In between snapping a 14-game losing streak and potentially starting a new one with a frustrating loss to the Red Sox, Bob Nightengale says the White Sox aren’t likely to fire Pedro Grifol midseason.
The Chicago White Sox have no immediate plans to dismiss manager Pedro Grifol, refusing to solely blame him for being baseball’s worst team.
The White Sox believe it would make no sense to bring in and pay another manager when the team’s fate isn’t going to change no matter who’s in the dugout. Grifol is in the second year of a three-year contract for about $3 million. The White Sox are expected to re-assess this winter to determine whether a managerial change is needed.
I’ve emphasized the line that sounds like it came directly from Jerry Reinsdorf, as dressing up resignation and laziness as the only possible course of events is one of his trademarks. You can try disagreeing, but by the time you’ve started a rebuttal, he’s already left the room.
It’s usually smart to bet against a White Sox midseason manager termination because the team hasn’t pulled that move since firing Gene Lamont in 1995, even though a few Sox skippers have effectively begged for one in different ways since. That said, in a White Sox season without precedent, it’s worth keeping the door open for unlikely decisions, which might be why Nightengale only wrote “no immediate plans.”
While Nightengale’s report isn’t what most White Sox fans were hoping to hear, at least it has two forms of secondary value for storing away:
No. 1: Nightengale stories are the only way we learn the terms of a White Sox manager’s employment. The last time around, he divulged that the White Sox were paying Tony La Russa $4 million a year, while it looks like Grifol is making less than Rick Renteria did.
No. 2: It’s fair to say that Chris Getz, the White Sox’s alleged single decision-maker, doesn’t have the authority to make this move himself.
Speaking of seasons without precedent, Martín Maldonado’s 0-for-4 Sunday dropped his line to .071/.124/.111, and the game is finding him in cruel and unusual ways.
There’s never been a White Sox hitter who’s accrued more than 100 plate appearances with an OPS below .300, much less .250. In fact, the only comparable MLB season for any team since the dead-ball era was Ed Connolly‘s 1931. He hit .075/.131/.086 over exactly 100 plate appearances, with most of that playing time coming in September for a second-division team playing out the string. Connolly effectively had the 2023 Korey Lee season without the 2024 resurgence, so Maldonado isn’t quite a parallel there.
In terms of decorated catchers playing until they’ve wrung every last bit of production from their being, Maldonado’s year is more reminiscent of Carlton Fisk’s 1993 season. At age 45, Fisk hit .189/.228/.245 and gave up 22 steals over 24 attempts over 125 innings. The White Sox let him play sparingly until he broke the record for games caught, after which they gave him a motorcycle and pointed him in the direction of the sunset.
Of course, Fisk gave the White Sox and their fans 13 seasons, so it’s understandable that circ*mstances became emotionally tangled. Grifol’s allegiance to Maldonado is wildly disproportionate to the amount of goodwill Maldonado has generated in Chicago. It’s like he watched Dusty Baker’s final year in Houston and decided that the only problem was all that pesky winning.
Grifol’s blind devotion to unproductive veterans sinks his chances of immediate progress, and his distant-father approach to unproven players makes him less a leader worth listening to, and more of a guy who requires waiting out. He’s treating the short term and the long game like he regards one-run games, in the sense that he thinks he’s doing great.
The White Sox’s absentee-landlord brand of leadership isn’t likely to help their image. The Athletic published its annual player survey today, and the White Sox finished second to Oakland in the team with the worst reputation.
“I’ve never heard a good thing.”
“Unlike some other bad teams, they have more potential to be good.”
“It sounds like no one wants to be there day in and day out … like it’s a grind just to show up to the ballpark. I couldn’t imagine.”
“It’s not good over there. You can tell by how often there’s turnover that it usually means something’s going on. Players leaving the organization and automatically doing better (with their new team).”
“Poor communication.”
There’s a chance that some of these sentiments are at least a little outdated. The returns are likely still commenting on clubhouses of the previous few seasons that even current Sox players acknowledge as toxic, and even if Getz is a departure from Kenny Williams and Rick Hahn as an administrator, he hasn’t yet been given the resources to prove it in a way that will resonate around the league. The Athletic also has long abandoned their previous efforts to dedicate a beat writer to every team in MLB, as many here are aware, so their sampling for these surveys is not as robust as it once was.
If it turns out that Getz is just as aloof as his predecessors, then you still can quibble with Comment No. 4. It used to be true that players frequently succeeded after leaving the South Side, but now it’s effectively baseball’s Last Chance Saloon. Kevin Pillar aside, there are so many plate appearances and innings to go around that if a player can’t make it there, he’s not likely to make it anywhere.
Jim Margalus Writing about the White Sox for a 16th season, first here, then at South Side Sox, and now here again. Let’s talk curling. View all posts
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