The future of the White Sox is bleak, with or without Pedro Grifol

Tuesday night, Chicago White Sox The longest losing streak of the century had finally come to an end. The 21-game streak tied the American League record held by the 1988 Baltimore Orioles. The Orioles had started the season infamously 0-21, and Orioles captain Cal Ripken Sr. had passed away during the streak (despite the heartbreak of his family). Chagrin), while White Sox manager Pedro Grifol could at least see his team stop its losing streak.

The win respite lasted just one day, as the White Sox quickly fell behind on Wednesday with a 3-2 loss to the out-of-town Oakland Athletics, a loss that dropped Chicago to a shocking 28-89 record for the 2024 season. Thursday MorningIn 2000, the White Sox announced they’d had enough. Grifol was fired in a major personnel shakeup that also saw bench coach Charlie Montoyo, third base coach Eddie Rodriguez and assistant batting coach Mike Tosar fired. Grady Sizemore, a former division rival in the 2000s, had only just joined the team in 2000. January — Will serve as interim captain while the front office ponders the team’s future.

The Pedro Grifol era won’t be a chapter fondly remembered in White Sox history. Expectations were modest when he was hired in November 2022. After all, his predecessor was Tony La Russa, a questionable hire ordered by owner Jerry Reinsdorf as an apology for firing the Hall of Famer in 1986. La Russa led the White Sox to their fourth-ever AL Central title in 2021, but few attributed that result to his unrealistic tactics. His talent was already shining when the White Sox reached the playoffs in 2020 and made their first postseason appearance in more than a decade. For the second time in his careerThen-manager Rick Renteria was fired in 2020 to make way for flashier hires, and La Russa’s team was easily eliminated by the Houston Astros in the 2021 American League Series and finished with a mediocre 81-81 record in 2022 despite being a preseason championship favorite.

So Grifol was given the reins to a team that still had championship-caliber talent in a division that tends to be underdog: Longtime first baseman Jose Abreu was gone, but the team still had All-Star shortstop Tim Anderson, solid starting pitchers Lucas Giolito and Dylan Cease, and young talent in Luis Robert Jr., Eloy Jimenez, Yoan Moncada and Andrew Vaughn. As an older manager and a valuable coach for the 2015 champion Kansas City Royals, Grifol could get the team back on track.

That hope didn’t even last the first month of Grifol’s brief career with the Pale Hose. They went 7-21 to open the 2023 season and almost immediately fell out of contention for the championship. In late April, Belt, a White Sox fan, called into ESPN Radio in Chicago and said, all About organizational deficiencies.

Never before had a sports-radio announcer been so skilled and effective in his strategy. Belt, despite his early success, knew this start was no fluke and was actually the result of deeper issues within the White Sox front office.

The higher-ups eventually agreed. With the franchise hurtling toward its worst season in more than 50 years, vice president Kenny Williams and general manager Rick Hahn were fired in late August. It was supposed to be a watershed moment for the organization. Williams, a former player, had been with Chicago since 1992 and built a team that won the 2005 World Series, the franchise’s only championship in the last 100 years. Hahn took over primary baseball operations in 2012, while Williams moved into a more senior role. Hahn had been with the team for 10 years at that point. He was tasked with overseeing a rebuild that was rewarded to some extent when the team made the playoffs in 2020 and 2021. Parting ways with them signaled that the foundation for lasting success had crumbled, though he appreciated the efforts to bring back at least October baseball on the South Side.

So if the status quo isn’t enough, who will owner Jerry Reinsdorf choose to get the White Sox going again? Just a week later, the answer turned out to be Chris Getz. Like Williams, he’s a former White Sox player, and like Hahn, he’s already a fixture in the current front office. Getz was in charge of player development and later became Hahn’s right-hand man as assistant GM.

The most infuriating part of Getz’s introductory press conference was when Reinsdorf admitted that he didn’t even do an outside interview for the job. He just gave it to Getz because he liked him and he was in a hurry.

According to John Greenberg Athletic:

“The conclusion I came to is that we owe it to our fans and to ourselves to not waste any time,” Reinsdorf said. “We want to get better as quickly as possible. If I had left, I would have had at least a year to evaluate the organization. I could have brought back Branch Rickey. He would have had a year to evaluate the organization.”

Reinsdorf may be in his late 80s, but it reeks of laziness to not have taken the time to seriously search for such an important position. No White Sox fan would have begrudged the owner for taking his time with this decision. For example, when Atlanta GM John Coppolella resigned in disgrace in early October 2017, it took the team more than a month, even in the middle of the offseason, to install the now-vaunted Alex Anthopoulos as manager. With the head of the front office to decide on a direction, Chicago needed to overhaul the entire operation with fresh eyes.

Instead, Reinsdorf rushed it and was with someone on the inside. Presided over The White Sox farm system has become less important, likely to cover up the terrible reasons for the firing of minor league managers Omar Vizquel and Wes Helms. There were plenty of reasons to doubt whether Getz was the right man for the job, but his first year as manager has been dismal.

Some aspects were beyond Getz’s control: Anderson’s terrible decline meant he left in free agency rather than converting a prospect in a trade or qualifying offer compensation; the inherited core of young position players was constantly fighting for health, and Getz only did Reinsdorf a favor by sending Jimenez to the Orioles at the trade deadline in exchange for a minor league relief pitcher. Cash ReliefThere was little reason to invest in this roster at the end of 2023, and the White Sox entered 2024 knowing the road ahead was tough, which led to the decision to trade Cease in San Diego in the middle of spring training.

But the franchise is in a surprising mess. The White Sox lost 14 straight games from May 22 to June 6, setting a franchise record that stood for nearly 100 years. By contrast, that nadir lasted less than two months, considering the aforementioned abysmal 21-game losing streak. To make matters worse, the industry isn’t astonished by the players Getz acquired in exchange for key trade targets, including Cease and deadline-deadline mainstays Erick Fedde, Michael Kopech and Tommy Pham. The best story you’ll probably hear is, mixture bag of opinion.

It’s certainly hard to imagine Pedro Grifol, who went 89-190, as the next White Sox leader. He may have been given a flawed roster, but his personality doesn’t suit a rebuilding team. He’s a guy so obsessed with baseball that he seems completely uninterested in something as beautiful and impactful as a total solar eclipse. “I’ll watch it on video,” he said in an interview with MLB.com. Anthony Castrovins“But there’s baseball.”

More worrying is Grifol. Publicly criticize the players and Acting like a tough guy from the start That quickly rang hollow, with reports of further attacks from Grifol within the team.

Grifol This was deniedHe did say, however, that running and batting practice was indeed mandatory, and while there may have been good intentions behind it, introducing it in the middle of a terrible season seems like a window dressing.

As Demetrius Bell wrote last week, the White Sox may replace the 120-loss Mets of 1962 and the 119-loss Tigers of 2003 as the worst team in modern MLB history. That team’s manager not returning for another season is hardly a groundbreaking development. In Grifol’s case, it would have been defensible even if the team had been a run-of-the-mill, run-of-the-mill weak team like the Rockies. This article is not intended to defend Grifol or discuss why he failed.

Either way, with or without Grifol, the White Sox organization is in trouble. As the last rebuild proved, the farm system has limited promise under Getz. The octogenarian Reinsdorf still runs the show, with no interest in selling despite owning the team for nearly 45 years and only seven playoff appearances. And even in the wealthier 21st-century sports world, the White Sox are one of only two teams to have never signed a $100 million contract.

Reinsdorf He says spend And I’m sure better times are ahead. This is all part of the plan, he insists. But White Sox fans are all too used to this story. They’ve seen their team lose so many times before. Now it just tastes different, and more difficult to accept than ever before.

Matt Murton – USA TODAY Sports