One Reason or Another

The White Sox haven’t been hit by the injury bug so much as a plague of locusts. Eloy Jimenez and Adam Engel go down in spring training, Tim Anderson spends time on the IL the first month of the season, and now this. Luis Robert is expected to be out three-four months after tearing a hip flexor while beating out an infield hit in Sunday’s loss to Cleveland. So much for hustle being its own reward. This all could be the inevitable result of launch-angle baseball, where size and strength are required to maximize outcome. Think about it. What do Anderson, Engel and Robert all have in common, along with Yoan Moncada, for that matter? They’re lean and muscled beyond belief, that’s what. Eloy is more of a hitting savant who could do what he does at any weight and any age between twelve and fifty. The other four, though, are trying to make their bodies into machines. Sorry, but that won’t work. The athlete in our family disagrees, and I admit my theory is based more on anecdote than analysis. It’d be nice if the analytics’ crowd got around to breaking down trips to the DL by non-pitchers over, say, the last fifty years or so. I’d be especially interested in contact vs. non-contact injuries. Have the percentages changed or stayed the same? Inquiring minds want to know. I’d also be interested in seeing if the White Sox conditioning program differs substantially from that of other teams. You have to attack this plague any way you can. Or it may all be karma. Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf has always been too smart by half. He wanted a publicly-funded stadium in the worst way (and, boy, did he get one), along with a strike (ditto there). He’s also the owner who engineered the signing of Albert Belle and defended the infamous “white flag” trade of 1997. Maybe with a history like that, you’re lucky to get just one title. Anything more and the locusts descend en masse.