In his first year with the Chicago White Sox, Carlos Quentin emerged as one of the league’s most potent sluggers for a playoff contender. An injury near the end of the season changed it all.
Although the Chicago White Sox were just three seasons removed from their first World Series title in 88 years, it’s fair to say there weren’t a ton of expectations for the South Siders heading into 2008.
After missing the playoffs in a fierce AL Central division in 2006, the ChiSox took a significant step back in 2007, finishing in fourth place with a 72-90 record. Expectations for the division in 2008 revolved around the still solid and competitive Minnesota Twins and the defending division champion Cleveland Indians, who came within a game of the Fall Classic in 2007.
While maintaining plenty of their World Series core from 2005, the White Sox made an under-the-radar trade in December 2007 that would drastically alter the course of the upcoming season, trading one future slugger in Chris Carter to the Arizona Diamondbacks for another in Carlos Quentin.
Entering his age-25 season, Quentin had shown flashes of promise, but nothing wholly consistent at the MLB level. In parts of the 2006 and 2007 seasons, Quentin played 138 games and slashed .230/.316/.425/.742, amounting to a below-average 85 OPS+ alongside 29 doubles and 14 home runs.
After speedster outfielder Scott Podsednik was released by the White Sox after 2007, Quentin took over in left field, supplying a complete 180-degree turn in power for the corner outfield position.
Quentin wasted little time making his impression on his new South Side teammates, bustling out of the gate with a .302 batting average and 1.050 OPS in the first month of the season, slugging seven home runs while walking 14 times.
The performance was not lost on his White Sox teammates, with the club able to stay above water at 14-13 after one month of the season. Though Quentin cooled off a little bit in the ensuing months, his monthly OPS never dropped below .849, its mark in June, as the White Sox stayed hot.
After a 16-13 record during May, the South Siders soared to their best month of the season in June, finishing the month with a 17-10 record, leaving them at 47-36 with a two-game lead in the AL Central at the end of the month.
Quentin began to heat back up in July, slashing .275/.345/.608/.953, slugging nine home runs and seven doubles in a month where the White Sox needed every bit of it, finishing July with a 13-12 record.
Perhaps saving some gas in the tank for a final push, both the White Sox and Quentin got hot once again in August, the latter having his best month of the 2008 season.
Bringing back a flash of his April performance and some, Quentin was a stellar 28-for-87 in August, hitting another eight home runs with 17 walks and 16 strikeouts, good for a .322 batting average and 1.130 OPS.
Though in a tooth-and-nail fight with the Minnesota Twins atop the division, Quentin’s stellar August left the South Siders with a 0.5 game lead in the division at the end of the month, with a 77-59 record already besting their 2007 season win total by five games.
The month-long power surge from Quentin also made him a prime candidate for the AL Most Valuable Player award – while both Dustin Pedroia and Kevin Youkilis were posting incredible seasons for the playoff-contending Boston Red Sox, Quentin and division rivals Justin Morneau and Joe Mauer of the Twins were also making their case for the prestigious honor.
Quentin ultimately finished fifth in MVP voting, but that came after a September in which Quentin only played in one game.
Wait, why?
In a Labor Day series opener on the road against the Cleveland Indians, Quentin fouled off a pitch from Cliff Lee in the midst of an 0-for-4 day at the plate. Frustrated after missing a pitch to hit, Quentin slammed the bat with his right hand while holding it with his left.
Though in many ways a freak injury, the frustrating moment led to a broken right wrist for Quentin, prematurely ending his season in the middle of a playoff race.
“What did happen was kind of unfortunate. It’s kind of something that, you know, I still have trouble believing that it happened that way,” Quentin told reporters after learning of the injury’s severity.
“My last at-bat, the second pitch I fouled off against Lee. Something I’ve done thousands of times since I was a kid. A little frustrated. I had the bat in my left hand and I just kind of hit down on the bat head with my right hand with a closed fist. I kind of hit a little bit low, nicked my wrist and finished the at-bat.”
At the time of Quentin’s injury (and what would ultimately be his final 2008 statline), he was slashing .288/.394/.571/.965 for the season with 36 home runs, 100 RBI and 66 walks alongside just 80 strikeouts.
To perhaps no one’s surprise, the White Sox felt Quentin’s absence immediately. After going 17-11 in the month of August on the heels of an incredible month from Quentin, the South Siders scuffled down the stretch.
Though they treaded water for most of the month, a five-game losing streak towards the end of the season left the White Sox with a 9-15 September record heading into the final contests of the year.
While the White Sox would ultimately rally to make the postseason, defeating the Detroit Tigers in a must-win make-up game before shutting out the Twins 1-0 in a Game 163 tiebreaker now known in local lore as the “Blackout game,” the South Siders would not be long for October.
Facing the Tampa Bay Rays in that franchise’s first-ever playoff series, the White Sox managed just a Game 3 victory at home in the series, losing to the Rays three games-to-one in the best-of-five American League Division Series.
I don’t mean to make too many grand proclamations on what could have been for the White Sox in 2008 – while they almost certainly would have won the division without the need for a tiebreaker if Quentin had not gotten injured, the American League still featured plenty of formidable competition that would have served as a serious roadblock for even a healthy White Sox team.
If not the Rays, the defending champion Boston Red Sox and then-perennial contender Los Angeles Angels also fit into the AL playoff picture, all clubs with noticeably stronger regular seasons than the South Siders’ 89-74 mark.
Though the immediate aftermath of Quentin’s injury had fans wondering what could have been on the South Side that October, it also raised questions on what could have been in the ensuing years.
While Quentin continued to be a solid hitter for the White Sox in the coming seasons, even making the AL All-Star team in 2011, the power and plate presence from his 2008 campaign was simply nowhere to be found after his injury.
Though the White Sox finished well above .500 in 2010 and 2012, the latter being a year after Quentin’s departure, the Twins and Tigers denied the South Siders entry to October, respectively. The White Sox would not make the playoffs again until the pandemic-shortened 2020 season.
Quentin managed just a 98 OPS+ with the White Sox in 2009, with an .877 OPS in a part-time role with the San Diego Padres in 2012 being the closest Quentin would come to replicating his .965 mark of 2008.
After three seasons of part-time action with the Padres, Quentin would bounce around the minor league systems of several MLB teams before officially calling it a career after some Mexican League action in 2017.
Though the White Sox kept Quentin as a full-time player for the 2009, 2010 and 2011 seasons, he never returned to being the team’s biggest contributor as he was in 2008, with veterans Paul Konerko and A.J. Pierzynski among those serving as the team’s most reliable hitters.
It’s impossible to tell if Quentin’s 2008 season would have been a one-hit wonder no matter what – his pedestrian numbers with Arizona prior to 2008 suggest that could have been the case. Yet it’s impossible not to wonder what kind of hitter the 25-year-old Quentin could have become if not for an injury that’s notorious for stealing power away from budding sluggers.
With elite power, well above-average contact and great plate discipline, Quentin had all the characteristics of a lethal hitter in 2008, the kind that only gets refined as a player moves through their 20s. Unfortunately for Quentin and the White Sox, one fleeting moment of frustration turned into years of questioning just what could have been.
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