MILWAUKEE -- To a beat writer who covered him from his draft night in 2017, to when he took it upon himself to address the media and speak candidly about the pain of loss No. 121, Gavin Sheets hasn't changed.
He is still both cordial and polished, simultaneously honest and circumspect with his wording in interviews. And when it's over, he's completing circuits around the Padres clubhouse, mixing joviality with keen observations about the Giants-Braves game on the TV, talking to different pockets of teammates. If "son of a big leaguer" wasn't a topline item in Sheets' player bio, it could be deduced about him anyway.
"It's been fun being a part of this team and being a piece in this lineup has been awesome," said Sheets, looking as comfortable in his new environs as he sounds, but also sounding excited about a Tim Elko homer as he checked scores on his phone on Saturday. "And yeah, I still root for [the White Sox]. I want that city, I want that fan base to get winning baseball back."
And to a White Sox fan wondering about Sheets from afar, and how he's moved to Petco Park and is sitting at 11 home runs -- one more than he hit in each of his last two seasons in Chicago -- he'll still look familiar. Especially if you remember him in 2021 and 2022, as he's earning his manager's affection by being a versatile complementary bat, pinging between first base and left field, providing a vocal clubhouse presence, and always, unfailingly staying healthy and available.
A collision with the wall in Petco Park last week briefly had him getting evaluated for a concussion and put this story in jeopardy. Instead, Sheets has started the last seven games in a row.
"How much time do we have to discuss the favorability of Gavin Sheets?" Padres manager Mike Shildt said with a smile. "I talked to Tony [La Russa] and said, 'Hey what do you have?' He said, 'I think there's more in there. He's going to be better against lefties,' and he said, 'You can win with this guy,' and that was all I needed to know."
At 37-28 and clinging to the final Wild Card slot in the National League, the Padres are winning with Sheets. Though, since they started the year 17-7 and the Sheets is 4-for-30 in June (again, he ran into a wall on the first of the month), both are working to show they can sustain hot starts. Nevertheless, Sheets is still sitting at a 115 wRC+ for the year and hitting for power at a rate (.205 ISO) that the 29-year-old hasn't sustained since his rookie year for the division-winning White Sox in 2021.
Sheets has a more upright posture in the batter's box alongside his career-high average exit velocity (92.1 mph), and credits the Padres for holding him out of Cactus League games early on so he could iron out the changes to his setup with their hitting and biomechanics groups during the spring. But Sheets is quick to clarify that he discussed similar changes with White Sox hitting coach Marcus Thames last year, deferred by the typical issue that such a substantive fix would need to wait for the offseason.
That this new Sheets swing wasn’t seen on the South Side, he would posit, is simply because the White Sox chose not to pay for it, and non-tendered him last November.
"I felt we had conversations leading up [to it] and just talking to my agent, we were -- I wouldn't say blindsided -- but we were definitely surprised," Sheets said. "Then I started to think about, this was a chance to see where there's interest and pick somewhere they're playing winning baseball and go contribute to it. So once I got to that perspective, it was good."
Sheets simply hadn’t performed statistically over the last two years (.220/.289/.346) in a manner that would give anyone security at the non-tender deadline. But also anyone who hit in the middle of the lineup all year, took a central role in the clubhouse and hitters' meetings, and spoke on behalf of the players after a historic and painful 121st loss would start to get the notion that they are an established piece of the roster. It’s more so now -- as he finds himself checking in on his friend Andrew Vaughn during his Triple-A sabbatical -- rather than last November, that Sheets can see that the group he was a fixture of is largely gone anyway.
A glance at the current White Sox lineup makes it look like their offseason decisions were more about clearing the decks after a historic season, rather than just making a call on giving Sheets a raise through arbitration.
"I wanted to see that thing through in Chicago and I wanted to see it get back," Sheets said. "Because more than anything, I feel for the fans. I loved Chicago. I loved the fan base. And seeing what it had gotten to from what it was when I first came up, it was upsetting because I know how great that fan base and I know what it's like to play in the in playoffs there. That's what I wanted to see. But the core I came up with isn't there anymore either.
"We lost [Jake] Burger and then you lose [Garrett] Crochet and it's, 'Where is the core that we had?' Once that dwindled away, you look around and this isn't the core I came up with."
After a week of being “just pissed off” after the Sox non-tendered him, Sheets did start warming up to the notion that a new opportunity could provide a jolt to his career. There is simply too much correlation to be a coincidence that he’s returned to his 2021-22 performance levels while returning to the complementary role he filled on those Sox teams, and Sheets wouldn't steer you otherwise.
It’s a lot easier to feel like he's contributing to a team that has a chance to win every night thanks to Manny Machado, Fernando Tatis Jr. and Jackson Merrill, than being the cleanup hitter for a White Sox offense that simply didn’t have enough to be competitive.
"It gets back to my perspective in '21: I'm going to hit and try to lengthen this lineup out," said Sheets, acknowledging he's asked to carry less of the weight again. "I'm going to try to be a piece of the lineup. [In San Diego] we have our superstars. In '21 [with the White Sox], we had our superstars."
"You go 0-for-4 but you have good at-bats, you get guys over, you play winning baseball and you help the team win that night, and you go home and you're excited about the win and you're excited about the way you played. I felt like we lost that a little bit last year, where it was, 'What can we do individually to make ourselves better? How can we put up stats today?' Getting a guy over in a six-run game isn't important. When you're playing winning baseball, it's easier. You don't put as much pressure on yourself to get hits in every at-bat. You're not trying to get two hits in one at-bat. I think it's easier on the mind to just say that I'm going to try to help the team win."
And so this reads like a breakup where both sides are better off for having ripped the Band-Aid off, even if it's hard to discuss how that came to be true without a grimace. For as many familiar faces that are missing from the Sox clubhouse now, Sheets still slips into teammate mode to talk up how Vaughn is going to rebound, and considers Andrew Benintendi one of his best friends.
While a sellout crowd for Mexican Heritage Night on Friday was a novel reminder of what Sox home games could theoretically feel like at some point, the Padres are second in the National League in attendance. After hitting .275/.320/.571 with eight home runs in May, Sheets has gotten to bask in its warmth more than once. But at repeated intervals, he could never quite go on too long about how much easier things are coming to him now in San Diego, without reminding that there's no magic spell keeping it from happening in Chicago.
"It's how I felt in '21 and '22: You showed up to the ballpark and you know your fan base is going to behind you, you know it's going to be packed, you know it's going to be crazy," Sheets said. "You feed off that energy, and the away team gets hurt by that energy. Getting back to Petco where it's an incredible crowd, an incredible fan base, playing baseball in front of a home crowd like that is awesome."
It's just that if the White Sox fan base finds the sort of satisfaction that Sheets has in San Diego, it'll have to be with somebody new.
"It looks like they have their new core," Sheets said. "Which is exciting for them."
