Pregame Notes: Waiting for Robert (in the rain)

The headline joke works a lot better if you imagine that week we all thought his last name had to be pronounced like it was French. Anyway, Luis Robert Jr. had a setback in his injury rehab. Oh no!

Great news: he’s already over it. Which means the former All-Star centerfielder felt the grabbing sensation in his right hip flexor sometime between late April when the team shared an optimistic projection that Robert would return to the White Sox in mid-May and now.

“He’s running today, he was up to like 70 percent,” said White Sox manager Pedro Grifol. “We’ll see if we can get him up to 90 percent running in the next five, seven days and after that we’ll take the next step. He’s frustrated, he worked his butt off this offseason to have another season of 150-plus games. But it happened and the work he put in is helping him now. Setbacks are part of the rehab. It didn’t set him back too far, just have to calm it down a couple days and now he’s back on track.”

Once Robert is able to beat Gage Crosgrove in a foot race without discomfort, the next step is implied to be a rehab assignment, but there will be some game action on some Arizona backfields before that takes place. Some poor rookie ball arm giving up a 450-footer to Robert is one of the great joys of baseball.

– But why would anyone fret about Robert being out when Tommy Pham and Gavin Sheets are patrolling center and right and topping the White Sox lineup?

“I like him being the first guy to get that fifth time around the order,” Grifol said of Pham leading off. “When we hit around four times and I look up right there and he’s coming up again, I’m liking that. I like that he can put a ball in the seats, he can get a base hit, move a runner, steal bases, he takes pride in his running, I like Sheets in the No. 2 that he’s protecting him and doing some things with the bat. So the lineup is taking shape a little bit. It doesn’t mean it will stay that way. Just keep moving it around till we find something we really, really like, and after that we’ll keep moving it around some more and matching up the way we feel we need to.”

The matching up will continue until morale increases. After that, the matching up will still continue, though Sheets gaining a more prominent lineup role can only help him when outfield playing time dissipates. Sheets has been a better hitter this season so far than Eloy Jiménez and Andrew Vaughn, one might argue, since the latter has the worst win probability added in MLB. Sunday scheduled starter Logan Allen has the worst among pitchers.

– Bryan Ramos had his first case of a Chicago reporter asking him for an interview and by the time the first question had been asked, 10 recorders and a TV camera were pointed at him. He was not flustered, and only needed translation once to clarify what a question meant. He expressed himself without issue.

“Everything,” Ramos said on the difference between Double-A and the majors. “Everything is new. It’s the same game but more professional. Maybe in the minor leagues, you throw a pitch in the middle, it’s a foul ball. But if you throw a pitch in the middle here, they’ll probably hit it, it’s going to be a homer. It’s way different.”

Ramos is hitting .357/.375/.429 through five games, which is full of fluky and weird things. His contact rate on pitches out of the strike zone is currently 100 percent, which is a rare case of an offensive number that you probably want to get worse. 

But even though they’ve been better of late, the Sox have scored 19 fewer runs this season than the Cardinals, who are 29th in runs scored. The Sox are also still the only team averaging fewer than three runs per game, so any offensive success is novel and worth exploring. (Relatedly, I intercepted Paul DeJong before he could head to the batting cage Thursday afternoon). So since the Sox don’t have nine guys who are hitting better than Ramos and sports reporters start to get tremors if they don’t have a future transaction to speculate on, whether the affable 22-year-old could have an extended stay in Chicago (rather than return to sleeping at Extended Stay hotels in the minors), is a regular topic.

“They haven’t told me anything, and I don’t expect anything, either,” Ramos said. "I just want to keep playing baseball the way I’m playing. They know what they’ve got to do. When they’ve got the opportunity to make a decision, they know what’s going to be the best for me.” 

“We’ll see,” Grifol said. “Some of these guys are far away enough for us to have a larger sample size on where he’s at so we’ll see. Obviously we want talent here. But at the same time we don’t want to push talent into a new situation where maybe it’s not the time. Right now he’s good. He’s playing well, he’s confident, he’s playing to win, he’s moving runners, he’s just doing the little things he needs to play at this level.”

--This game will begin in a rain delay without an announced start time.

First Pitch: White Sox vs. Guardians

TV: NBC Sports Chicago

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