Stone: Dunn Signing 'Disastrous' So Far
(WSCR) It's getting so far into Adam Dunn's debut season with the White Sox that fans are no longer wondering when he will start hitting, but instead are wondering if he will ever start hitting.
General manager Kenny Williams signed Dunn to a four-year contract last December and is starting to take the heat for what is beginning to look like a waste of money. So did the White Sox do their homework before signing the slugger to a long-term deal?
"I do know that there are very smart people in the front office of the Chicago White Sox," 670 The Score's baseball expert Steve Stone said on The Boers and Bernstein Show. "And I think the questions were probably asked, I just don't know how many went to talk to Adam face-to-face and got the type of response that he was probably going to give them."
LISTEN: Steve Stone on The Boers and Bernstein Show
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Stone believes Dunn's struggles are a product of him taking on a challenge he has never taken on before.
"When you've only played in the National League, when you've never been a designated hitter, when you've never played on a winning team, when the best team you've ever been with is 82-80, when you've never been in a big market , when you've never had intrusive media, when you've never had great expectations and now you have them, when you've never had a four-year contract and now you have it, put all those things together and from an emotional standpoint it becomes very difficult to do the same things you've been doing when you're coasting a lot of years on also-ran teams," Stone said.
For now, Stone isn't sugarcoating the signing.
"Quite obviously, they went out on the line, made a huge financial commitment and to this point, you'd have to say it was disastrous. That doesn't mean it has to continue to that way," he said.
Meanwhile, Dunn indicated earlier in the week that if the game ever stopped being fun for him, he would simply walk away.
"If it gets to the point where it is no longer fun and he wants to walk away, I got a feeling that there's nobody in Chicago that's going to stop him," Stone said.
