The White Sox Need To Get Yonder Alonso Out Of The Lineup RIGHT NOW

Okay so the White Sox enter the weekend with a 16-20 record to take on the 15-22 Toronto Blue Jays.  Two mediocre teams that will more than likely play mediocre baseball.  But that’s not what we’re totally talking about today… well, it kinda is.

The White Sox are an insanely top heavy too.  Without getting too in depth into it, the only players putting up decent or better offensive numbers are Abreu, Anderson, Moncada, McCann and Garcia.  They are carrying the complete and total offensive load of this team.

The rest?  They’ve been horrible.  Eloy has been hurt for 3 weeks or whatever but was still adjusting to big league pitching, but the veteran core consisting of Yolmer Sanchez, Adam Engel, Wellington Castillo, and Jose Rondon has been straight up trash.  

And the leader of that pack?  Yonder Alonso.  He’s been absolutely horrendous for the White Sox this year.  How bad?

And if you’re an advanced stats nerd, take it from Fangraphs:

Sweet 13.2% walk rate bro.  But yeah, Baseball Reference tells me you have stunk t00:

Just dog shit around the horn.  And it sucks mostly because A. he was traded to court Manny Machado and B. If he were playing to his career norms, the White Sox team offense as a whole would be pretty damn good.  It already is, in fact:

10th best batting average in baseball ain’t too shabby when you consider Alonso, Castillo, Sanchez and Engel have gotten about 1,000,000 at bats this year.

But the most important part of Alonso is that he has a vesting option if he reaches 550 plat appearances this year.  That can NOT happen if you’re the White Sox.  And as of right now, he’s at 136 plate appearances.

550 – 136 = 414 plate appearances for the option to vest.  He basically plays every game, even against lefties (which is a joke in and of itself) so assuming he plays 90% of the 126 remaining games, that’s 113 games and at 113 games x 4 ABs = 452 at bats that he should theoretically have this year.  Add that to the 118 at bats he has and *voila* that’s another year and another $9MM of dead money on the books for the White Sox in 2020.

This can NOT happen.  Now he does have a $1MM buyout should the option vest but why burn the money?  He didn’t serve his purpose when he more or less told Machado to sign with SD, and he isn’t serving his purpose as a DH with his sub-mendoza line batting average.

So, I propose this: trade him for a bag of balls to whatever team that *might* be contending that may need a platoon 1B/DH that hits against RHP and call up Collins.  Every time he is at bat it’s a guaranteed roll over ground ball to the right side of the infield, a strike out, or a weak pop out.  Dude stinks.  Get rid of him and let Collins get his feet wet.

PS – Kate is in our office today and she’s got us ripping shots of malorts so please excuse any and all typos/grammar errors/laziness in the writing

PPS – Kate told me to qualify this entire blog by writing the PS