Luis Robert Jr.’s injury a worst-case scenario for White Sox fans at outset of rebuilding season

The player’s union is currently calling out Major League Baseball for shortening the pitch clock, suggesting it’s the cause of a rash of early-season pitching injuries.

Maybe the White Sox should consider penning their own open letter, vilifying the league for standing by while first base continues to be an uncontrolled menace.

Once more, the White Sox watched Luis Robert Jr. pull up with a hip flexor injury – this one being described as a Grade 2 strain – after touching down on first base. The big difference between the injury the team’s MVP suffered Friday night in Kansas City and the one that knocked him out for three months of the 2021 campaign, other than the grade and with that, perhaps, the severity, is that this one came while rounding first on a double, as opposed to running through the bag trying to leg out an infield single.

The bottom line is the White Sox watched Robert Jr. get yanked out of the middle of their lineup, a player who entered this rebuilding season as perhaps the lone bright light as Chris Getz attempts to strengthen the future of the organization by rewinding, in a sense, back to 2017 and 2018 for another complete makeover.

Without Robert, the darkest days of the team’s latest rebuild have arrived in a hurry.

Robert was cemented as an obvious part of Getz’s long-term plans, the first-year general manager saying during the offseason that, even while trade rumors swirled around staff ace Dylan Cease, the team was unlikely to deal its star center fielder, who had four years of club control remaining. Robert was a player Getz would build the future around.

Even if Getz’s offseason was short on offensive upgrades, White Sox fans could count on watching Robert try to outdo what he did last year, when he turned in an MVP-type campaign with 38 home runs to go along with plenty of other eye-popping numbers. The general consensus at spring training? That Robert could be even better.

Now?

This is what you’d call the worst-case scenario for South Side baseball fans looking for something positive to watch in 2024.

A day after the injury, the White Sox were short on specifics when it came to how long Robert would be sidelined. All Pedro Grifol had for reporters in Kansas City is that the absence would last longer than the 10 days described in the name of the injured list.

Sunday, USA Today’s Bob Nightengale painted a picture looking an awful lot like the one from 2021, saying the White Sox, privately, believe they’ll be without Robert for three to four months.

In the season’s first week, Robert’s presence in the middle of the order wasn’t doing much to produce wins for a White Sox team experiencing rock-bottom expectations, with plenty of fans wondering how large the number of losses will grow even before Friday’s injury. The White Sox have a grand total of 13 runs in eight games, with just two trips across home plate in the first three games of their weekend set with the division-rival Royals.

Whether with Robert or without, it’s a looking like a nightly wonder how this team will score the requisite number of runs to be competitive in a Major League Baseball game.

But did those 0.0-percent playoff chances that so riled up the White Sox ever imagine something like this?

Not only is Robert the foundation on which Getz is expecting to build his next contender, he’s just plain fun to watch. He hits the ball ridiculously hard and far, as exhibited by the two rockets he launched off Kenta Maeda in the season’s second game. He plays sensational defense, whether making highlight-reel catches or making covering great distances in the outfield look routine. He pledged when the season began to be more aggressive on the base paths, too, forecasting more stolen bases.

And now, White Sox fans won’t get to watch that for some time. All while the team is expected to keep struggling offensively. It figures to be much tougher for Grifol, who pledged a different-looking White Sox team, to escape the same level of losing that defined his first year as a major league manager.

The long-term effects of being without Robert for an extended period of time are harder to pin down.

This year is supposed to be about learning for Getz and the White Sox, about figuring out where the roster is and how quickly it can be morphed into a contending one. When it comes to Robert, specifically, the White Sox don’t need to do any more learning. He showed last year that he’s capable of being one of the better players in the sport. A strained hip flexor in 2024 shouldn’t change what the White Sox think he can be in 2025, 2026 and 2027: a franchise centerpiece.

It wouldn’t seem that even a months-long absence for Robert would do much to alter any of Getz’s plans, even if it makes the current year’s team significantly worse.

The only thing that comes to mind is whether the White Sox need to start planning for life without Robert, and I don’t mean that from the standpoint of him switching teams before his contract is over but rather from the standpoint of him falling, through no fault of his own, into a similar oft-injured category as teammate Eloy Jiménez, whose latest injury has landed him on the IL, too, and weakened the team’s lineup.

Robert’s 2021 injury took him away from the White Sox for three months that summer, limiting him to just 68 games. In 2022, he played 98 games, dogged by a series of maladies, including a viral infection that impacted his vision and a late-season wrist injury that made him a one-armed swinger for a while. Last season, Robert stayed healthy and put up sensational numbers. But now we can add another potentially lengthy, injury-related absence to the list.

It’s not quite the series of unfortunate events that has bedeviled Jiménez throughout his major league career. But it’s been enough for Robert to be rightfully listed alongside Jiménez, Yoán Moncada, Tim Anderson, Michael Kopech and Yasmani Grandal as the White Sox’ core players who never experienced enough consistent health to reach the expected heights of the last rebuilding project.

And now there’s a new rebuilding effort underway. Will Robert prove these to be nothing more than unfortunate speed bumps and provide a solid foundation for Getz’s long-term work? Or is it worrying enough that Getz’s hopes for the future can’t rest, as good a player as he is, solely on Robert’s shoulders?

That’s all obviously to be determined well down the road. For now, this just sucks for the White Sox, for Robert, for their fans and for anyone who wanted what’s expected to be a tough season of South Side baseball to be a little more fun to watch.

In that regard, this would figure to be as bad as it can get.

Right?