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The White Sox have just lost their best pitching potential.
They will find it, but probably not before the 2020 season, this news falling Friday afternoon as a bomb in the team's high-level reconstruction effort. Kopech will probably be operated by Tommy John and will not only miss the last weeks of the season, but also the entire 2019 season.
The immediate question is obviously to know what it means for Kopech, who stands out for the wealth of his talented prospects as a future star, someone who has declared himself to be a Cy Young winner – and who has received the same projection Game. Its recent promotion stimulated not only those of the galleries of Guaranteed Rate Field, but also those of the clubhouse. He is a flamethrower who has combined 327 batters in two seasons as a minor league of the White Sox.
Although the rotation of the future White Sox is very busy, many fans and observers have qualified Kopech potential aspect of this staff. Where these projections are after Friday's news is a complete mystery.
These days, Tommy John's surgery barely prevents the throwers from returning to dominance. In announcing the news, general manager Rick Hahn has repeatedly spoken of his belief that Kopech will still be a great league starting pitcher.
"This is by no means the last time we saw Michael Kopech," Hahn said. "This is the last time we've seen it for 18 and very likely for 19, but it will continue to play an important role in what we expect to be very good White Sox teams in the future.
"We have already experienced this before. Lucas Giolito is … the one who has already lived it. Dylan Cease has just been named minor league pitcher of the year by MLB.com. These guys are coming back to the level they are able to launch.
"We saw, before that, that it was a wonderful year for Michael. He showed you what he could do at the big leagues. He is able to dominate at this level. He is an extremely diligent worker who will have to face hard work in the near future, but again, by 2020, he will be back and build on what he has accomplished this season. "
But the missed season is not a trivial matter.
Kopech has made only four starts in his major league career, and we have seen this season how the first full round in the majors can be challenging. Watch the campaigns of Giolito and Reynaldo Lopez. If 2020 arrives and the rebuilding of the White Sox has progressed to the point where they are ready to compete and compete, will Kopech be ready to compete at the level the team will need when it still has its first tastes? ?
Kopech's injury is a big problem, but he is far from the only victim of one of the White Sox's most anticipated prospects. Luis Robert, Dane Dunning, Alec Hansen, Jake Burger, Micker Adolfo and Zack Burdi have all missed a considerable time this season or have not yet left their respective wounds. Throw Kopech into the mix, and the entire timeline of the rebuilding effort could be changed from where it stood at the beginning of the calendar year.
Hahn is, and rightly, confident that his front office has imported enough talent into the organization to be able to stem even this long list of significant injuries. But he also mentioned the idea of having to help more during this off season to compensate for some of the bad luck.
"I do not want to make daring statements in one way or another right now. We continue to digest all this, "said Hahn, questioned about how Kopech's injury could affect the situation in the long run. "I know that throughout this process we have talked about it with more than one type. We knew that there would be setbacks, whether due to an injury or another performance, and that we needed to be prepared and have enough depth to isolate ourselves, either internally either through trade and free agencies. to be able to resist some of these things.
"Yes, it's going to be a challenge, but in the coming weeks and months we will respond and put ourselves in the best position for the long term."
So this date of 2020 that so many fans and observers had surrounded by the time this thing was going to go from reconstruction to conflict. To quote a phrase from Hahn, it is absolutely impossible to do it. But is that a problem? With a year behind Kopech and a long layoff, with all of these other guys getting behind what they would have been without the injury-induced absences, is the schedule changing?
We will not know until that date. But it seems perfectly reasonable to ask a question following the biggest news of the White Sox season.
Here's what we know: When Kopech makes his first start of the 2020 season, it will only be a fifth of his career in the Major League, about 20 less than he was supposed to be. It seems quite impacting.
"It obviously hurts. This is obviously a disappointment, "said Hahn. "But we tried to prepare for that. Throughout this process, you have heard about the importance of depth, the importance of quality options, and the importance of never feeling like we've had enough. We have other quality weapons in the system behind Michael that will contribute in the years to come, and we also think that Michael has a bright future in the White Sox uniform for a very long time.
"Unfortunately for all of us, we'll have to wait a little longer before we start seeing it regularly on this mound."
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