Will the youth of the White Sox be a help or a hindrance in this unprecedented 60-game season in the Major League Baseball?
The newly added veterans of the team see young people around them as a double-edged sword.
“I feel like this team is going to go very, very good or very bad to start,” starting pitcher Dallas Keuchel said Wednesday, echoing his new drummer partner Yasmani Grandal, who said almost the same thing the day before.
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When asked how he expected the mostly young White Sox pitching team to do well this season, Grandal said: “There is not going to be a gray area. Sixty games is a very small window in which we have to put together everything, so it’s going to be really good or it’s going to be really bad. “
“Either or very bad” would not be a 2020 catchphrase at a meeting with the White Sox marketing team. But suddenly it has become an issue.
Of course, these guys predict the unpredictable, and that’s the point behind their words. An abrupt disruption to spring training in March, a month-long layoff while baseball watched the COVID-19 pandemic and saw fruitless negotiations between the league and the players union, and now only a three-week period before two months . sprint from a regular season. It has never happened before. Despite his confidence in his own personal preparation, no one seems to know what kind of game his competition will have. The 30 teams were built for 162 games, making it impossible to guess how they will perform in 60.
So excuse the White Sox newcomers for providing a couple of different possibilities of how things could play out on the South Side when the season starts in a week.
“It is that sprint. It is no longer that marathon where you can have an unstable start or even an indifferent start,” Keuchel said. “I feel like this team is going to go really well or very badly to start. I would like to think that we are going to go really well to start. We have youth, we have talent.”
“He really is the one who goes out to that hot start and continues it. No one knows how it will be until we step on that field (July 24).”
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OK, that covers the unknown (some of it, anyway). How about what we know?
The White Sox added veteran help this winter, Keuchel and Grandal are the two biggest names in a group that also includes Edwin Encarnacion and Steve Cishek. And, of course, José Abreu is back on a new three-year contract.
But most of this list, and most of why the White Sox rebuilding effort seems ready to launch into containment mode, is made up of youngsters who exploited big last season or are yet to come. : Yoán Moncada, Tim Anderson, Lucas Giolito, Eloy Jiménez, Luis Robert, Dylan Cease, Reynaldo López, Carlos Rodón, Nick Madrigal. The list makes for an exciting future.
But what does it do for the present? For that, we will return to the unknown.
According to Keuchel, the youngster offers many positives, which White Sox fans can probably pretty easily say right now. But if the 60-game sprint for the postseason will feel like a chase from day one, well, the vast majority of these guys, including Abreu, haven’t experienced that kind of thing before.
As important as Keuchel’s experience in the World Series is, or Grandal’s experience playing in the last five postseasons, or Encarnación’s experience winning in AL Central with the Cleveland Indians, that can only go so far. The rest of the team has to play well enough to do the rest of the way.
So the guys who know what it takes are not quite sure if this White Sox team will be able to expertly handle it in such bizarre circumstances. They have hope, of course, but they would be lying if they said they are safe.
“I think in this situation that no one has really been in, I think young people could help with how we will do things,” Keuchel said. “We have speed. We have everything we need to compete with all the other teams.”
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But the youngster also makes the other extreme possible, a pitfall that a more experienced team might not have to worry about, says the 2017 world champion.
“The oldest presence, the oldest team, I feel it will be very, very good or half the way to start,” Keuchel said. “I think the young team, you’re going to get very, very good or very, very bad. If we can deviate from very, very bad to start, we have a very good opportunity to stay in it and run at Central (or) a wildcard point.
“That’s the area where young people help (you may have) a really really hot start because of the athletics there. They are always cool because they are very young.”
Again, don’t go wrong with Keuchel or Grandal. They have been as positive about the outlook for these White Sox as anyone. Heck, they signed up for the offseason because they wanted to be a part of things in the future.
But even though Anderson and Robert and Giolito are seen at “Summer Camp” right now, not to mention Keuchel, who has also been very good at White Sox in-scale games, there’s nothing certain about the season. baseball 2020.
“Either well or very badly.” It is not a winning marketing slogan. But it could be as accurate a prediction as you will get right now.
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