The White Sox may set the all-time losing record this season, but Pedro Grifol doesn’t have to talk about it.
Two days after the White Sox ended a 21-game losing streak, setting the American League record for most consecutive losses, the White Sox mercifully released Grifol with 45 games left in the season.
His last game was adequate, a 3-2 loss at Oakland that featured a good starting pitcher, a blown save, and not enough offense.
In truth, Grifol was a dead manager all season.
The White Sox should have parted ways with Grifol after last year, his first on the South Side, was a 101-loss affair so miserable that chairman Jerry Reinsdorf fired the two longtime top decision-makers in his front office, Kenny Williams and Rick Hahn.
But in classic Sox fashion, chairman Jerry Reinsdorf was either too stingy or too slow to fire Grifol, who signed a three-year contract before the season, so they invited him back to punish him even more.
With a 28-89 record, the Sox have more than a chance to surpass the 1962 New York Mets’ 120 losses and set the modern record. While Reinsdorf stated last August that 2024 would certainly be better, the Sox have been so bad this season that it’s hard to comprehend.
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Grifol’s .319 winning percentage (89-190) is the worst in White Sox history, and if he had two full seasons, it would be one of the worst in baseball history. The Sox have been so consistently awful this season that the only explanation for his holding on as long as he has is plain and simple.
Grifol, 54, was a lifelong baseball player who finally landed his dream job. But as often happens on the South Side, his dream turned into a nightmare.
He is far from blameless. He made a ton of mistakes, strategic, interpersonal, and inspirational. He was baseball’s Jim Boylen, a unique Chicago-based Reinsdorfian nickname for a manager. To put it in purely South Side terms, Grifol was the worst Sox manager since Terry Bevington.
Grifol was the wrong man at the wrong time for the wrong franchise. In a way, he’s lucky. He won’t have to watch the remaining two months of the Sox’s march to infamy.
Grifol had no chance of returning to the job in 2025, and it’s better for everyone that the firing happened now so Sox management can openly begin considering candidates to replace him.
GM Chris Getz, who was promoted to the top job last summer, has assembled a diverse front office that should include a roster of up-and-coming coaches. Not that all of them would want the job, which offers little hope of a good outcome in the near future.
Or maybe Reinsdorf will just spin his buddy Rolodex until he finds a name he likes. If I were newly minted Hall of Famer Jim Leyland, I’d keep Jerry on “read.”
Ozzie Guillen is better off doing the pregame and postgame shows for the Sox. He doesn’t need those losses on his record. AJ Pierzynski would be great for the local media, but he doesn’t need all the hassle either. I suspect Getz wants to start over, but who knows if the 88-year-old Reinsdorf will let him make his own decision?
When the White Sox called a press conference on August 31 to announce Getz’s promotion to GM, I had a simple question: Why did he feel the need to declare that Grifol would return for a second season? There was no rush, and he deserved no vote of confidence.
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“I think it’s important to provide stability for our players,” Getz said. “There’s been a lot of change over the last few years, and certainly here recently. I think we need to get back to the focus on playing baseball so that when these players show up every day, they can just focus on the game and not on the leaders of the organization.”
Another reason may have been that he was in the first year of a three-year contract and Jerry said he would stay.
This year, it was no secret to those around the team and the game that Getz was not exactly thrilled with his manager. Whenever Getz was publicly asked about Grifol, he did not even pretend to express his trust in him.
Behind closed doors, the two argued over player usage during the season, a discrepancy that was understandable. Getz was focused on keeping guys healthy until the trade deadline. Grifol was trying to win games to save his job and his reputation. The two seemed to have found a balance, and the Sox ended up losing a lot of games.
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Grifol started out as a nice story, the hardworking guy who gave up his career in management to try his hand at managing in the minor leagues. He worked his way up to his dream job in his 50s. But a manager is judged by wins and the development of his players. In that regard, he failed in an almost unbelievable way.
The Sox lost almost every night and played a miserable brand of baseball that turned off fans and televisions.
Last year, the Sox were 8-21 through the first month of the season. This year, they started with a 3-22 record. During their worst losing streak from late May to early June, they lost 14 games, a franchise record. They broke that mark with their 21-game losing streak. A sensitive Campfire Milkshake could have had the same effect, and would have been delicious, too.
Grifol was given flawed lineups and came into the team during a period of dysfunction that went beyond the usual Sox discord. And yes, the lack of talent (and poor conditioning of several former stars) was the problem this year. The Sox aren’t hitting, and Grifol’s last loss was also the team’s 29th blown save. But remember, he was the one who would whip this team into shape.
Before his first season, Grifol said in a television interview that the Sox were “preparing to kick your ass every night.”
“We will prepare every night to kick your ass.”
– Pedro Grifol, Mayor of Chicago pic.twitter.com/L95aq1Hoqm
— White Sox Talk (@NBCSWhiteSox) March 27, 2023
Before his second season, he introduced an acronym for playing FAST
Pedro Grifol explains what it means to play FAST pic.twitter.com/eGvFIJcRGT
— White Sox Talk (@NBCSWhiteSox) March 15, 2024
Like most new managers, especially those on the job for the first time, Grifol preached discipline and fundamentals, repeating the usual baseball buzzwords as if they meant something new. But under his leadership, the Sox were a completely unsound, undisciplined team that did almost nothing right. He never seemed to hold veterans accountable for their mental lapses, and when he did say something, his players sometimes contradicted his views.
“He’ll feel that way, and we obviously feel differently,” catcher Korey Lee said after a game in late May when Grifol famously called his hitters sluggish.
His answers at press conferences were often the stuff of jokes from critics, such as the time he said he was too busy preparing to observe the solar eclipse in Cleveland.
White Sox manager Pedro Grifol, who is here in Cleveland in the path of the total solar eclipse that will occur in the United States until 2044, said he will not observe it. In fact, he was quite adamant about his statement.
“I’ll watch videos of it… but there’s baseball.”
— Anthony Castrovince (@castrovince) 8 April 2024
Grifol, in classic White Sox fashion, was often thin-skinned when it came to criticism. But he could also be very generous, as my former colleague James Fegan wrote.
His hiring followed Reinsdorf’s unpopular power-play move to bring his longtime friend Tony La Russa out of retirement after the 2020 season. La Russa led the Sox to their first division title in years in 2021 – albeit not without some bumps along the way – but his health issues helped derail the 2022 season.
Rather than retain interim manager Miguel Cairo, who had done a good job replacing La Russa, Hahn hired Grifol from Kansas City, hoping he could bring discipline to the Sox and get them back into the league. Grifol, a source told me, was also one of the reasons the Sox signed Andrew Benintendi to a franchise-record contract. In two seasons, Benintendi, who hit a home run in Grifol’s final game, had a negative value for the Sox.
When Tim Anderson and Benintendi got into trouble in 2023, Grifol left them at the top of the lineup every game. It made no sense, and he could only justify it with an argument on the back of a baseball card.
Grifol has not proven that he is a top manager. But you know what? Grifol’s successor will not have it easy either.
The Sox have very little major league talent and their two best players, outfielder Luis Robert Jr. and starting pitcher Garrett Crochet, are on the transfer list in the offseason. Getz shows a lot of promise as a GM, but the early results are not great.
While the minor leagues are looking up again — especially on the pitching side — the big league organization is in dire straits. Attendance is down again this year as the Sox are in the dumps along with the Florida teams and the Oakland A’s, who just finished their season. Given the dire financial picture, an industry source tells me there has been a hiring freeze on the business side at the corner of 35th and Shields this season. Perhaps that explains why Grifol has had a job for so long.
Grifol is also doing better without the White Sox. When the team approaches 120 losses in September, I hope he’s relaxing on the beach, sipping an ice-cold beverage. To paraphrase former White Sox manager Kenny Williams, the White Sox are no longer Pedro Grifol’s problem. And vice versa.
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(Photo: Ed Zurga/Getty Images)
