On May 8 Josh Fields was sent to the DL with tendinitis in his right knee. For fifteen days, that’s all we knew. He had tendinitis in his knee. He wasn’t playing. He’d be back…eventually.

Well, now he is back–kind of. Fields, who (for some reason) sat twice this week, is healthy. He must be–they’re playing him. And, really, consider his injury: tendinitis in his kneecap. I’ve had that before. Your knee’s sore. You take an Advil, stretch, and rest. It’s the baseball equivalent of a stinger.

The amazing thing is that no one was writing about Fields. I checked all the Chicago papers, the Chicago MLB-universe website. All I could find was that Fields was on the DL. No one really seemed to care about the severity of his injury, whether he’d had an MRI, if his numbers were down because of the knee.

What I can’t figure out is Why. Why, given Fields’s five home runs in the final thirteen games of ‘07, aren’t White Sox fans or beat writers calling for Fields’s call-up? Why, given his .480 SLG % in ‘07, isn’t he starting?

I guess this all has to do with Joe Crede. For some reason Crede’s a demi-cult hero in Chicago. It’s something that I can’t explain. Right now Joe’s slugging .488. That’s .008 points above Fields’s rookie number. And Joe’s thirty; Fields is straddling twenty-five. His [Crede's] .271/9/29 puts him on pace to go .270/25/90. OK, those are good numbers, but that’s Crede’s ceiling. What’s Fields’s ceiling? One HR for every sixteen at-bats? Well he pulled that in his rookie season. Those are–if you’re looking for a good position-comparison player–Troy Glaus numbers.

Crede’s defense is what allowed him to beat out Fields in spring training. But he has eleven errors in 146 chances, and his .925 fielding % is the lowest in his career. He has zero stolen bases, and his OBP is .340. Plus he’s a free agent in 2009, and everyone’s pointing to a new job on the West Coast when baseball starts up next spring. People were talking about giving him a five-year, seventy-five-million-dollar deal. Are you kidding? But despite the lack of re-sign-Joe rumours, Crede keeps playing. And, what’s even more incredible, his job looks safe.

Then you’ve got Fields. Clearly, Ken Williams didn’t have a plan when it came to deciding on a third basemen for 2008. Crede should have been traded or cut in the off-season. Plenty of teams needed a third baseman, and the idea should’ve been to give him to any and all takers. He was coming off serious back surgery, and his ‘07 numbers were understandably awful. So why wasn’t he dealt? The Sox wanted an A-list prospect. That’s the Rumpelstiltskin school of baseball trading: steel for silver. It rarely works. They wanted an MLB-ready pitcher. Wasting a year of Fields in AAA should not have been an option. But that’s what’s happened. With Paul Konerko hitting .213, with Jim Thome hitting .212, with Nick Swisher hitting .207 there’s still no room for Fields. The White Sox want to keep him at third base, and a Thome platoon is out of the question.

Fields is hitting .250/7/20 in thirty AAA games. His OBP and SLG % are more or less the same as Crede’s stats. But what’s Josh trying to prove? That he can hit .450 with 45 HR and 150 RBI? You know he’ll heat up when he gets back to the majors. If the guy can slug .480 in his rookie season after slugging .498 in his ‘07 stop at AAA, you’ve got to find a place for him. You can’t let him go down to AAA, go stale in a season of it-doesn’t-really-matter games, then come back up and try to figure out where he left off two years ago.

That’s especially true when the guy blocking him is in his walk year. Do the Sox lose anything by going from Crede to Fields? I can’t see how they would. Crede’s career .307 OBP is well below average; his career .448 SLG % is something that Fields has already eclipsed.

And Crede’s batting eighth. He’s not protecting anyone, he’s not playing Gold Glove defense, and he’s months away from walking. How do you justify playing him over Fields?