He was talking about relief pitcher usage on Friday afternoon, but Pedro Grifol wound up issuing the most succinct assessment of the 2024 White Sox major league club.
"We’re not in an ideal world right now," Grifol said, expounding upon why he's been more inclined to chase rare chances at victories with multi-inning Michael Kopech outings rather than keeping him available multiple days in a row. "We’re 2-10."
That the Sox are now very much 2-11 after being shellacked by the Cincinnati Reds does not really undermine the tone of anyone's pregame comments from Friday. This is a club that was built to defend and run better than they've shown, but never had the bats -- or full rotation -- to contend even before their 2-3-4 hitters all sustained significant injuries while running the bases. Now keeping things respectable looks like the true struggle.
Considering this theoretically, even in spring training, and watching this group slog through a grisly first couple of weeks are two different animals. This White Sox team looks a long ways away right now, driving WGN's Chris Boden to ask how this jibes with Jerry Reinsdorf's emphasis on turning this team as soon as possible -- a prominent part of his stated justification to stay internal and hire Chris Getz as general manager in the first place.
The emphasis is mine from Getz's response.
"We certainly prioritized certain areas to improve on the team, and on the defensive side and the pitching side and feel pretty good about that so far," Getz said. "Obviously it hasn't really shown well in our win-loss record at this point, but it's really about staying the course. This isn't something that was going to be turned around overnight. We’re determined as a front office and leadership group to continue to go out there and find talent on the amateur side, to continue to develop players, to put them in the pipeline to eventually help our major league club. We’re tasking our major league staff to maximize the talent that we have, and that's what we’re focused on right now. And we have support to do that because it is the right plan."
There are qualifiers to this ... The White Sox have mostly looked for more advanced minor league talent in trades. At 24, Lenyn Sosa was easily the youngest member of Friday night's lineup and is playing due to immediate need, not a mass directive to commit major league reps to developing younger players. The front office talked a lot about not being nihilistic about the major league club in a non-contending season, and trying to prove this is a good place to turn your career around ... But this is generally how you talk about a rebuilding club, where the most important additions are the ones that can affect future seasons.
In keeping with that, a lot of questions during Getz and Grifol's Friday media sessions centered around how and why Luis Robert Jr., Eloy Jiménez and Yoán Moncada all got injured in the process of baserunning. Grifol talked about his philosophy that players should try to hit maximum intensity during their warm-ups, so that it's not a big jolt for their body when they reach the same thresholds in games. Getz reminded that the biggest predictor of future injury is past injury and all three Sox mainstays have a track record that pointed to this possibility, but his answer ended up gazing out toward a world where finding a way to these particular players healthy carries less weight.
"Some of these guys are dealing with recurring injuries," Getz said. "When you have an injury, you are a higher risk of having a similar injury in the future. And you know that’s tough for players to accept and understand, and organizations as well. It’s our job to prevent something like that happening.
"Overall, it’s my job to build an organization that is resilient to injuries. Every team deals with them, and obviously we were hit with them here recently. But moving forward into the future, you’ve got to build out an organization to be able to take on some of these injuries and build out depth. We’ve certainly begun to do that just so when you are hit with them, you can continue to fight and compete and be as good as you can be."
This is both plainly obvious, but also markedly different from the past several years of simply longing for a season where Robert, Jiménez and Moncada all stay healthy and max out their potential together. The latter two are likely in their final seasons with the White Sox, making it a gimme putt for the GM to envision a roster that is not dependent upon them. But it's still meaningful for this organization, rather than preach to "basically stay healthy," to acknowledge that cannot be a regular excuse.
But even after a Friday night where Colson Montgomery, Edgar Quero and Jacob Gonzalez all homered, these are just pretty words and exciting plans. Until that depth arrives, the offensive strategy is going to feature a lot of rubbing two baserunners together and hoping to start a fire.
“Fundamentally, it really doesn't change in regards to giving consistent at-bats and understanding situations that are in front of you," Getz said of how the offense survives in its current state. "Pedro did a good job the last couple nights in terms of double steals and tacking on some runs here and there, and getting runners over from second with no outs. You've got to be creative at times and I think there is a level of creativity with this group. But I think it just starts with the quality of the at-bats one through nine."
Following up on this statement on the need for quality bats, a White Sox offense sitting their hottest hitter for platoon issues produced four baserunners, drew no walks and saw only 125 pitches through nine dreary innings Friday night. Asked if it was a product of hitters pressing in the absence of Robert, Moncada and Jiménez, and Grifol provided another blunt assessment that could double for the idealized depth that Getz hopes to eventually build.
"They are not here," Grifol said. "And they aren’t going to be here for a while."
