Sox is singular: Promoting Michael Kopech was the right move and so was Paul Konerko's TV debut

A rebuilding season is a strangely consequence-free zone. A bad month doesn’t necessarily carry a ton of weight, much less the score of a single game, so the results are left to somebody else to tabulate, and we just all trust they’re counting correctly.

A season feels even more unmoored when a club intentionally resists assistance from high-performing prospects in Triple A. For weeks, the White Sox had Michael Kopech stringing together strong starts while the rotation wobbled, and Eloy Jiménez answering all challenges while the Sox cycled through corner outfielders. When the Sox did not address their pressing problems with the clearest solutions, it felt like the parent club and its Triple-A affiliate weren’t part of the same organization, or at least in the same season.

Perhaps the Sox had valid reasons for withholding their star prospects, even if general manager Rick Hahn couldn’t articulate them. The problem is that when the front office seems content to count down the days, it makes the attempts to manufacture a winning culture from elsewhere seem contrived.

I still don’t understand why Rick Renteria benched Avisaíl García, especially since Renteria talked openly about García’s need to manage his knee injury. Picture a jockey whipping a horse with the hopes of finishing 22 lengths out of the money instead of 24, and you end up with the same question. Pairing that benching with his mission to turn Adam Engel into a good two-strike bunter, and I see a manager who is punch-drunk from the losing and struggling to put his actions in a convincing context.

With the Sox so far afield, the surprise promotion of Kopech might come off as pointless to some. When Kopech makes his first start for the White Sox on Tuesday, he’s not going to restore order by himself. They’re going to be a losing team — it’s just a matter of whether they’re a third-place team or a last-place team.

Michael Kopech was more than ready for his White Sox promotion, and Tuesday should be a banner day in the rebuild. (James Fegan/The Athletic)

You’re going to take the Kopech action figure out of his original packaging for this?

Sure, nothing is guaranteed. Even if Kopech is lights-out through September, Yoán Moncada and Lucas Giolito will tell him that it all starts over again in April, and success might get dropped on the transfer.

Regardless of results, Kopech’s debut automatically serves a purpose. This promotion gives the season some grounding and puts more things in order. A high-performing prospect was rewarded with a tougher assignment. A team that needs better players received one. These are the ways that normal, competitive baseball teams operate, and that’s what the White Sox are trying to become. Promoting the better players, and not running 10 percent harder on routine fly outs, is the easiest way to start winning more.

Hawk Harrelson Superlative of the Week: Paul Konerko.

PAUL KONERKO IS THE GREATEST BROADCAST PARTNER HAWK HARRELSON EVER HAD.

OK, that’s my superlative, because Harrelson would say Don Drysdale, and most White Sox fans would say Tom Paciorek. I’d also say 1990s Paciorek for that matter, but that’s me expressing how impressive Konerko was in his first-ever appearance as an analyst on Sunday.

Harrelson has never been a traditional play-by-play guy, which makes him a tough pairing for even analysts with experience. “Hawk and Wimpy” worked because either one could define a broadcast on a given day. The subsequent pairings with Darrin Jackson and Steve Stone never worked as well because they understood the broadcast to be Harrelson’s show. If Hawk didn’t talk, nobody talked, because Harrelson wasn’t in the business of setting up his partner.

That’s what made Konerko’s performance so impressive. For one, he didn’t need an assist from Harrelson to talk about what he saw on the field. If something grabbed his interest, he explained what he was watching in paragraphs, keeping the conversation flowing by himself.

If that didn’t make Harrelson want to talk — and his thoughts usually prompted some from Harrelson — Konerko engaged with him directly. For instance, when the Sox fell behind big to Kansas City early, Konerko picked a good time to asked Harrelson how he got into broadcasting, setting up the kind of retrospective storytelling Hawk’s farewell is supposed to be about.

Basically, Konerko kept Hawk primed for a turnaround, and when Avisaíl García hit a three-run blast in the fourth inning to cut the Royals’ 6-0 lead in half, Harrelson unleashed a classic call this farewell tour needed:

“This one hit high and deep … STRETCH! STRETCH! He looks up! You can put it on the boooooard, YES! And we are right back in this juego!”

The Sox hit two more homers before the end of the inning to tie the game, and yet that wasn’t the most impressive sequence of the day. No, that came when Konerko successfully steered Harrelson out of his usual sabermetrics rant not once, but twice.

In the top of the sixth, Harrelson manned the battle station against analytics with the way he always prefaces his discontent: “There’s a place for numbers in baseball. I love certain numbers in baseball. But not to the extent that they’ve elevated them, this much, this quick.”

Konerko acknowledged the point, but offered that baseball is perpetually evolving. Some changes will stick and seem obvious in hindsight, others are fads that will fade away, and the game always corrects itself in the end. With that, Konerko cleared the first hurdle before the commercial break.

Then came the Moneyball test.

Harrleson’s disdain for the movie is well-known. He hasn’t read the book because he hated the movie. Specifically, he can’t stand that Billy Beane got more credit for Oakland’s success than Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Barry Zito. It’s a valid critique, although it loses some punch in Year Seven.

At any rate, Harrelson opened the bottom of the sixth assailing the movie at length the way he usually does, and this time Konerko didn’t get in his way. The broadcast’s genial vibe was in jeopardy as Harrelson fumed, “When I first heard they were coming in with this, I told DJ — [Darrin Jackson] was my partner at the time — I told him, I said, ‘DJ, this is going to get a lot of good baseball people fired. And it has.’”

He was interrupted by Moncada’s fly ball to right.

And then a miracle.

“You touched on DJ,” Konerko said. “One of the things I wanted to ask you was, you know, talking about you getting into broadcasting. You spent a lot of time with Tom Paciorek, Wimpy, up here. Tell me about…”

Konerko did it. He cracked the code. From my couch, I cheered that pivot louder than any of the White Sox’s three homers. After years of broadcasts being at the lowercase mercy of Harrelson’s moods, somebody solved the problem by saying, “Hey, let’s talk about this instead.”

Harrelson and Konerko laughed it up as they talked about baseball’s funniest guys, the White Sox cooperated by holding on to beat the Royals, and Hawk’s final year had its finest broadcast to date.

(Top photo: Brian Westerholt/Four Seam Images via AP Images)