Soft-tissue injuries here! Get yer soft-tissue injuries! Who’s lookin’ for a soft-tissue injury?
The woebegone White Sox have indicated that they’re open to trading just about anybody on their roster, but I think what they mean is that, if there’s a major-league team in the market for a strained hamstring or a strained stomach muscle, well, step right up.
Sox designated hitter Eloy Jimenez keeps hitting the repeat button on soft-tissue injuries. This time it’s his left hamstring, which he strained Tuesday against the Blue Jays. That he apparently did it on his way to the plate is poetic, the perfect combination of rare (a Sox run) and commonplace (a Sox injury).
The team said Jimenez will be further evaluated. For what? Pink eye? Chicken pox? A strained relationship? A broken promise?
On Wednesday, the team placed Jimenez on the 10-day injured list.
Jimenez missed two weeks earlier in the season with an adductor strain. Injuries are not to be laughed at, but a bad team with an absurd plague of injuries is. Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf seems to believe there’s a sucker born every minute, so perhaps another team will take Jimenez in a trade. What can be said with certainty is that there’s an adductor strained every minute at 35th and Shields. Third baseman Yoan Moncada is out three to six months after straining an adductor last month.
His replacement, Bryan Ramos, is out with a quadriceps strain.
Outfielder Luis Robert Jr. has been out with a strained hip flexor since early April, and the Sox are hopeful he’ll be back soon.
Robert, Moncada and Jimenez were considered the Sox’ core when the team emerged from a rebuild several years ago, and you don’t need a degree in irony to notice that their injuries are to core muscles. I don’t have a medical degree, so I can’t tell you whether the soft-tissue injuries are the result of bad luck or unsound workout practices. I can tell you that what’s happening is so very White Sox. This is slapstick, slip-on-a-banana-peel stuff.
Only the Sox could declare their intention to do a second rebuild and have it damaged by injuries.
It’s not hard to rebuild. The Sox did it a few years ago, losing in earnest in order to get high draft picks, build the farm system and, eventually, make trades to acquire more talent. That allowed them to get Moncada and Jimenez. It cost them Chris Sale and Jose Quintana. There wasn’t a massive outcry from the fan base because the Sox were doing what all the cool kids in baseball were doing.
But the rebuild resulted only in a wild-card-series loss and a division-series loss. It included a failed experiment with manager Tony La Russa.
So the Sox started rebuilding again. They went 61-101 last season and are doing worse this season. But it’s hard to do a quality teardown when some of your most marketable players are limping and wincing.
So I don’t know what to call this. A stalled rebuild? A condemned building? A haunted house?
Jimenez seems to be the symbol of all that ails the Sox. It’s a lot of ailing. In five-plus seasons, he has missed games because of injuries to his ankle, leg, groin, hip, foot, knee, chest, elbow, hamstring, adductor and heel. He has missed games because of appendicitis and lightheadedness, too.
Robert’s four-plus seasons have been filled with physical issues. So he’ll see Jimenez’s elbow and heel injuries and raise him a wrist injury (2022) and a finger injury (2023). He also has missed time with COVID-19.
Left-hander Garrett Crochet, one of the few bright spots on the roster, somehow has managed to stay healthy. Spoilsport. After a victory Tuesday in Toronto, his scoreless-innings streak is at 19.
He could be traded in the coming months in the hopes of bringing a winner to Chicago. That’s how the rebuild dream goes.
‘‘Similar to the message from last fall and all offseason, we will be open-minded on anything to further set us up for future success,’’ Sox general manager Chris Getz told the Sun-Times earlier this month.
What would really set up the Sox for success would be the hiring of a faith healer, someone who could lay hands on a player who gets hurt tripping over the third-base line or a pitcher who strains finger ligaments while rubbing a rosin bag on his hand.
A wise, experienced Sox fan will automatically see the flaw in that idea: Only on the South Side would a faith healer be susceptible to a rotator-cuff injury.
