White Sox offense slowly improving thanks to focus on detail

Grady Sizemore has filled a few different roles for the White Sox, including being called upon to manage the team after Pedro Grifol was fired last August. That’s a role Sizemore was clear from the beginning — and still maintains — that he is not interested in, but he has remained invested in the Sox organization. This season, he is serving as the White Sox offensive coordinator. A job title that he jokes sounds like it’s taken from a football team, but the overarching idea is similar: Help your team score.

“The title almost is the distracting part,” Sizemore said. “Everyone’s like, ‘Well, what does that mean? How do you define it?’ And I can’t really say what it means or what it defines. I think I’m just trying to carve a path out to help these guys and be a good bridge for the coaching staff and the players.”

Sunday’s 7-5 loss to the Royals was a microcosm of what Sizemore and the rest of the coaching staff have on their hands with the White Sox offense. Plenty of promise, but not always the desired results. Like the ninth-inning rally that fell just short, the White Sox offense still feels just shy of where they need to be. Last season, they were last in the majors in runs scored, by almost 100, and going into Sunday’s game they had crept up to 26th in baseball. Progress, but not much yet.

A part of Sizemore’s job this season is to find ways to help continue to push that even higher. The Sox have benefited from additions like Mike Tauchman and the emergences of young hitters like Chase Meidroth, Edgar Quero, and Miguel Vargas, but beyond that, Sizemore and the rest of the staff are working on some of the more granular things they can do to help the Sox score.

“It’s trying to find different avenues,” Sizemore said. “Trying to help Marcus [Thames] and Joel [McKeithan] on the hitting side and look for ways that me and Jason [Bourgeois] can come up with different baserunning cues for these guys and really just trying to find ways to improve and look for an advantage and get some runs on the board.”

The White Sox have been particularly good at the plate in the ninth inning; Sunday’s three-run effort may not have been enough to close the gap, but it was another instance of an offense that has shown the ability to keep adding runs late in games.

“Whether it’s we have a lead or we are trying to get back in the game, it’s really being aggressive,” Sizemore said. “Attacking the zone and playing to our strengths and being disciplined with the gameplan. Depending on who is on the mound, it will vary or change but also play into our strengths.”

The White Sox offense will continue to get better if Luis Robert, Jr. finds his form at the plate again. He returned to the lineup on Friday after a three-day break meant to give him a chance to reset mentally and produced more or less the same kinds of at-bats he’s been having all season. He had two hits and a walk and drove in three runs on Friday, but went 0-for-4 with three strikeouts on Saturday and then had another 0-for-4 day in the series finale on Sunday. Robert, Jr. was able to drive in a run on a bases-loaded fielder’s choice in the ninth inning of Sunday’s game, but he otherwise had the same struggles as he’s been dealing with all season.

A mechanical tweak in Vargas’ swing seems to have unlocked something, but according to Robert, Jr. his days off didn’t involve any such change for himself.

“I know all they do is for me to get better,” Robert told reporters on Friday. “I’m open to the suggestions, and I just want to get better, too.

“It all started with the suggestion of taking that couple of days off to try to take off the stress of the game when you’re not getting the results. The other part was working throughout those days and getting better. . . . I didn’t make any big changes.”

Improvement for Robert, Jr. would not only help the White Sox do better on offense as a whole, but it might help improve their chances of taking another step forward in the rebuild. Robert, Jr. is still the most valuable trade piece the White Sox have — general manager Chris Getz said teams are continuing to call about him even though Robert, Jr. has a .546 OPS — but they will not be able to tap into the full trade potential unless he starts to hit like he has in the past.

With or without Robert, Jr., the White Sox are slowly turning a corner in a positive direction as an organization. A homestand like they just had, where they split a four-game series against the best-record-in-baseball Tigers and took two games out of three against the Royals, could point to more good days than bad in the future.

“Every day, we’re coming out here with a chance to continue to get better, and we have,” manager Will Venable said. “We certainly appreciate having the good results this home stand, but we know we’ve got to continue to go and get better with every day we have the opportunity to do that.”

It seems to be helping to have Sizemore working behind the scenes, who can draw from his ten-year playing career, as well as what he’s gleaned from a season of coaching and managing in the White Sox organization to keep pointing the team in a positive direction.

“It’s fun, it’s exciting. I think we’re kind of finally starting to see some of these young guys, and we’re getting healthy again,” Sizemore said of the run the White Sox are on. “So we have our veterans back, we have the young guys. So we’re kind of seeing what it was meant to look like from the start of the year right now. I think that’s the exciting part, when it comes together and we’re seeing positive results in the series to series. So I think it’s all been fun.

“Like I said, I’ve enjoyed my time here and the relationships I’ve built, so just looking to continue that and try to get better each day.”