El Grande Dolor. The Cuban Barry Bonds. Oso or Yogi. All of these are phrases and nicknames that have been used to describe Chicago White Sox slugger Jose Abreu in recent years. I’m not really sure where those last couple of ones came from, but they’re listed under his profile at baseball-reference, so we’ll roll with it. Side note: can those profiles be edited by the public á la Wikipedia? Perhaps I could just go in and change his nickname to, say, Boo-Boo. Would that make listening to Hawk Harrelson tolerable if he started using random meaningless terms to describe the Sox players? Hmm… probably not. But I digress. Abreu has looked anything but a Cuban version of Barry Bonds or Frank Thomas in the early going. Maybe more like the current version of Thomas, but that’s not exactly what was expected of him coming into this season. We’re almost a month into the 2016 campaign, and Abreu’s been outhomered by the likes of Aledmys Diaz and Scooter Gennett. He obviously brings no speed to the table, and his batting average currently resides under the Mendoza line. In other words, he’s been pretty awful thus far. What’s going on here? Why has Abreu been so terrible this season?
Let’s dig into Abreu’s profile to see if we can figure out what’s causing these early struggles. Here are a few observations:
Please, blog, may I have some more?
