Beckham to miss 6-8 weeks with injured wrist
The White Sox’ first road trip of the season is off to an inauspicious start.
Not only have the Sox dropped two straight interleague games at Washington, they’ve lost second baseman Gordon Beckham, possibly for two months.
The Sox announced Beckham has a fractured hamate bone in his left wrist and will have surgery “in the next few days.” Beckham suffered the injury in Monday night’s series opener against the Nationals.
The White Sox also announced pitching coach Don Cooper remains hospitalized in northern Virginia with diverticulitis.
Cooper has missed both games against Washington and the Sox announced he will miss the rest of the road trip that makes stops in Cleveland over the weekend and Toronto next week. Once Cooper is released from the hospital, he will reportedly return to his off-season home in Nashville, Tenn.
As for Beckham, he was off to a good all-around start, batting .316 (6-for-19) with 1 RBI while playing his accustomed solid defense.
White Sox general manager Rick Hahn spoke to reporters in Washington this afternoon about Beckham’s injury.
“The standard time of recovery on an injury like that, which obviously happens from time to time, it’s very standard recovery, it’s about six weeks,” Hahn said. “We don’t have the surgery scheduled yet. So we don’t have more information on that. As for a corresponding roster move, we’ll have something announced tomorrow prior to our game in Cleveland.
“Generally, it’s unfortunate. Gordon looked pretty good and had gotten off to a nice start. I know he was feeling confident and he’s frustrated. On the plus side of things, this is, as I said, something that happens fairly commonly and has a fairly standard recovery process. Once the time elapses, hopefully he can pick right up where he left off.”
Jeff Keppinger has moved from third base to second to cover Beckham’s spot, with Conor Gillaspie coming off the bench and playing third.
Even when a replacement joins the Sox in Cleveland Friday, Keppinger and Gillaspie are likely to be in the regular lineup at second and third base.
“It’s an opportunity for Conor to probably get some more at-bats, and we’ll have another move tomorrow to add someone to that mix,” Hahn said. “We’ll see. We are still talking through some options. The nice part of having flexibility and guys who can do different things is we aren’t locked into bringing up a middle infielder per se because we lost a middle infielder.”