One of the most popular questions surrounding the White Sox, as they head into a season unlike any other, has lingered throughout the three-month layoff.
What kind of rookie year will Luis Robert have?
Things have obviously changed since March, when spring training came to an abrupt halt and everyone on the South Side had to wait indefinitely to see Robert play his first major league game. The wait is over, but Robert's first taste of the bigs will come in a shortened, 60-game season. The hype is still there, sure - and for good reason - but as past hyped White Sox prospects like Yoan Moncada and Eloy Jimenez have shown, it can take time to adjust to major league pitching and start playing up to expectations.
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Moncada went through a full season's worth of struggles in 2018, striking out 217 times before having a huge 2019 campaign and emerging as the team's best all-around player.
So when he shares confidence that Robert's going to do just fine in his rookie season, it might not be a bad idea to listen.
"He's a young guy with a lot of talent. Everybody saw that during the spring," Moncada said through team interpreter Billy Russo on Wednesday. "I think for him, the key is to just play his game, don't feel pressure, and with the support of all of us, he's going to be good. I'm very confident he's going to have a very, very good season just because of the talent he has."
The talent is obvious. Robert garnered preseason expectations as a front-runner for AL Rookie of the Year honors because he's a true five-tool threat who spent last season wowing minor league crowds with a combination of tape-measure home runs, blazing speed and highlight-reel catches in center field.
The hype is real.
"He can do it on the defensive side of the ball and the offensive side," second baseman Nick Madrigal said back in February. "He'll hit a 400-plus-foot home run one day, and then he'll make a Superman catch in the outfield. It seems like he can do it all. Stealing bases every day. He's definitely the complete package."
But how will the unpredictable circumstances of 2020 affect Robert? How they will affect anyone remains a mystery until teams start workouts this week and start playing games a few weeks later. One thing we can calculate at the moment is time, and Robert won't have much of it to make any necessary adjustments.
We saw it take far more than 60 games for Jimenez to get used to the way big league pitchers were attacking him last season. He figured it out eventually, started launching balls over the center-field fence and had a torrid final month to his rookie campaign. Robert won't have the same luxuries in 2020.
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But he will have resources, the same ones he was expected to be able to lean on before the pandemic wiped so much of the season off the calendar. Moncada has benefited so much from Jose Abreu's mentorship, and there's no doubt that Abreu and Moncada both will offer any advice they have to their countryman Robert.
"I passed through that process, and Abreu was there helping me through the process and that was very helpful," Moncada said Wednesday. "And I think for (Robert), it's going to be the same. We're going to be there for whatever he needs, for whatever questions that he has. That's going to be very helpful for him. We're always going to be there for him."
They'll just have to be there from six feet away.
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Yoan Moncada all in on Luis Robert, predicts big rookie season with White Sox originally appeared on NBC Sports Chicago
