Tim Elko doesn’t need to set the world on fire to be worth a shot

Tim Elko is coming up to join the White Sox, or as Edgar Quero put it on his Instagram story: "Tim time🔥"

With a still quite silly .348/.431/.670 batting line through 31 games at Triple-A, Elko's arrival could come with some bloated expectations for immediate impact. He's a 26-year-old without prospect pedigree, but also possibly the clearest example of a minor league hitter getting better in response to the organization's recent investment in technology, jumpstarting his pitch selection with machine training. Surely some more exuberant White Sox fans were not nearly as circumspect as Quero in their flame emoji usage upon learning the news.

At the same time, Will Venable immediately defused one notion for the sort change Elko will bring, detailing that both he and Andrew Vaughn will be in the lineup together on Saturday. But the White Sox's offensive troubles have been too far-reaching to ever frame the decision as Elko or Vaughn. It's more of a question of whether Elko had emerged as the best option for doing something in the face of a broad suite of issues.

Vaughn broke a six-game homerless streak for the White Sox offense with his second-inning solo shot Friday night, which was not even their longest drought of the season. The Sox are tied for baseball for the fewest home runs in MLB at 27, and the two teams knotted with them have both played fewer than their 39 games.

The injection of a bat who spent all of April regularly accessing 70-grade raw power could be helpful for saving Rate Field's reputation as a hitter's ballpark, which only the pitching staff has been invested in burnishing for some time now.

At an 11-28 record with a meager 3.44 runs per game, the flexibility of the White Sox position player group is more of a necessity than a feature. But it has been a clear modus operandi of Will Venable to aggressively substitute in-game to respond to any situation, and the designated hitter slot has been rotated to create options for their wealth of utility-ish options. Sliding Vaughn to DH and having Miguel Vargas to first has been a recent iteration to incorporate Josh Rojas at third, to say nothing of how a rehabbing Gage Workman would fit on this roster.

But with both Andrew Benintendi and Mike Tauchman already on their second injured list stints on the young season, the DH usage can quickly become rudderless, or strangely, a place to store concentrated bursts of the worst production their few positional regulars can manage.

That overall DH production is 25th in baseball, but just perusing through that list is a quick refresher on some reasons the White Sox would prefer to avoid being locked into a set 1B/DH pairing like the days of old.

Robert DH-ing occasionally is a pillar of their plan to keep him healthy and one of reasons cited for the Michael A. Taylor signing, and he'll probably need a wider window than three games to determine that he can never thrive in such a role. Even with his old UVA teammate Mike Vasil talking up how good he was in the outfield as a freshman the other day, the Sox will want the freedom to put Kyle Teel and Quero in the lineup at the same time once they're on the same roster again. Even if Benintendi is not, as the numbers would indicate, the best DH in baseball, his injury history from this year alone would encourage regular time off from the field. With time, all those conflicts can re-emerge.

And so a fully healthy roster will eventually pit the two bat-first players without defensive versatility (Vaughn and Elko) against each other. But 1) a fully healthy roster in MLB essentially never happens and 2) in the wake of this tumult, the Sox have turned to options that might be most generously described as bench bats, or less generously typified as players fighting to shed the Quad-A label.

What tension has resulted from the White Sox not overtly designating Elko as a potential long-term piece of a more competitive future, can now ironically be assuaged by treating him like the hottest bench bat in Triple-A. There is a small, but perceptible gap in the White Sox' options and Elko looks like the best man to fill it, and if there's any transferability to the havoc he's created on International League pitching, the hard decisions become happy ones.