White Sox manager offers unfortunate injury update on slugger

White Sox manager Pedro Grifol spoke with members of the media today, with Daryl Van Schouwen of the Chicago Sun-Times relaying video on X. Grifol relayed the latest on slugger Eloy Jiménez, which wasn’t great news. 

“He beat it up pretty good,” Grifol said of Jiménez’s left hamstring. “Exactly how much time, I mean, who knows? But it will be an extended period of time.”

Jiménez, 27, landed on the injured list Wednesday due to a left hamstring strain, the latest in what has become a mounting injury track record. Although this is his sixth season in the big leagues, he has never played more than 122 games in a season. He’s only reached 85 games twice and has only gone beyond 55 games three times. He has gone on the injured list due to a high right ankle sprain, a right ulnar nerve contusion, a left adductor strain, a ruptured left pectoral tendon, an appendectomy, a torn hamstring tendon and multiple left hamstring strains.

When healthy enough to take the field, he has shown himself to possess a potent bat. He has 94 home runs in just under 2,000 plate appearances in his career and has slashed .271/.321/.479 for a wRC+ of 116. But the missed time due to injuries has often prevented him from providing that kind of offense to the Sox on a consistent basis.

Before even making his major league debut, the Sox signed Jiménez to a six-year, $43M extension for the 2019-24 seasons. That deal also has two options for 2025 and 2026, respectively valued at $16.5M and $18.5M, each with a $3M buyout.

The Sox were rebuilding at the time of that deal and hoped to be opening a new competitive window. They ended up making the postseason in 2020 and 2021, remarkably the first time the franchise made the playoffs in consecutive years, but the window slammed shut after that. The Sox fell to .500 in 2022 and then slid even farther last year, kicking off yet another rebuild.

The club was undoubtedly hoping for a strong season here in 2024 so they could trade him this summer, now that he’s in the final guaranteed season of his contract, but an extended absence will make that even less likely.

As of January, the club was reportedly finding little trade interest in Jiménez, surely on account of his increasing health issues and his diminished performance more recently. He hit .276/.327/.504 from 2019 to 2022 but has hit just .263/.310/.427 since the start of 2023, the latter line translating to a wRC+ of 102. Since Jiménez doesn’t really steal bases nor play the field well, he really needs to hit, especially with his contract.

The timeline on Jiménez is still vague, but with the trade deadline now just over two months away, the Sox may be squeezed out of finding a trade partner. Even if Jiménez is back and healthy a few weeks before the deadline, his ongoing injury problems will tamp down the interest from other clubs.

For the same reasons that the trade interest may be muted, it’s possible that the clock is ticking on his tenure with the White Sox. In the most recent offseason, bat-first players like Justin Turner, Joc Pederson and J.D. Martinez signed one-year deals for less than the value of Jiménez’s 2025 option. Even Teoscar Hernández, whose career offense is roughly comparable to that of Jiménez but with more speed and defensive ability, had to settle for one year and $23.5M with a decent chunk deferred.

That may have the Sox leaning towards turning down their 2025 option, since it would appear to be above market value for a defensively limited slugger, especially one with the recent track record that Jiménez has. That will be a decision for the future. For now, he and the club will be focused on getting him healthy to see how things go in the latter parts of the season.