaw spoke the unspoken truth of his presence on the team.
“His greatest strength was his availability and taking the ball,” Getz said.

– Of course, Shaw wound up pitching and losing in the 10th inning on Wednesday in Cleveland,
with Michael Kopech and Jordan Leasure both unavailable after their respective two-inning
outings the night before. Pedro Grifol said ideally they would work single inning outings and be
available more often (speaking with Steven Wilson 1-on-1 today, you can mark him down as
leaning this way too), but felt Tuesday was a “must-win” game.

“To win a game when there’s some urgency, sometimes you have to go multiple innings, even if
it costs you the next couple of days where you’ve got to get them a rest,” Grifol said. “I thought
that the second game in Cleveland was a must-win for us, so Leasure had to throw two, and
Kopech had to throw two. When we hit our stride here, they’re going to have to pitch three
[days] out of four.”

– Getz did not commit to a fifth starter, but the next open slot in the rotation comes on Tuesday.
That will be five days since Brad Keller threw five innings at Triple-A Charlotte on Thursday, and
that’s the exact number of innings Getz said they needed to see to be comfortable calling up
any fifth starter candidate.

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