ANAHEIM, Calif. (AP) — The Chicago White Sox signed veteran outfielder Randal Grichuk to a one-year, $1.25 million deal on Monday and placed outfielder Austin Hays back on the 10-day injured list because of a left calf strain.
Grichuk, who elected free agency after being designated for assignment by the New York Yankees last week, should give the White Sox a solid right-handed bat against left-handed pitchers.
The 34-year-old is a career .268 hitter with an .816 OPS, 79 homers and 220 RBIs in 1,569 at-bats against left-handers over 13 big-league seasons, including a .317 average and .940 OPS against them from 2022-2024.
“It kind of came together last second,” Grichuk said before Monday night’s series opener against the Los Angeles Angels. “We were talking to a few other teams and were about to get something done when they came into the mix. It’s a young, exciting team that is playing good baseball, so we felt like it was a good spot.”
The White Sox lost at least 100 games in each of the past three years — including a major league-record 121 losses in 2024 — but they entered Monday with a 16-18 record, thanks in part to the potent bat of new first baseman Munetaka Murakami’s 13 homers and 26 RBIs.
“Any time you get a chance to throw on the jersey and compete and keep playing, it’s an honor,” said Grichuk, a 2009 first-round pick of the Angels who is playing for his sixth team in four years.
“They’ve had some tough years here, but they’re on the up-and-up. They’ve got a lot of good guys, and I’m excited to grind with them.”
Hays missed most of April because of a right hamstring strain. He returned last week and played three games before suffering a calf injury that is expected to sideline him for at least two weeks.
“With Hays going down, we needed a right-handed outfielder,” Chicago manager Will Venable said. “(Grichuk) fit the roster, he was available, and we feel really lucky that we got him. He’s a guy with a ton of experience who has performed really well in his league.”
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New York Yankees' Randal Grichuk, left, is safe at first base before the tag of Boston Red Sox first baseman Willson Contreras, right, during the sixth inning of a baseball game, on Tuesday, April 21, 2026, in Boston. (AP Photo/CJ Gunther)
NEW YORK (AP) — Pulitzer Prize officials awarded the fiction prize to an author with a history of experimenting with genres and with language itself: Daniel Kraus, cited for “Angel Down,” a World War I narrative with a celestial twist that unfolds over some 300 pages in one long sentence. “Liberation,” Bess Wohl's look back at the feminist consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s, received the drama prize.
Winners announced Monday include two books rooted in the country's founding. Jill Lepore's “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution” won for history, and Amanda Vaill's “Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution” was the winner for biography. Yiyun Li’s “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” her blunt account of the suicides of her two sons, was cited for memoir-autobiography. “There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America,” by Brian Goldstone, won for general nonfiction.
The poetry prize went to Juliana Spahr's “Ars Poeticas,” and the music award was given to Gabriela Lena Frank for “Picaflor: A Future Myth,” a symphonic work inspired by Andean legend and California wildfires.
The 50-year-old Kraus has had a diverse and prolific career quite unlike the average Pulitzer fiction winner. He has written horror, science fiction, graphic novels and books for kids. He has collaborated with filmmakers George Romero and Guillermo del Toro, whose Oscar-winning “The Shape of Water” was conceived with Kraus' help. He has received numerous prizes over the years, including the Bram Stoker Award for horror, but had never imagined he'd win a Pulitzer. When he began receiving texts Monday — that included such messages as “Wow!” — he worried that he had somehow gotten himself in trouble.
Pulitzer officials praised “Angel Down” as “a stylistic tour-de-force that blends such genres as allegory, magical realism, and science fiction into a cohesive whole, told in a single sentence.” Kraus said that he at first used a conventional narrative but found that abandoning traditional punctuation better suited a story of war that seemingly had no end.
“It's like you have the feeling of being locked into the book forever,” he told The Associated Press during a telephone interview.
Wohl’s memory play collects second-wave feminists from all walks of life as they tackle misogyny, internalized homophobia, domestic abuse and gender roles. The play navigates between past and present, and six of the actors disrobe for the Act 2 opening scene. The win comes a day before the Tony Award nominations, when “Liberation” is expected to be named in the best new play category.
Lepore is a New Yorker staff writer and Harvard University professor whose Pulitzer helps confirm her as one of the country's most prominent historians. Her previous honors include the Bancroft Prize for “The Name of War” and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for “New York Burning.” In 2023, she contributed an introduction to Paul McCartney's book of Beatles photos, “1964: Eyes of the Storm.”
Goldstone is a journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic and other publications. Spahr is a poet, critic and editor whose prize-winning collection is a statement of poetry's vitality during the darkest times, and Frank is a Grammy-nominated artist known for combining influences ranging from Latin American folklore to Western classical music.
Associated Press Entertainment Writer Mark Kennedy contributed.
FILE - Signage for The Pulitzer Prizes appear at Columbia University, May 28, 2019, in New York. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File)
FILE - Bess Wohl attends the Glamour Women of the Year Awards at The Plaza Hotel on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)
