1. By the end of the year, the only thing that will stand out as garishly wrong with Jose Abreu‘s raw seasonal totals is home runs. His strikeouts are down, his doubles total will be fine (though it will obviously be leaching from the home runs), even his walk rate will look fairly normal because he’s always chased like a feverish madman and how have people not noticed this before.
It’s the home runs that have been absent, and for a hyper strong individual with power to all fields, that’s not a switch in approach or ‘taking what pitchers give him’ on a long-term basis as much as it’s a departure from driving and lifting the ball like he is able. From a quick initial glance, FanGraphs has his pull rate dropping 2.5 percent every year since his thunderous debut, so it’s encouraging to see a lot of his blip of production in the past week going to left field.
Here’s him nailing a Jordan Zimmerman 90 mph fastball to left.
And here’s him nailing a Yovani Gallardo 90 mph fastball to left.
These are pretty mediocre, as far as fastballs go, and both of them allow him to extend his arms and don’t address his issues with being jammed, but by definition there are tons of mediocre fastballs out there and Abreu should eat what he’s being fed. By the same principal trotted out to discuss Avisail Garcia roughly 9,000 times, it’s cool that he is strong enough to reach the seats by going opposite field, but just think how easy it must be for him to pull anything out that he lifts in the air. The dinger he hit Sunday was just a long fly ball muscled out with raw strength, but it’s better to eliminate mysterious things that might be wrong with him than discover new ones.
2. James Shields certainly made it easier for the haters by delivering another true trainwreck outing on Sunday, rather than the troubling low-strikeout, vague competence mix that was confounding observers for most of July. He struck out one batter–the first one!–in 1.1 absolutely terrible innings, and in doing so raised his truly awful K/9 with the White Sox up to 4.5; both exposing the flaws in the metric and showing that if you’re really bad, those flaws still won’t save you. All told, he has a 1.07 K/BB ratio in 62 innings with the Sox.
For some reason, I thought it would be fun to see when the last time someone with such dire indicators got that many innings with the Sox. Matt Albers and Mat Latos this season really came pretty close, and I should mention that Mike MacDougal was very, very bad, but the last pitcher with that many innings was Dan Wright, who had 1.02 K/BB ratio in 86.1 innings in 2003, was somehow even worse in limited time with the Sox in 2004, and never got major league action again. That’s a decent primer for how this Shields situation will shake out.
3. 21-year-old Trey Michalczewski pounded out his ninth home run of the season Monday night. He is sitting at .234/.319/.373 with 117 strikeouts in 453, but is playing very high-level ball for a non-elite 21-year-old prospect who has not yet grown into his power yet, and is .261/.433/.435 for August with more walks than strikeouts.
He’s a solid asset who projects to hold his own at the major league level, albeit still a bit down the road, and the more of those in house, the less contracts get handed out to Jeff Keppinger. Anyone pegging him as a smooth transition from Todd Frazier in 2018, however, is selling you a bridge.
4. Who is David Robertson‘s publicist and how is anyone as bad at whatever word processor made this as I am at cleaning out my inbox?
5. The White Sox face the Royals Tuesday, who have stopped being to able randomly win with a rotation full of has-been starting pitchers while getting plus offense from Whit Merrifield at a time where the Sox are too besieged by their own issues to enjoy it. They’re fifth in the AL, but no longer elite at making contact, so perhaps they will not derail Chris Sale‘s return to strikeout dominance anymore than they already have.
Lead Image Credit: Dennis Wierzbicki // USA Today Sports Images
Bruh, how you got 21,000 unread emails?