It's Time To Call Eloy Jimenez Up

Rick Hahn has a ton of these coined phrases he uses when discussing the innards of the organization with the media.  All Sox fans have heard them time and time again:

If I had my druthers

Accumulating a critical mass

Development isn’t linear

Mired in mediocrity

Shit like that.  It’s gotten to the point where media members light-heartedly make fun of him for using the same canned quotes over and over again in pressers. And that’s exactly what they are; words he feeds the media that say just enough, but hardly anything at the same time.

Which brings me to his favorite quote of all:

Good players have a tendency of forcing the issue

The White Sox have obviously ‘accumulated a critical mass’ of organizational depth over the last 1.5 years, starting with the Chris Sale trade in December of 2016.  MLB Pipeline is the most popular prospect ranking site on the internet, and all 30 of the Sox top 30  prospects have a shot to be legitimate big leaguers in one realm or the other.  In years prior it was littered with AAAA players toward the top, and players with hardly any shot at all towards the back end of it.

Fanbases aren’t patient.  Not at all.  With Hahn accruing several top 10 prospects over the last year and a half, he’s been peppered with questions asking about when they’re going to be called up to The Show.  He obviously stresses patience, as this is a marathon and not a sprint, but he always has acknowledged that the good ones “have a tendency to force the issue” on when they’ll be called up.

Which brings me to Eloy Jimenez.  He is ‘forcing the issue’ more than any player they’ve acquired in this rebuild, and there’s not a close second.  Actually, I take that back, he’s not forcing the issue.  He’s holding a goddamn gun to it’s head and saying “call me up right fucking now”.

Now, the smart play in a completely lost season, at least as far as wins or losses go, would be to stow him in Charlotte until about 4/15 of next year to accrue an extra season before he’s arbitration eligible.  But that would go against the grain of everything Hahn has said in media pressers over the last 1.5 years.  In case you’re too lazy to look up what Jimenez is doing right now in AAA, here are his current stats:

86 at bats, 32 hits, 7 doubles, 6 bombs, .372 average, .419 OBP, .663 slugging, 1.082 OPS (!) with only an 11% K rate.  Absurd for someone’s first taste of AAA pitching, albeit in an extremely hitter friendly park in Charlotte. These numbers really speak to how polished a hitter he is.

“But WSD, what do you mean when you say he’s a polished hitter?”

Thank you for asking.  It’s pretty simple; a polished hitter is more cerebrally advanced than his actual baseball age and the peers he’s playing against.  Polished hitters know how a pitcher will attack them more often than not, and they use guile and brains more than their physical skillset to succeed at producing offensively.

HOWEVAH… Eloy has both polish and freaky physical skills.  He really is the complete offensive package, as seen below with…

…An A+ hit tool, as seen here:

94MPH fastball, inner half, and Eloy SOMEHOW stays inside this baseball, finds the barrel, stays short, and laces it to the left/center gap

All-field power that he pairs with his hit tool, as seen here:

Here:

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Here:

And here:

Again, he’s the complete package offensively.

Jimenez doesn’t have a spray chart on Fangraphs yet, and if he did it’d 100% be spooge-worthy, but Fangraphs does annotate his field usage percentages, and they’re a thing of beauty:

Again, the amount of polish in his bat and in his brain is incredible.  Fastball inner half?  Fuck you, double to the gap.  Miss over the middle of the plate?  Fuck you, bomb over the batter’s eye in CF.  Breaking pitch, outer half?  Fuck you, missile to RF.  He’s like Henry Hill in Goodfellas.

“Eloy Jimenez is such a good hitter he can win a batting title and home run title in the same season”. – quote from a scout that I cannot find on the internet but swore I heard last summer

So now that Eloy has sufficiently “forced the issue”, what now?  Because the fanbase is growing extremely impatient waiting for his arrival:

And perhaps the most impressive thing to me is that he took it upon himself to become fluent in English while emigrating from the Dominican Republic just a small handful of years ago, knowing how important communication is in baseball:

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Watch that interview.  This is a kid that just gets it.  Gets it every which way.

WHAT MORE DOES HE HAVE TO DO RICK?

Now it would be an awful, awful idea to pander to a fanbase’s wishes because… the fanbase is wishing for something.  Hahn is smarter than that.  BUT if Hahn sticks to his guns, then Eloy should be up very, very soon.  Kopech too probably, but for different reasons.  I’m ready, you’re ready, and Eloy is clearly ready.  How long does he have to keep murdering baseballs in Charlotte for?  If he’s as good as literally everyone thinks he is, then the Sox are going to have to pay him eventually, service time be damned.  So let’s get this show on the road.