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The anti-bunt brigade is not going to like this. Not one bit.
Yoán Moncada, when healthy, is supposed to be one of the White Sox’ best hitters. He’s shown that ability in smaller stretches, be it during the 2019 season that earned him a contract extension or at the tail end of last season after his back stopped bothering him. But consistency has proven elusive over the last four campaigns, all of them featuring one health issue or another.
Moncada says he’s feeling good this spring, a good start. Pedro Grifol has him ticketed for the No. 2 spot in the batting order, one typically occupied by one of a team’s top batsmen.
So why, plenty might have wondered in sheer terror, was Moncada laying down a bunt during a Cactus League game this weekend?
“Bunt” is one of the more triggering words in the baseball lexicon, especially for those who call Twitter home, which is why Grifol’s recent comments on what Moncada will be expected to do in the No. 2 spot in the White Sox’ lineup instigated a loss of consciousness among many fans.
“That’s a selfless spot in the order,” Grifol said to reporters, including NBC Sports Chicago’s Chuck Garfien, earlier this month in Arizona. “You have to give yourself up. Not a lot, but some. You have to take pitches, move guys over. You might have to bunt, hit and run. And he’s all in on that.”
Moncada? Bunting?
He’s sacrificed four times in his big league career. And only once since 2019. The number of bunt hits in his career is similarly small.
Certainly Grifol is not among those who consider a sacrifice anathema, quite the opposite. The “S” in his much discussed “play FAST” mantra this spring stands for “selfless,” and while plenty falls under that umbrella, doing what the team needs in a given situation at the expense of personal statistics is an obvious example.
Traditionally – maybe “historically” is a more apt descriptor at this point in time – the No. 2 hitter would do whatever it took to set up the run producers behind him. If the leadoff man did what he was supposed to do and got on base, those duties could include hitting the ball to a specific side of the field to get a runner in better scoring position or, gasp, laying down a sacrifice bunt to do the same.
Whether it’s obvious or not, that does not mean it’s something that’s expected to happen in every situation, and certainly with how highly Grifol thinks of Moncada – he said last year he could be an MVP candidate – the manager has no intention of reducing his third baseman to the equivalent of an NL pitcher of yore.
But we didn’t have to take Grifol’s word for it that Moncada is up for anything this year, which could be his final season on the South Side, given the team option on his contract for 2025. Instead, Moncada showed he’s been listening to his manager, dropping a bunt down in Saturday’s exhibition game against the Padres. This one went for a single, taking advantage of the infielders, and therefore didn’t earn as much ire from the Twitter masses. But all the would-be complainants made it clear if he ever did it in a sacrifice situation, they’d be furious.
Surely, Grifol does not care.
“When was the last time you saw that?” Grifol said of Moncada’s bunt hit during a Sunday conversation with reporters, including MLB.com’s Scott Merkin. “He wants to hit in the two-hole, right? There’s your motivation, right there. (He can be a) pretty damn good two-hole hitter if he puts his mind to it. We’re going to make sure his mind is right.”
What Grifol does care about is his White Sox playing a different style of baseball than the one they did last year, when they finished with 101 losses in one of the worst seasons in club history. His “play FAST” message covers a lot of ground and isn’t about literal speed. But it does involve a lot of things the White Sox didn’t do last year, like creating movement on the base paths and playing fundamentally sound. Grifol has promised that if his team is able to play the way he wants, he’ll appear as a different manager, someone with more tools at his disposal and more levels to pull.
That, of course, will require buy-in from everyone on the roster. And past that, whether there’s buy-in or not, the ability of those guys to play that way.
“He’s a really good bunter, (good at the) hit and run. He’s really good handling the bat, both sides (of the plate),” Grifol told Merkin and others Sunday. “He’s buying into the program, buying into our instruction and who we feel he can be and just bought in. That’s what it’s about.”
Moncada is a perfect example of someone who has been around for a while now – he played his first games for the White Sox in 2017 – and whose ability to play this kind of game is somewhat of a mystery. It’s not because of his physical ability, as he’s long seemed a great athlete, but rather because he was part of Rick Hahn’s rebuilding effort, which crafted a major league squad around power hitting and wasn’t necessarily strong in every facet of the game.
In other words, this shift to “playing FAST” could be somewhat seismic for some of the holdovers as Chris Getz embarks on an organizational overhaul.
But according to Grifol, Moncada is all about the team, refuting the notion many have about the player drawn from what they read in his body language.
“He’s a team guy,” Grifol said last month in an interview with CHGO. “And that might be hard for people to see, but he truly wants to win. He wants to win, he wants to be a big part of this thing. We’ve talked about the style of baseball that he needs to play and the offensive style of baseball that he needs to bring.
“(In an early spring game), he hit that double. OK, that’s a double, that’s a statistical thing. But the next at-bat, he took some good pitches, he ran that pitch count up a little bit. We’ve seen that before. Eighty four walks in a season, we’ve seen it before (from him).
“I’m going to be pressing on him pretty hard, because I know the ability he’s got and the impact he can make on this team and this whole organization. We’re going to be pressing him pretty hard.”
We’ll see exactly how often Moncada is asked – or inspired, perhaps – to play differently than he has in the past. If all goes well for the White Sox, and for Moncada in particular, there might not be much impetus to do anything but let him swing away, even if Grifol is staunch in his philosophies.
But if even someone like Moncada, the team’s highest paid player this season with a $24.8 million salary, can buy into “playing FAST,” then perhaps a teamwide transformation is possible and a new White Sox identity could blossom in 2024.
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