Various White Sox personnel are less than a week away from having to pretend they can speak about a team that has left them utterly nothing to say.
Pedro Grifol has spent the last four months oscillating between two settings: Claiming the White Sox are building a culture, and undermining those claims by castigating his team's lack of effort. After Tuesday's 15-4 loss to the Diamondbacks, he was back to pretending he had any ability to instill any accountability in a team that's listing toward 100 losses:
Eloy Jiménez launched a three-run homer in the first Tuesday, and the White Sox (60-97) held a 4-1 lead in the second. Arizona (83-74) scored 14 unanswered runs against a less-than-intense looking South Side squad, which is never acceptable for Grifol.
“Early on it wasn’t at all. But once you get behind and the game kind of gets out of hand, that happens,” Grifol said. “You still have to respect the game and go out there and do your job. … That’s what’s expected.”
Remember, it was only a month ago that Grifol said:
“When you give up five runs in the first inning and four in the fourth or fifth, and you’re down 9-1, that’s kind of what happens,” Grifol said. “And is it acceptable? No. But that’s what happens. … It’s unacceptable, because our job is to start the game and finish it with energy. And I will address that.”
Of course he didn't, because after 100-plus games of a sham season, he provided no evidence that he could. And if you're to take him at his word that next year's judgment will "all going to be based on wins and losses" rather than an assumed level of talent that maybe never actually existed, then he's painted himself into another rhetorical corner, because Chris Getz sounds like he's pumping the brakes on any sort of quick turnaround.
Getz met with reporters before Tuesday's game and ran into a similar problem with how little he can say. There's no incentive for him to speak in specifics about the impending contract decisions for Liam Hendriks and Tim Anderson before he makes those moves, but he also couldn't deliver generalities about a potential direction for next season:
“I think that there are a lot of players on this team and a lot of pieces that can help a team win a division and have some success at the major league level,” he said. “However, what’s best for us in the short term and long term, that’s going to take kind of a deeper dive.
“For me, it’s coming in here and (figuring out) foundationally where are we with different departments so we can avoid these extreme swings. That’s been the focus and will remain (the focus). As we move through October and November, we’ll start focusing more on what we need to do to put the best team forward for next year and years further.”
This is all reasonable, except it undermines Jerry Reinsdorf's reasoning for hiring Getz without interviewing any other external candidates. Reinsdorf allegedly hired Getz because any outsider would need a year to evaluate what the White Sox have and what they need to do to address those issues, whereas Getz could hit the ground running.
“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.”
Getz echoed Reinsdorf's sentiments by trumpeting his knowledge of the White Sox's "gaps." A month into the job, Getz says he still needs to take a deeper dive into all the areas the White Sox are deficient.
In insolation, I suppose that's preferable. I'd rather have Getz being noncommittal about 2024 than blaring intentions to complete a half-finished roster in one offseason, because the former is a far healthier assessment of an unwell franchise. There's just the small matter that Getz's stance eliminates the whole point of Getz's unchallenged rise to this role, especially when the only commitment Getz has made is to a nullity of a manager.
In a world where Grifol could be gone after Sunday, it'd be a lot easier for Getz to take his gap year. Instead, he's running the risk of overhauling a roster, just to hand it to a guy who failed to meet every challenge. The only thing we can see is Getz prioritizing stability over ability, which is exactly how Reinsdorf steered this franchise into the deadest of ends.
Maybe Grifol buttered up Reinsdorf sufficiently to the point where Getz couldn't remove Grifol if he wanted to, but that's not any better. Therein lies the challenge for Getz, Grifol, and everybody downstream of Reinsdorf's malignant neglect: It's damn near impossible to establish a culture when nobody can believe a word anybody says.
