When the White Sox formally introduced Pedro Grifol as their new manager, Rick Hahn hammered on a few key selling points. He covered most of them in one sentence...
"In Pedro, we are hiring someone who is a renowned communicator, a modern baseball mind who is seeking to build a cohesive and inclusive clubhouse environment and one where the attention to detail and the accountability will be priorities."
... but he also went out of his way to tout what Grifol had in mind for everyday preparation:
“We spent a lot of time with Pedro talking through improvements to our pregame planning, something that he was heavily involved in in the past, as well as how we prepare from an offensive standpoint to get the most out of the traits of the players on the roster,” Hahn said. “How we go about our business in that area in particular I think you’re going to see a lot different from what we had in the past.”
I can't speak for what's going on inside the clubhouse, but we're definitely seeing something a lot different on the field. The White Sox are 7-21, and they'll finish April going 0-8-1 in series and without consecutive victories at any point over the month.
Yet that all feels besides the point after what did or didn't happen with Luis Robert Jr. on Saturday night. There is not yet a cohesive story, so we're left to participate in some sort of postmodern truth exercise based on the realities of the primary parties.
What we saw: Robert started sprinting out of the box on a weak chopper to the left side, but then eased up halfway down the line even though he would've beaten the throw by plenty.
“I just spoke to him and said we’ve got to run hard down the line. Luis is a really hard worker, plays hard. He might have had a mental lapse. Add our expectations are we got to run hard down the line. This is not a common occurrence with Luis. As a matter of fact, I’ve talked to him about slowing down a little bit in practices and save some of it because he’s a hard worker. But our expectations are you run hard down the line and he might have had a mental lapse on that. I’m not sure.”
“Since I woke up this morning, my hamstring was tight,” Robert said. “Before the game, my mind was made up: I wouldn’t try to push too hard unless it was something that was game-ending or something because I wasn’t feeling like I was 100 percent. I tried to play safe.
“Before the game, I just told Eloy (Jiménez) and (Elvis) Andrus, ‘Hey guys, I will need your help today running down fly balls, if you could help me.’
“After the play happened, (bench coach Charlie) Montoyo came to me and asked me, ‘Hey, are you OK?’ I didn’t say anything. And then Pedro came and asked me, too, ‘Hey, everything OK?’ I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to say anything. I wanted to stay in the game. But I think afterwards, one of the guys told them, and that is when they knew.”
The truth isn't somewhere in the middle here, because either Robert is trying to manage a leg issue or he isn't. But it also doesn't matter what the truth is, because it's already undercutting Grifol's supposed selling points. There isn't evidence of communication or cohesion, and it's also a strike against the vaunted pregame planning, because you probably want to have a strong idea of what a player has to offer before batting him leadoff.
Which isn't to say Robert is acquitted, because he's having a terrible week as a teammate. One day he's stealing fly balls from Eloy Jiménez, and another day he's delegating his outfield duties to Jiménez, never mind that Jiménez was DHing. You never know whose job he's going to do. His? Somebody else's? Nobody's?
You can say that Robert's dragging down Grifol, but Grifol's job is to maintain control, and each day's fresh affront to the concept of professional baseball contributes to the growing sense that he's not the White Sox's Real Dad.
Perhaps I'm extrapolating from his pregame and postgame comments, because it really sounds like he's lying to himself. I cringed for Grifol when reading his his offhand quote about his experience with dead-in-the-water teams ...
... because it invites a reporter to keep asking him "How about now?", and those answers aren't any more inspiring.
“It doesn’t feel like that,” Grifol said. “I can’t explain that feeling. It doesn’t feel like that. I wake up every morning and my feeling is today is going to be the day we start something really good. That’s my feeling. And that’s how we prepare, that’s how we work. Address things, that’s what we do. My feelings of that don’t change. We’re 20-something games into it, it doesn’t change. I don’t go back and look at history and look at what teams have done. I don’t do that kind of stuff. But I’m sure it’s been done before. Teams feel like the sky is falling on top of them, and all of a sudden they catch a break here and there, and they’re off and running. So I just don’t feel that way. I don’t feel that this is over, by any means.”
Admittedly, Grifol can't stem the tide with words, but this latest episode with Robert invites him to take a bolder stance against the incompetence around him. He cushioned his criticism by saying that Robert is a hard worker, and Robert basically comes in afterward and says, "Yeah, I lied to him."
I wouldn't count on Bad Cop Grifol being any more effective at salvaging this season, partially because he just may not be cut out for this, but more because no first-time manager could withstand the crushing weight of the White Sox's organizational ineptitude. The players certainly aren't validating his sentiments, so sharpening an edge is the fastest way to start saying something somebody, anybody else can believe.
