Pedro Grifol’s year in quotes starts with the big one

Pedro Grifol briefly tried to connect with the public, but when it became abundantly clear that his attempt to plant a flag struck a gas line, it might explain why he abandoned that particular end of his job over the course of the regular season.

This is the quote that would've been the epitaph on the tombstone of Grifol's White Sox career if Jerry Reinsdorf and Chris Getz weren't so intent on trying to make something out of their contractual obligation.

Grifol really liked this line, because what he said to Chuck Garfien is the same thing he said in his introductory interview on 670 The Score, even adding the other game times.

White Sox fans liked it, too. It was an undeniably clear mission statement after six months of murkiness over who was in charge, and whether the person who was in charge was physically capable of performing the duties of the job. They were so visibly mismanaged, undermanaged or unmanaged as Tony La Russa battled issues that he wouldn't start disclosing until he stepped away in August, that the .500 record at the end of the 2022 season set a very tempting trap.

What if you could just take a .500 club and add a manager who possessed the health, energy and desire to drive the team for six months?

Except Grifol did not have the same team. It looked the same, because Rick Hahn and Kenny Williams were unsuccessful in their attempts to make any meaningful transformations. Other than replacing José Abreu with Andrew Benintendi and Johnny Cueto with Mike Clevinger while making Oscar Colás Plan A for right field way too early, the White Sox largely ran it back.

But under the hood was a collection of 50/50 calls about whether a player was capable of holding up his end of the bargain, and the White Sox lost far more coin flips than pure chance should've allowed. Aside from Luis Robert Jr., every player who had been hampered by injuries continued to be unable to push through them, leaving the Sox ill-prepared for new forms of disappointment like Dylan Cease's unremarkable season or Liam Hendriks' brutal cancer diagnosis.

All of that was a Rick Hahn problem, not a Pedro Grifol problem, but Grifol walked himself into a Rick Hahn problem by making that banner statement that he couldn't back up.

Most of Hahn's answers were prefabricated assortments of hedged sentences that he could rearrange to technically answer a given question, which made his forays into pithiness all the more bookmarkable. Things like "the money will be spent" and "ask me after the parade" stood out because they could be graded by a simple pass/fail system. The money wasn't spent. There were no parades. Case closed.

Likewise, Grifol said, "We're going to prepare every night to kick your ass," and then he said it again. The White Sox then went on to finish the season 61-101, somehow showing less fight than the previous season, when the manager struggled to be heard in a literal, audible sense.

Grifol never provided specific answers for why the White Sox never came close to delivering on this promise, because even a below-.500 team can make life difficult for the teams ahead of them in the standings. Once Jerry Reinsdorf fired Hahn and Williams, replaced them with Chris Getz, and Getz declared that Grifol's job was safe, the kicking shifted to kissing. Grifol mostly detached himself from the identity of the team he was managing and set forth declaring goals and characteristics for the team Getz hadn't yet built.

Those who watched the 2023 White Sox can fill in the answers themselves, and over a series of posts, I'll try to highlight some of Grifol's own words that explain, mostly unintentionally, why Grifol's team kicked so little ass.