It's not a bold thing to say about a home run, but everyone seemed to agree that Eloy Jiménez's laser out to right center of Busch Stadium Sunday afternoon was a particularly good sign. Giovanny Gallegos is not exactly at his career apex, but jumping all over struggling pitchers to turn close games into comfortable wins is kind of the job.
"It’s great to see him hit a home run to right-center field," said Pedro Grifol afterward. "No. 1, that means he’s getting the ball in the air, and No. 2, he’s starting to open up the field a little bit. That’s when he becomes dangerous. He’s a hitter first and then he’s got some power."
"If you see back at home and in Minnesota," Jiménez explained postgame. "They were pitching me away and I was not available to hit that ball. So to stay that way ... that was in ’19, too, the most homers I've hit and pretty much all my homers went to the other side. So hitting the ball that way means I’m getting better."
But after following up that encouraging blast with an 0-for-4 night in Tampa Monday night, Jiménez is still at just .220/.278/.378 on the season through 90 plate appearances. It might be your introduction to how down offense is leaguewide to know that this still represents a 86 wRC+, early enough in the season to be a good series away from league average offense.
But a league average hitter is not in line with Jiménez's expectations, and his persistent confidence that the talent to be a premier hitter, if not the premier hitter in the sport is still inside him at 27 years of age.
"I always think that I'm the best doing what I do," Jiménez said. "I remind myself every single day that I'm the best one, and it doesn't matter the results that I have in the moment. I remind myself that I'm the best.
"It's a little bit hard when you're not doing well and you're hitting less than .250. It's hard. But it doesn't mean I'm going to lay down my head and just let it happen. I just battle every single day."
Many reading this have inevitably grown weary of this battle. Past Sox hitting coaches have outlined the talent present for Jiménez to hit .330, or pile up 40 home runs in a season, with health and related inconsistency keeping either benchmark from being approached. The team is not contractually committed to him past this year, and an upturn in performance only makes it more likely that their pairing ends in July instead.
Seeing Jiménez inch toward the familiar rhythm in his swing and timing that has yielded his best moments reminds of the cycle he's been stuck in. He gradually progresses back toward being one of the gifted hitters in the sport, but when any ailment pops up and shuts him down, the journey restarts. A shift to designated hitter saves him from the wear and collision potential of playing outfield defense, but puts him in a role where it's harder to stay loose, and his history of soft tissue injuries can work against him.
"It's a little bit harder because as a DH, you don't know really what to do," said Jiménez, fresh off another session in the portable hyperbaric chamber the team has been traveling with. "Especially me, all my life I was in the field. Right now it's new for me being a DH regularly."
But Jiménez came into spring camp with a change that was suppose to ease the process. Already a mounting issue, Jiménez's ground-ball rate had crested to a career-high 53.2 percent in 2023. Having never been an issue of this scale during his minor league progression, the numbers troubled Jiménez. With his personal hitting coach in the Dominican Republic, Jiménez said they raised his hands in his setup in line with where they were in 2017.
The basic idea is that his hands now start closer to where his swing path starts, and earlier loads will give him more time to catch the ball out front -- when his barrel is angled up to lift the ball in the air.
"We [didn't] really have to watch videos because we knew right I way I needed an adjustment," Jiménez said. "It's something I've done in the past and I got results, good results from it, so why not try it again?"
So far, Jiménez has piled up a 55.7 percent ground ball rate on the young season. It's been dropping of recent, but whether it's too noisy due to his adductor injury and following ramp-up to judge or not, it's not an encouraging early figure if the hope was for a sea change. But there were other expected benefits from the alteration of his setup.
"It's cleaning his path up. [With his hands] down here, he was late getting his barrel around to the baseball and it was causing a lot of ground balls," said White Sox hitting coach Marcus Thames. "Timing is everything. If his timing is off he's going to have a lot more ground balls, so we're trying to make sure he's on time with his hands. If he does that, timing is going to be good and he's going to be able to recognize pitches, see the baseball better."
Getting loaded earlier would grant Jiménez a longer look at the ball, if this mechanism worked. So it's of note that Statcast records his out of zone swing rate at 27.7 percent. That's not only a career low, but it would be the only sub-30 percent chase rate Jiménez has recorded in the majors, and would also represent the first time ever that Jiménez would be less aggressive out of the zone than the league average, even if it's as slight of an edge as possible (27.8 percent).
At a time before getting Jiménez healthy and off the ground became the most pressing projects, boosting his swing decisions would have been regarded as the sort of breakthrough that vaults him toward MVP-caliber numbers. Now, hopefully it just helps; shorten the wait to feel and look like something closer to what Jiménez still believes he will be, or just nudges him out of the rut he's currently in.
Jiménez has four homers now, but just one double on the season as his running still looks limited and he admits "I feel slow." A moment free of nagging physical issues is going to be more elusive than a stretch of feeling in rhythm at the plate. But Jiménez still sees indicators that the production he expects, and everyone once expected from him, are around the corner.
"Right now I've been unlucky for dropping in some hits, but I've been hitting the ball over 100 mph right now when I hit the ball hard, so it's been close," Jiménez said. "I've been working every single day to do that. And I know one day, it's going to be there. I'm going to be around those numbers."
