Pregame notes: White Sox reinstate Eloy Jiménez, tinker with rotation

They should believe otherwise in their hearts, but the White Sox have performed worthy of the title Worst Team in Baseball^TM for the season’s first two and a half weeks. Team meetings, roster shakeups, van residing motivational speakers, etc. all should be considered in play for this club, and the first two were deployed before their efforts to improve upon their 2-13 record on Monday night.

“The full team meeting today, it was just something I felt like we needed to get together and discuss,” Pedro Grifol said. “It was beneficial but I’m not going to talk about it.”

Sloppy, error-prone defense and baserunning foibles have been added to the White Sox's uncompetitive offensive efforts of recent. A roster with a payroll $50 million lighter than the group that lost 101 games last season left Grifol with only so many knobs to turn, but the manner in which the Sox were swept and outscored 27-5 by the Reds this past weekend still left the Guaranteed Rate faithful with the distinct sense that someone had left the gas on.

It’s always a damning admission for a team to concede that they had a separate meeting to address their poor play, especially for a manager who is so regularly assuring all that appropriate conversations are being had about every issue. It also would be borderline criminal for a team performing like this one to not have a meeting, but an administration carrying a 63-114 record doesn’t seem like the one to wring meaningful change out of sharing hard truths.

In other words –I don’t know, whaddya gonna do?

“At some point, sometimes you need it, and I think that was the right time,” said a surprisingly activated Eloy Jiménez. “Today was good.”

Jiménez was indeed activated after two weeks on the IL with a left adductor strain, despite previous indications that a rehab stint would be necessary. Grifol said such a measure was considered, but that Jiménez showed well enough in live batting practice sessions to be activated, with the man himself saying he’s felt good enough to play for the last few days.

With Grifol terming this as the return of “our four-hole hitter,” and declaring that Jiménez is available to pinch-hit and will likely start on Tuesday, a popular and trending question is why will Jiménez not simply start right away for a team that has scored 34 runs in 15 games. Grifol shot down the notion that the decision is relevant to Jiménez’s recovery, while Eloy proved once again to be a better comedy partner than a cog in a coordinated communication plan.

“Yeah, why not? If I’m active, why not?” Jiménez replied when asked if he could play Monday night, and he continued parrying to a follow-up question on if he had spoken to Grifol about it. “I’m going to ask him right now.”

Jiménez provided some support to the practice of giving him another day off his feet before returning, although probably not in the way the team would invite. Jiménez stopped short of saying he’s 100 percent recovered – as Chris Getz said was the aspiration – and provided a good representation of the internal conflict of a professional athlete asked to pare back his effort.

“I don’t know,” Jiménez said when I asked if he’ll run max effort to first base on slow grounders. “I don’t like to say that I’m not going to do it, because at the end of the day, I try to hustle, I try to play hard every single day. To me, saying I’m going to take it easy, did I really want to take it easy? Or did I really want to keep hustling and keep pushing? But right now, I don’t have a concrete answer to that question.”

We could sit with the complexities of this answer all day, but there’s just too much going on.

Nastrini’s debut was already announced, with at least some indications from Sox higher-ups that he’s getting a chance to stake a claim on a rotation slot. But also participating in team stretch were the unmistakably sun-kissed blonde locks of Jonathan Cannon, whom Grifol later confirmed will start Tuesday’s game, with Erick Fedde helming the finale.

Grifol would not guarantee that Cannon’s debut, nor Nastrini’s would be anything more than a one-off, but brevity seemed to define a lot of his answers. And nothing he said about Chris Flexen’s status in the rotation seemed likely to get clipped from the newspaper and hung on his parents’ refrigerator.

“He’ll also help us in the pen at some point until that next start comes along for him,” Grifol said of Flexen, who has effectively had one good start and two rough ones.

Brad Keller has not worked significantly less than Nastrini and Cannon at Triple-A, but Grifol mapped out his next two outings with Charlotte, and presumably would not be in consideration until then. Grifol did not rule out running a six-man rotation for a time, but with the same tone that he used to avoid ruling out anything. In retrospect, asking about the prolonged closed door team meeting that delayed clubhouse access for 40 minutes was not a big conversation starter.

“Possibility,” Grifol said of running a six-man rotation. “That’s why it’s so important to just debut today, debut tomorrow and see where we are at right after. You can’t get too far ahead of yourself. They might force that issue. They might not. We’ll see.”

There’s always a risk of feeling silly when weighing “How will the White Sox get all these bats in the lineup?” But it is notable that while Jiménez is bench-bound for Monday night, the top four of the batting order are filling out both corner outfield spots, first base and designated hitter. Something will have to give for Jiménez to play.

While he was spotted taking outfield reps during batting practice, a return to right field doesn’t jibe too smoothly with Jiménez’s uncertain answers about how much running intensity he can handle. Grifol said Jiménez could play outfield this season, but we are likely to see Gavin Sheets playing out there sooner.

Not much has been said about the state of Max Stassi’s right hip, but a roster move that takes him out of consideration to play in Chicago before the end of May obviously says plenty.

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