ANAHEIM, Calif. –- In his first season as White Sox assistant hitting coach, Chris Johnson gets to the ballpark early and stays late. Johnson has a full plate — the Sox’ hitting woes are a big reason why they were 13 games under .500 at the midpoint of the season going into Wednesday’s game against the Angels.
Since the beginning of the season, Johnson has encouraged young position players Andrew Vaughn, Jake Burger and Gavin Sheets to step up as leaders. With Jose Abreu gone this season and Tim Anderson mired in the worst season of his career, there are voids on that front.
Talk to players and some acknowledge it’s lacking, but only to a degree. It’s not the reason the Sox are performing badly, but teams that win typically find performance and clubhouse leaders successfully blending together.
“It’s something you work on,” said Johnson, 38, who played eight seasons with five teams from 2009-16. “When you’re a young guy who gets called up you do your job and stay out of the way. But those guys are at the point where you know what you’re doing, how things can be done. Leaders can be any age or service time. Just be a leader. You don’t need 15 years in the big leagues, that’s what I’m telling them.”
Ask around the clubhouse and players point to pitchers at the top of an unbalanced leadership chain, starting with Lance Lynn, Lucas Giolito and veteran relievers Kendall Graveman and Joe Kelly. And Liam Hendriks, but Hendriks has pitched in five games after battling cancer and is on the injured list with a sore elbow.
“We have enough leaders in this clubhouse, but sometimes you have conflicting ideas of what leadership is and sometimes you get conflicting ideas of the way to do things,” Hendriks, 34, said. “Sometimes that can be an issue, but we don’t have an issue with leadership in this clubhouse.
“Everyone has their own ways of doing things and sometimes you need to look into it as how some guys respond well to certain things, some guys don’t respond well to certain things.”
Johnson said players respond best to those “who lead out there every single day.”
“One of the best I played with was Freddie Freeman, who leads by example,” Johnson said. “He showed up each day, the same person.
“There are so many games, 162 and 180 days, the guys you look up to are the ones who lay it on the line and don’t come in and take days off. They never take a pitch off. They’re just gamers and they’re in there every day. That’s the biggest way to lead.”
Like Abreu led. He was one of the franchise’s most productive sluggers who refused to take days off.
“Obviously Jose Abreu was not so much on the vocal side but just his presence of exuding that leadership,” Giolito said.
Giolito describes the Sox’ leadership climate as “kind of fluid.”
“I wouldn’t say we have full on [leadership] designations,” he said.
It’s enough of question mark that general manager Rick Hahn and manager Pedro Grifol have been asked about leadership recently. Grifol has enough veterans to handle it but Lynn, Anderson, Kelly and Elvis Andrus, to name a few, are all having sub-par seasons. And Anderson has publicly shared issues in his personal life that can be distracting.
“Veteran leadership is important,” Grifol said. “It becomes tough to lead when you are going through adversity.”
Hahn understands speculation about a lack of clubhouse leadership because when teams are playing poorly, edge and swagger aren’t as visible.
“I don’t feel that’s the issue going on,” Hahn said last week. “I don’t feel there’s a lack of cohesiveness or every man for himself kind of thing or lack or preparation. That’s not what I think is ailing us.”
