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

On Tuesday night, the Chicago White Sox finally put an end to Major League Baseball’s longest losing streak this century. At 21 games, it tied the American League record held by the 1988 Baltimore Orioles, who infamously went 0-21 to start the season. That club’s skipper, Cal Ripken Sr., did not survive the duration of the streak (much to his family’s chagrin), whereas White Sox manager Pedro Grifol at least got to see his club snap the skid.

The grace period for the elusive win lasted one day. The White Sox promptly went back to their losing ways on Wednesday, as the desperate-to-skip-town Oakland Athletics beat them, 3-2. The defeat dropped Chicago to a jaw-dropping 28-89 on the 2024 campaign, and on Thursday morning, the White Sox announced that they’d seen enough. Grifol was fired in a sweeping overhaul that also cost the jobs of bench coach Charlie Montoyo, third-base coach Eddie Rodriguez, and assistant hitting coach Mike Tosar. Former 2000s division rival Grady Sizemore — who only joined the organization in January — will be the interim skipper while the front office mulls over its future.

The Pedro Grifol Era will not be a fondly-recalled chapter in White Sox history. Expectations were modest when he was hired in November 2022. After all, the previous manager was Tony La Russa, a questionable hire mandated by owner Jerry Reinsdorf in what was apparently an apology for firing the Hall of Famer all the way back in 1986. La Russa had piloted the White Sox to just their fourth-ever AL Central crown in 2021, but few credited that results to his out-of-touch tactics. The talent had already shined through when they made the playoffs in 2020, their first postseason appearance in over a decade, and for the second time in his career, then-manager Rick Renteria got shown the door to make room for a more splashy hire. La Russa’s club was easily dismissed by the Houston Astros in the 2021 ALDS, and then stumbled to 81-81 mediocrity in 2022 despite being preseason favorites to repeat.

So Grifol was handed the keys to a team that still had the makings of a contender in the often-weak AL Central. Longtime first baseman Jose Abreu was gone, but there was still All-Star shortstop Tim Anderson, rock-solid starters Lucas Giolito and Dylan Cease, and young talents like Luis Robert Jr., Eloy Jiménez, Yoán Moncada, and Andrew Vaughn. As a more age-appropriate manager and a valued coach for the 2015 champion Kansas City Royals, perhaps Grifol could get them back on track.

That hope didn’t even survive the first month of Grifol’s brief career leading the Pale Hose. They went 7-21 to start the 2023 season, almost instantly putting themselves out of contention. In late April, a White Sox fan known as Berto called into ESPN Radio in Chicago and laid out all of the organization’s flaws.

Never has there been a more masterful and efficient takedown by a sports radio caller. Berto knew that in spite of the still-semi-recent success, this start was no fluke, and was in fact endemic of more serious problems within the White Sox front office.

The higher-ups eventually agreed. With the club careening toward its worst season in over 50 years, executive vice president Kenny Williams and general manager Rick Hahn were fired in late August. This could have marked a significant turning point for the organization. A former player, Williams had been with Chicago since 1992 and built the team that won the 2005 World Series, its only championship of the past century. Hahn had primarily taken over the baseball operations in 2012 with Williams moving to a more senior role, and he had been with them for a decade at that point. Hahn was trusted with overseeing a rebuild, which somewhat paid off when they made the playoffs in 2020 and 2021. To part ways with them was a signal that while they appreciated the work to at least return to October baseball on the South Side, the infrastructure for lasting success had failed.

So who would owner Jerry Reinsdorf select to pick the White Sox back up if the status quo didn’t suffice? A mere week later, the answer turned out to Chris Getz — like Williams, a former White Sox player, and like Hahn, a figure already entrenched within the incumbent front office. Getz had been in charge of player development and later became Hahn’s right-hand man as assistant GM.

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The most galling part of Getz’s introductory press conference came when Reinsdorf admitted that he didn’t even conduct any external interviews for the job. He just gave it to Getz because he liked him and he was in a hurry … for some reason.

Per Jon Greenberg of The Athletic:

“The conclusion I came to is what we owe our fans and ourselves is not to waste any time,” Reinsdorf said. “We want to get better as fast as we possibly can. If I went outside, it would have taken anybody at least a year to evaluate the organization. I could have brought Branch Rickey back. It would have taken him a year to evaluate the organization.”

Reinsdorf might be in his late eighties, but to fail to take the time to do a true job search for such an important position reeked of laziness. Not a single White Sox fan would have begrudged the owner for taking his time with this decision. For instance, when Atlanta GM John Coppolella resigned in disgrace in early October 2017, it took over a month — even in the offseason — for the team to settle on the now-universally-praised Alex Anthopoulos. The head of the front office sets the tone, and Chicago was in need of an overhaul with fresh eyes on the entire operation.

Instead, Reinsdorf rushed it and stayed internal with someone who had presided over the White Sox farm system dipping in prominence and seemingly covered up the awful reasons for the dismissals of minor-league managers Omar Vizquel and Wes Helms. There were many reasons to be skeptical of Getz as the man for the job, and his first calendar year in charge has been miserable.

Some aspects have been beyond Getz’s control. Anderson’s awful decline meant that he simply left in free agency rather than turn into any prospects via trade or qualifying offer compensation. The inherited core of young position-player talent is in a constantly-losing battle for health, and Getz really only did Reinsdorf a favor by sending Jiménez the Orioles at the Trade Deadline for a minor-league bullpen arm and cash relief. There was little reason to invest in this roster at the end of 2023, and the White Sox entered 2024 knowing that they had a grim road ahead — hence the call to trade Cease in San Diego in the middle of spring training.

Yet the organization is in shambles to a staggering degree. The White Sox set a franchise record that had lasted nearly 100 years by losing 14 games in a row from May 22nd through June 6th. In contrast, that nadir lasted fewer than a couple months, given the aforementioned atrocious 21-game skid. Worse, the industry isn’t blown away by the names that Getz has acquired in exchange for prime trade targets like Cease and the main players moved at the deadline, Erick Fedde, Michael Kopech, and Tommy Pham. The best you’ll probably hear is a mixed bag of opinions.

It was admittedly difficult to envision the 89-190 Pedro Grifol as the leader of the next good White Sox team. He might have been given multiple flawed rosters, but his personality just did not match a rebuilding team. This is a man who lived the baseball hardass lifestyle so much that he seemed completely disinterested in something as beautiful and impactful as a total solar eclipse. “I’ll see videos of it,” he said to MLB.com’s Anthony Castrovince. “But there’s baseball.”

Even more concerning was Grifol calling out his players in public and putting on a tough-guy act from the jump that rang hollow in a hurry. There were reports of Grifol attacking his team internally even further:

Grifol denied this, though he did say the running and batting practice were indeed mandated. While there might have been good intentions behind that, instituting it at the halfway point of a horrid season comes across as eyewash.

As Demetrius Bell wrote last week, the White Sox might end up becoming the worst team in modern MLB history, supplanting the 120-loss 1962 Mets and 119-loss 2003 Tigers. The manager of said team not returning for the subsequent campaign would hardly qualify as a groundbreaking development. In Grifol’s case, it would have been defensible even if this was just your standard, run-of-the-mill bad team like the Rockies. This article is not meant to be a defense of Grifol, or a treatise on how he got jobbed.

All the same, the White Sox organization is in dire straits regardless of Grifol. The farm system can only offer so much hope under Getz, as the last rebuild could attest. The octogenarian Reinsdorf is still running the whole show with no interest in selling despite only seven playoffs berths to his name in nearly 45 years of owning the team, and even in the more rich, 21st-century sports landscape, they are one of two teams to never issue a $100 million contract.

Reinsdorf says that he’ll spend and that better times are ahead. It’s all part of a plan, he claims. But White Sox fans are all-too-familiar with that story. They’ve seen too much of their team losing before, as well. Now, it’s just a different flavor, and one more difficult to swallow than ever.

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