The Best-laid Plans of Mice and GMs

 With the temperature scraping 60 and snow predicted two days from now, I went out this morning to make war on the sparrows, who are intent on building a nest above our back door; the overhead floodlight makes a nice platform for that sort of thing.  If only the birds were house-trained, we wouldn’t mind so much, but they seem to love nothing so much as a good crap on the back steps.  For me, that’s a definite declaration of war. 

The trick is to anchor stuff—a box wedged against the floodlight and the wall, an empty soda bottle to jam into the space between box and wall—with duct tape.  Only I’ve found you can’t position a ladder on the stairs; it either wants to tip over or crash through the back door.  Today, I tried another approach—a plank between two ladders, one on the porch itself and the other just beyond the stairs.  Naturally, the phone rings while I’m walking the plank, so to speak.  It was Clare with news on White Sox third baseman Jake Burger.

Our #1 draft choice from last June ruptured his left Achilles running out a grounder yesterday in Arizona; see you next year, Jake.  Oh, and fellow minor-leaguer Micker Adolfo, with Ruthian power, screwed up his right elbow swinging; that will mean surgery at some point, though for now the team thinks that Adolfo can keep hitting without suffering further injury.  (But he hurt himself hitting, so that strikes me as a little counterintuitive.)  Oh, and Eloy Jimenez, who mixes Mays with his Ruth, has a sore knee.  Nothing serious, though.  We hope.

The moral of all this is, stuff happens and every organization has to have a Plan B, or C or D and more in order to survive.  Which makes me wonder what plan the Sox filed center fielder Adam Engel under.  You would think that anyone who showed the speed and defense Engel did last summer would have garnered serious attention early on from the big-league club.  I mean, what do minor-league coaches and roving instructors do if not identify and develop talent in the system?  For whatever reason, though, the Sox apparently never thought enough of Engel’s top-level defense to work on his hitting.  That, or nobody in the front office knew about it.

Clare said she read something about how the heir of Landis/Agee/Berry/Rowand worked on his swing in the off-season.  I’ll leave it to my daughter, who’d make a very good hitting coach herself, to see if there’s cause for hope.  All I know is that Luis Robert, on whom the Sox spent in the neighborhood of $50 million last spring to sign, hasn’t even played in A-ball yet.  What he’s shown so far in Arizona doesn’t suggest he’ll be playing center in the big leagues this year or next (or even the one after that). 

Adam, White Sox fans turn their lonely hearts to you.