GOODYEAR, Ariz. — If all goes to plan, it’s likely that outfielder Austin Hays’ stay with the White Sox will be brief.Hays signed a one-year, $6 million contract with a mutual option for 2027. The deal is beneficial for both sides. Hays gets a long runway to reestablish himself after recovering from a 2024 kidney infection that also affected him in 2025. The Sox get an every-day right fielder.“What I went through was systemic, so it’s not like, ‘OK, you do four weeks of rehab on this muscle, and then you’re back to full-go,’ ” Hays said. “It had affected a lot of different areas of my body, and being able to do the blood test that I did, [I saw] where my body had been kind of malnourished and it wasn’t working right, and why I was continuing to be so sore, why I was experiencing so much fatigue.”General manager Chris Getz lauded Hays’ ability to crush lefties. He has a career slash line against them of .282/.340/.479 with a 124 wRC+.Hays drew some parallels between the Sox and his Reds team last year that made the playoffs with a young core supplemented by battle-tested veterans.Getz set out this offseason to upgrade the roster without making any long-term commitments that could hamper flexibility in the future, when the team expects to enter its competitive window. The short-term arrangement came with some familiarity for Hays. He worked with Sox director of hitting Ryan Fuller in Baltimore, where Hays made his…
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