While Pedro Grifol seemed to meet most of Rick Hahn's criteria during the most recent White Sox managerial search, one box went unchecked: "recent experience in the dugout with an organization that has contended for championships."
If you tossed out the first word, Grifol would've passed with flying colors, as he was the catching instructor for the both the 2014 and 2015 Royals. But over the following years, Grifol ascended the ranks of the coaching staff as Kansas City tumbled down the standings.
| Year | Position | Record |
|---|---|---|
| 2016 | Catching instructor | 81-81 |
| 2017 | Catching instructor | 80-82 |
| 2018 | Quality control/catching | 58-104 |
| 2019 | Quality control/catching | 59-103 |
| 2020 | Bench coach | 26-34 |
| 2021 | Bench coach | 74-88 |
| 2022 | Bench coach | 65-97 |
Considering the White Sox have never made conventional postseasons in consecutive years, you can't take the Royals' consecutive American League pennants away from them. You just couldn't call it "recent" after the World Series title was followed by seven consecutive seasons without a winning record.
All that losing followed Grifol to Chicago. The White Sox beat the Astros on Opening Day, then never spent another day of the season over .500. Hell, they never touched .500 after Game 6. Following that 7-3 victory over the Giants on April 5, they lost 17 of their next 21, and only the lousy state of the AL Central kept them the least bit relevant afterward.
In the middle of a 10-game losing streak, Grifol reminded everybody of his former employer's terrible track record as he attempted to counter circling the drain with some positive spin.
"I've been on teams that you go through a streak like this and you know the season is over. This doesn't feel that way. It doesn't feel that way at all."
Pedro Grifol, April 26, 2023
Grifol said that to reporters the day after the White Sox were shut out by the Blue Jays, 7-0. The White Sox then proceeded to get shut out by the Blue Jays, 8-0, to cap off a four-game sweep. They'd return home to face the Tampa Bay Rays, where they'd lose three more in a row before the skid came to a merciful, graceless end.
If Grifol was correct, it's that the season wasn't over. Thanks to the AL Central's general ineptitude, the White Sox pulled within 3½ games of first place while being seven games under .500, and they didn't fall 10 games out of first until the second half of the season.
But the White Sox never resembled an actual contender at any point in the season, and whether referring the micro or the macro, Grifol was always the last to confirm the problem.
James Fegan followed up on what Grifol said a few losses later, and just like the first two quotes we've discussed in this series, Grifol doubled down on it.
With a new slate of deeply discouraging blowout losses since Grifol said in Toronto that this awful start in the standings didn’t feel as disqualifying as it might be for less talented, less engaged teams, I asked whether that endorsement still held true.
“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.”
The sentiment is understandable, but he couldn't actualize it, partially because of the way his optimism clouded his thinking elsewhere.
Reviewing Grifol's elaboration, these lines jumped out to me ...
I wake up every morning and my feeling is today is going to be the day we start something really good.
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.
... because they mirrored the way he defended leaving Tim Anderson in the leadoff spot until late June:
"I know at any given day he could start feeling really good. We’ve got 92 games left, [he could get] 120 hits the rest of the year. I don’t react that way."
In the first nine games of June that preceded that question and answer about Anderson, he hit .211/.250/.263. In the 11 games that followed the quote, he hit .098/.136/.098. The biggest consequence Anderson faced for his performance was batting second instead of first. Otherwise, he was free to amass enough plate appearances to qualify as baseball's least productive regular.
Likewise, Grifol spent the first half of the season insisting that the team wasn't a lost cause, but when Rick Hahn assessed the fight of the White Sox in a hopeless attempt to refute Keynan Middleton's comments, he said the team just didn't have it.
“You learn a lot about people’s character during times of adversity,” Hahn said. “Unfortunately, we got off to a wretched start and the way the room responded was not the way we had hoped.”
Is that the players’ fault or the manager’s? Or — wait — does the blame lie with Hahn and Kenny Williams, who put the roster together?
“I perhaps overestimated the strength in that room to deal with adversity,” Hahn said.
So did Grifol. Whether he was looking at Anderson, or Andrew Benintendi, or the team as a whole, he didn't want to react "that way," but the result was that he didn't react in any way at all. Grifol might've been attempting to convey optimism or determination, but it ended up resembling plain ol' denial.
