What will the next championship-contending White Sox team look like?
That's what we're setting out to determine (or at least make a guess at) over the next few weeks. Ten members of our White Sox content team here at NBC Sports Chicago put our heads together to try to project what each position on the diamond would look like in one, two, three years. Basically, we posed the question: What will the White Sox starting lineup be the next time they're capable of playing in the World Series?
That question can have a bunch of different answers, too. We didn't limit ourselves to players currently a part of the organization. Think the White Sox are gonna make a big free-agent addition? Vote for that player. Think the White Sox are gonna pull off a huge trade? Vote for that player. We wanted to see some creativity.
While one voter got a little creative in center field, it was again a pretty easy choice: With nine of 10 votes, Luis Robert is our center fielder of the future.
Robert has been wowing folks with his athleticism and his ability on the baseball field since well before the White Sox signed him as a 19-year-old international free agent in 2017. The ball exploded off his bat during must-see batting-practice sessions with Eloy Jimenez and Micker Adolfo last spring. A little more than a year ago, Rick Renteria gave a nice summary of Robert's abilities — and got a lot of White Sox fans excited in the process.
“I saw Robert,” Renteria said at the 2017 Winter Meetings, “he’s a pretty impressive specimen. Listen, this kid can fly. I saw him run down to first I think it was like 3.56 after a full swing on a ground ball. He ran down a ball in center, right-center field effortlessly. He hit a ball against the wind and a gust into center, left-center field that I thought had no chance and it ended up going over the trees.”
And that was before Robert ever played a minor league game in the United States.
MLB
Last year, he finally did that, though he didn't play in as many as he would have liked, bothered by thumb injuries that delayed the start of his season until June and briefly put him on the shelf for almost the entire month of July. And the effects of those injuries were present in his end-of-season numbers: a .269/.333/.360 slash line with no homers and only 17 RBIs in just 50 games.
But Robert's promise popped up again this fall when he wowed during the Arizona Fall League, posting a .324/.367/.432 slash line with two homers, 10 RBIs and five stolen bases in 18 games.
Oh yeah, and he did this:
“I hear them in the dugout. They’re all at the top of the dugout when he comes up to hit, so that just tells you how they feel about him as well,” Class A Winston-Salem's hitting coach, Charlie Poe, told our Chuck Garfien in November. “I see them, I hear them in the dugout. ‘He’s up! He’s up! What’s he going to do? How far is he going to hit it?’”
That's an accurate assessment of White Sox fans' excitement level, too. And given the ability with the glove, with the bat, on the base paths, Robert seems like a lock to be the center fielder of the future.
Other vote-getters
Tim Anderson (1). Yes, someone on our crew envisions the White Sox current starting shortstop finding his way to the outfield one day. Be that because of a free-agent arrival who pushes him to a new position (cough, cough, Manny Machado, cough, cough) or the ascent of last year's first-round pick, Nick Madrigal, Anderson might have to end up switching to a different spot. Being the team player he is, he likely wouldn't mind it. But his improvement at shortstop was one of the high points of the developmental 2018 season. He's an athletic guy, perhaps giving one of our voters reason to believe Anderson can pull off being a major league center fielder.
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