Everyone is a winner in the Sox second base battle (Micah Johnson is likely the real winner)
/As a message and principle, striving for peaceful resolution and avoiding hostilities is just fine. As the conclusion to weeks of battle in a presumed winner-takes-all duel, it is terrible. Terrible.
Carlos Sanchez vs. Micah Johnson wasn't just a battle between similar prospects (relatively) for supremacy, but had remarkable stakes: a starting job on a possible contender, or back to the minors and blocked from promotion. For Sanchez, it could even mean getting DFA'd. It almost certainly wouldn't, but it technically could!
Instead, they gave us the end to the friggin' Pokemon movie. Chris Sale staying on schedule (by whiffing 13 minor-leaguers in six innings) means the Sox don't need to make room for a new fifth starter, and since neither the research nor the result of an investigation of "who is the eighth-best healthy White Sox reliever?" would not be fun for anyone. So the Sox are going carry Micah Johnson, Carlos Sanchez, Gordon Beckham and Emilio Bonifacio on the same roster for a week or so. This is atypical.
The good (?) is that none of these guys offer bats worth planning around, so Robin Ventura has a week of pinch-hitting for Conor Gillaspie, pinch-hitting for one of these four, pinch-running, defensive replacements without any reasonable limitation. Which means he will max it out and possibly still run out of players by the eighth inning.
Keeping Johnson is kind of a giveaway, since they need to open up a 40-man spot to keep him, which isn't a 'week's worth of an extra infielder' type of gesture. If that is how it's played out, there should be a major league job for Sanchez too, since he's going to be a better utility man than Gordon Beckham, might already be, and they will be going in different directions throughout the year.
--Jesse Crain had a fun day. He got reassigned to minor league camp as he works back from his umpteenth shoulder setback, but the MLB transactions page marked him as being released, and several news sites aggregate from that page, so...
--The space for Johnson could be cleared by Maikel Cleto, who with Kyle Drabek and Javy Guerra likely sliding in front of him, should be the odd man out of the bullpen.
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