(670 The Score) Legendary White Sox broadcaster Hawk Harrelson is fed up with the club’s players being sidelined by what he views as injuries that they could play through, and he believes agents are the driving force behind that lack of availability by telling their players to be overly cautious with their health.
Harrelson shared his viewpoint on the Mully & Haugh Show on Friday morning, first discussing it in the context of the White Sox before noting it’s a problem across all of MLB in his mind.
“The guys are on the DL all the time,” Harrelson said. “I told a good friend of mine a long time when they first brought in the 10-day DL rule, I said the agents are going to stick it up your ass with that 10-day DL rule. And boy they have done it. It’s just that simple. It’s turned into an agent’s game now. You take a guy like Scott Boras, his combined stable last year, their salaries were ($1.2 billion). And he just turned down a 23-year-old player (Juan Soto) for a $440-million contract. You know, when I broke in, you could’ve bought every team in baseball for $440 million.”
Harrelson was then asked about the White Sox’s outlook in the second half of the season – they’re 46-46 at the break and trail the AL Central-leading Twins by three games entering play Friday – and how they should approach the trade deadline on Aug. 2.
“Well (I like their outlook), if the guys will play, which they haven’t so far,” Harrelson said. “If they’ll play, hell, all they’ve got to do is they come up every day, ‘Well, my legs are sore’ or ‘I hit the wall, and I’m going to go on the DL.’ And a lot of this is coming from the agents. Because what they’re trying to do is prolong the shelf life of their clients, especially the pitchers. I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s just an agent’s game today, and it’s getting worse and worse and worse. And I don’t know what they’re going to do to stop it. They’re maybe going to have to take that 10-day rule out of play because of the fact agents have abused it. And I don’t blame them that much. Because if you were an agent or I was an agent, we’d be doing the same daggum thing. We’d be trying to prolong the shelf life of our players, especially the pitchers.
“It’s just not the White Sox. Hell, it’s all over baseball now.”
Harrelson then shared his irritation about injuries once again when asked which White Sox player could step up and be the difference-maker in the second half.
“We got several players that would fill that bill – if they would play,” Harrelson said. “But (Yoan) Moncada’s always on the DL. Eloy (Jimenez) is always on the DL. So you can just erase those two. But if they would play, there’s not a team around, certainly not in our division, there’s not a team around that has more talent or as much talent as we have.”
MLB replaced the 15-day injured list with the 10-day injured list ahead of the 2017 season. Currently, the 15-day injured list is used for pitchers and two-way players, while the 10-day injured list is in effect for position players.
Harrelson also seemed to be turned off by the White Sox’s lack of hustle. A handful of White Sox players are under orders from organizational brass to take it easy on routine plays, so as to not aggravate previous injury issues. Multiple White Sox players have long been hampered by soft-tissue injuries.
“When you’ve got players out there who seemingly don’t give a damn or they look like they don’t give a damn, that’s not good enough,” Harrelson said. “You got to get out there and you’ve got to bust your ass. You got to play hard.”
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