Pregame notes: Andrew Vaughn sidelined

MILWAUKEE -- Andrew Vaughn has hit a palatable .240/.345/.440 in his last seven games, dating back to the beginning of the Orioles series. So after the struggles the White Sox have played him through, his recent absence from the lineup is not merit-based.

"His ring finger," said Pedro Grifol of Vaughn's left hand. "A sprain there, so it’s not feeling too well. It’s a little angry. It’s a pivotal finger on the bottom hand. It’s a little angry right now."

Finding out how Vaughn sprained his finger becomes fairly self-explanatory while watching the play where it happened.

As we all know, finger-centered rage is the most difficult to manage. Vaughn is not on the injured list because Grifol said this was projected to be a 3-to-5 day malady, but it's Day 3 of that process and the first baseman sounds like he won't play for the rest of the weekend. If Vaughn is still limited in his ability to swing heading into the Cubs series, a roster move is possible, but the Sox won't be able to backdate his placement more than three days.

Of course, that could wind up being a Vaughn for Luis Robert Jr. swap on the active roster. But the Sox are at least outwardly touting that Vaughn was rounding into someone who could help them avoid historical infamy. Vaughn was up to a 92.6 mph average exit velocity over the last two and a half weeks of May.

"Underlying numbers, he's been hitting the ball harder," hitting coach Marcus Thames said of Vaughn. "There are some things that are really sticking out--they don't show up on the scoreboard--but let us know that he is hitting the ball better.

-- Between playing DH more in Eloy Jiménez's absence and steadily moving up the batting order, Korey Lee has the critical role in the White Sox offense he always imagined, even if it was hard for others to envision it last season.

"I've always been able to hit," Lee said. "It's obviously nice to have the satisfaction of the stats or whatever, but it's the daily mindset of coming in here and going to work, not taking a pitch off, and not taking an at-bat for granted. Working every single day on what I need to do and making in-game adjustments like I need to. Just being confident in myself, because I think confidence goes a long way in this game."

Grifol spent his Saturday pregame session once more straddling the fence between talking up Martín Maldonado's work on defense, while also predicting a future where Lee is catching 130 games per season. At some point, waving away Maldonado's struggles (.079/.128/.124) begins to undersell the hitter he was before this season. He hasn't posted a wRC+ under 60 in a season since 2015, and hasn't had a full season where he didn't collect double-digit homers since 2018. In other words, he was staunchly glove-first, but major league caliber before this season.

"He's just not swinging it right now the way he's used to doing," Grifol said. "I don't know his career average but it's not what it is right now, let's put it that way. I love what he does defensively."

-- Especially in an era where the infielders know what pitch is coming via PitchCom and can adjust a step or two accordingly, it's alarming to allow 18 singles through the infield in a single night.

"Those ground balls can all of a sudden hit a couple gloves in the infield and we're not talking about the same thing," Grifol said. "We're doing some work on all those ground balls and right now it just looks like one of those days where everything they hit found a hole. But we're digging a little deeper than just that."

Mostly the big adjustment is a totally different style of starting pitcher with Garrett Crochet, a four-seam left-hander with the second-highest qualified strikeout rate in baseball, rather than the sinkerballing Erick Fedde.

-- I put this whole piece together while Jim and Josh were out tailgating, so please excuse the formatting weirdness.

First Pitch: White Sox at Brewers

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