Bob Nightengale appeared on 670 The Score's Mully & Haugh show to offer some speculation about Jerry Reinsdorf's mindset during another embarrassing season for the White Sox, and in standard fashion, he couldn't help but flatter his friend along the way.
“All spring, they were saying ‘Look at what the new manager is doing – Pedro Grifol.’ He’s done nothing. It’s the same thing,” Nightengale said on the Mully & Haugh Show on Tuesday morning. “I was joking that they should give Tony La Russa another plaque in Cooperstown for actually winning with this team. Nobody else has been able to do it. I think they’ve got no choice but to break that thing up. Obviously, it’s not working. The third manager is unable to do much with it. I think it’s very frustrating. Particularly all spring, they kept saying this is the year, look at all the new energy and stuff is happening.
It’s the same old story. Nothing has changed since a year ago.”
The Nightwashing of La Russa makes it easy to have the conversation derail into a needless argument invoking Rick Renteria, but because Nightengale is the only way we know what Reinsdorf might actually be thinking, it's worth trying to extract more useful points from it.
He's correct that nothing has changed, and part of the reason why La Russa's return was so misguided is that it made it too easy to blame him. Give the White Sox a manager who fit under a standard chain of command and who was healthy enough to literally be heard by his team, and it would've been a lot less noise surrounding a roster that didn't appear to work. Instead, the Sox wasted the inflection point of the contention window, and that one terrible year is now dragging down a second.
But there are also problems beyond the players that Grifol's arrival didn't resolve, like the handling of injuries. The White Sox have played short-handed for six days because Eloy Jiménez may or may not be healthy, and what happened with Liam Hendriks is even more troubling.
Hendriks seems to have avoided the worst-case scenario with his right elbow inflammation. He said there's no structural damage, but he has to shut it down due to a fluid build-up that isn't getting out of the way. Given everything his body has been through during his fight with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a smooth recovery couldn't have been expected.
Yet when the White Sox placed Hendriks on the injured list with right elbow inflammation, Rick Hahn emphasized that the White Sox did the due-est of diligence ...
“I feel — at this point, based on everything we know — I feel confident in saying that the ramp-up and the return-to-play protocol did not influence this result,” Hahn said Sunday. “Has everything he’s been through, medically and physically, over the past six months, let’s say, potentially led us here? Maybe? I don’t know if anyone’s ever gonna know that. But in terms of his, once he was cleared and how he was ramped up and how he returned to play, I don’t think that’s a factor, based upon the fact that the number of medical professionals involved … this is perhaps the most thoroughly vetted return to play of any player in certainly my recent memory.”
... only to have Hendriks say a few days later that he's been hurting the whole time:
“It’s been sore for the last few weeks, ever since before my rehab assignment it was barking, but my mantra is to pitch things until I can’t,” Hendriks said Tuesday at Dodger Stadium. “It kept getting a little worse and worse and worse until the last couple of outings I wasn’t able to pitch through that pain.
Were this a one-off episode, you could maybe blame Hendriks for not being transparent about his condition when circumstances warranted more caution. But the 2022 White Sox were hamstrung by a major inability to recognize and reconcile injuries that visibly hampered "active" players, and Grifol's renowned communication skills don't seem to have made a dent.
Grifol hasn't been around the White Sox long enough to deserve much specific blame, but he also doesn't seem special enough to distinguish himself from the overall disarray, and I've wondered whether it's possible for somebody with few credentials to overcome such a dreadful first impression. During Hahn's giddiness over the hire, he mentioned that Reinsdorf likened the process to how the Bulls settled on Artūras Karnišovas, which is the only other time in recent history that Reinsdorf's teams bothered with a proper search. It wouldn't surprise me if he looked at the results of both as confirmation that new people are overrated, even if Grifol was commissioned the captain of a sinking ship.
It's probably too soon to call Grifol a dead man walking, but even before the record became the record, the word "stiff" came to mind when watching him go about his business. I've mostly regarded that as an adjective, but if Nightengale is doing more than speculating, the noun form might soon be in play.
