Eloy Jimenez — and, really, the Chicago White Sox as a team — just cannot catch a break. The oft-injured star appears to have suffered yet another health setback, exiting Sunday’s game against the Atlanta Braves with what’s being called left groin tightness.
Eloy Jiménez was removed from today’s game with left groin tightness and is being further evaluated.
— Chicago White Sox (@whitesox) July 16, 2023
The team has yet to offer any sort of timetable for return, and we likely won’t know more until he undergoes testing in the next day or so. Still, given Jimenez’s lengthy injury history, it’s hard not to fear the worst here.
The story is well-known at this point. The 6’4, 210-pound slugger — acquired along with Dylan Cease in the trade that sent Jose Quintana across town to the Cubs at the 2016 trade deadline — rocketed through the Minors and appeared on the verge of superstardom after his first couple of years in the league, putting up a 123 OPS+ with a Silver Slugger award and a fourth-place finish in AL Rookie of the Year voting between 2019 and 2020. And then the injuries began: Jimenez appeared in just 139 total games across the last two years, tearing his left pectoral in spring training ahead of the 2021 season and battling hamstring issues throughout 2022.
Jimenez hoped to put those issues behind him this season, but it didn’t last long — he suffered another hamstring strain in early April, then missed most of May due to an appendectomy. Understandably, all that missed time had made it hard for him to find a rhythm, and he’d hit a solid but unspectacular .270/.314/.465 with 12 homers across 61 games.
It’s just one more bullet point in a year full of underperformance on the South Side, as the White Sox entered Sunday with the third-worst record in the AL at 39-55. Luis Robert Jr. is just about the only one of Chicago’s name-brand stars who’s performed up to that billing, with Jimenez, Tim Anderson, Andrew Benintendi and Andrew Vaughn all struggling through middling seasons.
