Eloy Jimenez had three hits Friday night and smacked his second home run since the All-Star break. But it was the agile night the 26-year-old had on the basepaths — going from first to third on a single, scoring on a shallow sacrifice fly to left, hustling out an infield single — that really tantalized.
“I’m feeling pretty good right now,” Jimenez said. “I’ve been putting more effort in the gym than before. I’ve been practicing running before the game. I think that helps me a little bit more.”
With his injury history and poor reputation as a defender, it might surprise many to know that Statcast grades Jimenez by sprint speed as faster than teammates Yoan Moncada and Elvis Andrus. It might surprise Jimenez’s body at times, too.
“He can get down the line when there’s adrenaline in the mix, so we have to find ways to prepare him in that way,” White Sox manager Pedro Grifol said. “We had our talk in New York about it. And his preparation is getting close to game speed, which is really important.
“We think that his pregame preparation is going to help prevent the smaller injuries here and there, just because he’s got that burst of speed down the line that he really doesn’t replicate in practice. We’ve got to get him close to that, to that speed in practice, to be able to sustain any of that here in the game.”
Recreating game speed in drills and pre-game work was an emphasis for Grifol essentially since the day he was hired. It can feel overdue for Jimenez, who, among his many injuries, tore a right hamstring tendon last April in Minneapolis while hitting a season-high sprint speed down the baseline.
But high-minded plans about ramping up Jimenez’s practice intensity quickly ran into the reality of his situation for the last few years. Jimenez suffered a hamstring strain during the home opener, had an appendectomy the next month and has spent much of the year doing rehab work and getting treatment to enable him to simply take his at-bats.
“[If] he’s got some things that he’s nursing, then obviously you can’t do that as much,” Grifol said.
Even now is an awkward time to ask if ramping up Jimenez’s routine might make him more capable of handling the rigors of outfield defense. A mild groin pull in July and heel soreness earlier this month have conspired to make him a DH-only player since July 16.
“I’m trying to work as hard as I can to help the team one way or the other,” Jimenez said. “I feel good to play. I’m going to be available if they need me.”
Grifol said of Jimenez’s future spot: “If he plays a little bit of right field, great. If not, he’ll be one of the best DHs in the game.”
Even the latter scenario would be a huge coup.
Jimenez entered Saturday with an .820 OPS since June 16 and has a .279/.318/.457 overall line with 14 homers in a season that features another laundry list of reasons why it has been a challenge for him to maintain a consistent offensive rhythm. Eclipsing the 122 games played and 31 homers of his 2019 rookie season — still career highs — are not in the cards this year.
Despite all that, Jimenez has been an undeniably good major-league hitter, just not quite the game-wrecking force that the Sox centered their ill-fated rebuild around. And not quite the force that Jimenez knows he can be.
“I’m going to be better, I know,” Jimenez said. “We are young. We need to learn a little bit more about the strike zone and all that. I know we are going to be better.”
That sort of stuff comes with time and at-bats, which is easy to say but has been much harder to do for Jimenez and the Sox.
“We’ve just got to keep him healthy,” Grifol said.
