MILWAUKEE — When reigning AL Silver Slugger Eloy Jiménez returns to the White Sox lineup Monday night in Kansas City, as Tony La Russa confirmed Sunday afternoon, he will be ahead of schedule. Four months after a torn pectoral tendon threatened his season and was projected to require five- to six months for a return to play, Jiménez will return as a needed boost to an offense that has struggled this weekend against the NL Central-leading Brewers’ top-flight starting pitching.
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That context could have been anticipated in March, but even in a smaller window of time than anticipated, most of the situation around Jiménez has flipped in four months. And to borrow a common La Russa phrase, it’s all to the good.
Though his injury was initially perceived as a body blow to the White Sox’s chances to stick with the Twins in the AL Central, Jiménez returns to a lineup that has managed to average five runs per game in his stead (fifth most in baseball entering Sunday) and to a team that is largely cruising to a division title and tasked with rounding into their best form by October. Gavin Sheets has hit five home runs in 20 games, Brian Goodwin has hit well from every offensive position, and even Adam Engel is a power threat now to help hold down the fort. The Twins, meanwhile, just traded Nelson Cruz, could easily deal more pieces and face an unsettled situation with retaining Byron Buxton and José Berríos long-term.
“We’ll be playing better than we have the last two days, hopefully,” La Russa said, grinning a lot more than he normally would be amid a three-game losing streak. “But overall we’re playing good for (Jiménez) to feel like, ‘just let me take my at-bats’ and there’s a lot of help all over that lineup. It’s a different situation (from) if our offense had been kind of absent since he’s been gone. It’s really good to be fair as far as the pressure he’s going to feel.”
Jiménez’s injury, coming after Engel’s hamstring strain, threw the White Sox outfield into, if not chaos, certainly a period of rapid adjustment. Andrew Vaughn said his outfield work with field coordinator Doug Sisson at the team’s alternate site last season was not an occasional detour, but daily practice. But he went from not playing left field in any Cactus League games to suddenly a daily presence in the final week of spring training and into the regular season. What was once a tenuous plan that seemed dependent on Luis Robert playing half of left field to work now seems exceedingly normal. Scan a White Sox lineup looking for guys playing out of their natural position, and Vaughn in left field might not stand out. Nor would the sight of Vaughn running down a flare in the left-center gap, adeptly feeling for the wall on a deep drive to the warning track or even laying out for a diving catch.
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“I wouldn’t say fully natural just because it hasn’t been so long that I’ve been out there in the outfield, but it’s definitely getting a lot more comfortable,” Vaughn said. “In BP just going out and trying to get as many balls as you can. It’s kind of tiring so you can’t do too many, but it’s just testing your limits to know what I’m capable of going and getting. And then in a game I can bring that and say, ‘OK, I know I can get this one for a fact.'”
Vaughn’s discipline for staying within himself amid meager foot speed can make him seem like a more stable defensive option than Jiménez’s superior range but a tendency for misplays and injury. Previously, La Russa has indicated Jiménez would likely emerge as the primary designated hitter upon his return. But the level of turnover in the White Sox outfield this season has been a reminder of why the team would be sufficiently wary of ruling out Jiménez playing the outfield somewhat regularly. Given the positive reports he cited from Charlotte Knights manager Wes Helms, La Russa didn’t even rule out Jiménez playing in left field Monday. He drew a line in the sand elsewhere.
“You get what you earn, and I don’t think that Eloy being here is going to take at-bats away from Andrew,” La Russa said. “Maybe a time or two where you want a left-handed hitter in there and Eloy’s going to play, but right now Andrew is swinging the bat as well as anyone on the team. And he’s earned it and we’re trying to win, so that’s how you get at-bats: you earn them, and he’s earned them.”
Vaughn is a franchise cornerstone until we’re told otherwise, and he entered Sunday night as the new featured player in the rotating cast of White Sox offensive heroes, hitting .328/.352/.597 in July. And though La Russa’s mention of the need for left-handed hitting gives a nod to roles for Goodwin or even Sheets, even with the everyday presence of Jiménez, perhaps an even more important element to Vaughn heating up is that it’s come increasingly against right-handed pitching, where he’s been an above-average offensive contributor since June 1. Vaughn has always contended he sees right-handers just as well as lefties and has increasingly shown the results to back it up. He chalks any deficiency there to the difficult adjustment of his first year in the majors.
“I guess I was getting too amped up, too rushed, chasing too many pitches, coming out of my comfort zone instead of letting that ball come to me and being myself and sticking to my approach and just stay simple,” Vaughn said. “People talk about it but once you get there but everybody runs faster, the defense is extremely better. Guys cover a lot more ground and pitchers are definitely at the elitest of the elite. You definitely see that right away.”
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It could have been anticipated that Vaughn would be at this stage of adjustment by late July; certainly more so than it could have been anticipated that the primary roster complication of Jiménez’s return would be the erasure of major-league at-bats for a healthy Jake Burger. But though the immediate wake of Jiménez’s injury was focused on the seemingly impossible task of replacing one of the best hitters in the game, his return will actually inspire a shuffle of Sox corner bats who have proved themselves viable in his wake.
“Eloy is a huge part of our offense, a huge part of our team,” Yasmani Grandal said. “I heard yesterday it’s kind of like our trade deadline to have those guys back, right. You get two big bats back in Eloy and (Luis) Robert, guys who can play defense, the team is going to be full now and hopefully those guys get hot at the right time, and those two guys can really carry a team through the end of the season on to the postseason.”
Grandal isn’t a team executive trying to explain away a quiet deadline, so don’t jump down his throat all at once in the comments. And he also has a point. Jiménez and Robert (still at the Single-A Winston-Salem portion of his rehab) are a far sight better than the typical deadline addition, but they would be atypical guys for the Sox to get at the deadline for more reasons than that. They will serve as upgrades — big, possibly transcendent ones — at spots where the Sox have been able to get by, rather than plugging festering holes. That’s another remarkable flip from the feeling when they both went down, and something worth commending as this chapter of the Sox season where they made the most of a bad situation begins to close.
“In my career, it’s one of the best performances by a team that loses key guys, starting with (Jiménez),” La Russa said. “He’s an RBI machine and here we are where we are. I can’t give the club enough credit.”
And as this chapter ends, tough weekends like what the Sox have experienced in Milwaukee will gradually be graded on less of a curve. Every showdown with a contender has come with at least some small acknowledgment that the White Sox are not what they could be by the end of the year. As Jiménez returns and rounds into top form, so must the White Sox. But they’re expecting the boost he’ll provide will be anything but subtle.
“As soon as he walks into the clubhouse, he’s going to light it up with his personality,” La Russa said. “Everybody’s fired up.”
(Photo: Mark J. Rebilas / USA Today)