Josh and I talked about it on the latest episode of the Sox Machine Podcast, but I want to highlight what Pedro Grifol said about the state of Andrew Vaughn in post form in the event that it needs to be referenced later.
The first three grafs of Daryl Van Schouwen's updated on Vaughn neatly encapsulate one of the off-putting elements of the Grifol administration:
First baseman Andrew Vaughn’s left foot still hurts when he walks — enough to have him in a boot, at times — but the White Sox aren’t considering putting him on the injured list right now.
Vaughn fouled a pitch off the foot Tuesday against the Mets and missed his fourth consecutive game Saturday against the Twins. The best-case scenario for a return is Tuesday, when the Sox host the Cubs, manager Pedro Grifol said. The team is off Monday.
‘‘We haven’t even talked about [the IL],’’ Grifol said.
Just to summarize the situation for if and when this is revisited years from now, Vaughn suffered a bone bruise last Tuesday and hasn't played since. He will be inactive for at least six consecutive days, which means he'd be more than halfway through the minimum stint on the injured list if the Sox shelved him within the three-day retroactive window.
Also, Vaughn is hitting .188/.204/.208 this month, with one double, zero walks and 15 strikeouts over 49 plate appearances, so a midseason reset might actually help.
If a struggling player is hurt enough to miss five consecutive games, why wouldn't a manager "even talk" about a possible move to the IL?
Of course, one shouldn't take Grifol literally. Back when Tim Anderson spent six weeks flailing at the top of the order, Grifol was asked about whether he'd consider trying somebody, anybody else. Grifol's response then: "Hasn't even crossed my mind."
Two days later, Grifol batted Andrew Benintendi leadoff, and Anderson hasn't returned to that spot since.
Unless you believe that Grifol truly hasn't given consideration to active problems over the course of days and weeks until somebody else raises the idea, I wouldn't take it at face value. It's fairer to treat it as a rhetorical tic in the spirit of the "dreaded vote of confidence," when a coach or manager has complete and unwavering support of the front office until they suddenly don't.
The problem is that it's not a great phrase to default to when your entire job is thinking about such things.
Maybe it's worth deploying when you're trying to support a struggling player like Anderson, and you don't want to saddle him with more criticism when you know he's putting in all the work he can to turn it around. It doesn't exactly look smart to say it that way, but I could see how it might help to redirect some heat.
There's no such benefit here. Vaughn is using a walking boot (at times), so it's not like he's trying to hide it from the media. The bone bruise does not have emotions, so it's not going to get better or worse in response to what Grifol says. This is something that's perfectly fine to "even talk about" or "even cross your mind," regardless of the course of action. "We've considered it, but..." accomplishes the same purpose while indicating awareness of the situation.
As somebody who battles with his own verbal crutches, there's a little bit of "physician, heal thyself" at play when devoting an entire post to somebody else's pet phrase. It just happens to symbolize the tension underlying Grifol's plight: Without a track record or any particular sort of magnetism or gravitas, everything becomes about the work, and saying you "haven't even thought about" a prominent problem suggests the work isn't being done, and the only confidence that inspires is the dreaded kind.
