MINNEAPOLIS -- In the bottom of the eighth inning of Thursday afternoon's 6-3 loss to the Twins, a White Sox team that pledged to improve its defense and play guys out of position less often, rolled out an outfield of Robbie Grossman in left, Andrew Benintendi in center and Gavin Sheets in right.
It's the byproduct of unsuccessful efforts to juice the worst offense in MLB, which scored 18 runs and homered four times during this winless seven-game road trip, whereas the Twins left the yard five times in the final three innings Thursday. Earlier in the day, offseason rotation acquisition Michael Soroka had one of his better outings of a difficult season undone by back-to-back homers to lead off the sixth, but his remade delivery had produced zero swinging strikes over 68 pitches. Sox pitching and defense collaborated to allow six runs or more in every game of this ongoing losing streak.
"I believe things will turn around, and this group is definitely making the effort to do that," Soroka said. "Everybody wants it. We’ve been over this before, as a team and with you guys, there’s no lack of effort that’s going into turning this thing around. At this point, we’ve talked about it and we want to be the group that does kind of make that change in this organization."
"We all want to be good," said Andrew Vaughn, who collected his fourth extra-base hit of the season on Thursday. "We’re all working our butts off. But it definitely hasn’t gone our way."
For the 3-22 White Sox, off to one of the three worst starts in MLB since 1901, nothing is going to even the most humble of plans.
For Pedro Grifol, the start has further cemented him as the least successful manager in team history to have helmed a full season. A .342 winning percentage puts Grifol above only Les Moss and Ed Walsh, neither of whom managed as many as 40 games for the White Sox. Who knows if Walsh would have sullied his Hall of Fame pitching career with three games in the manager chair if he knew his 1-2 record would have such an enduring place in Sox history. But Grifol spent over a decade working his way up the coaching ladder for this opportunity, and has perilously few success stories to point to in his tenure.
"I’m not going to sit here and tell you that I’m oblivious to our record and oblivious to things because I’m not," Grifol said Sunday. "At the same time, I’m not going to concern myself with that. I know the job this staff is doing. I know the players, the effort they are putting in. I know the care, the want, the will to have success. I know the work that’s going on. That’s the only thing we can control."
New general manager Chris Getz announced his plans to retain Grifol for 2024 during his own introductory press conference last August, and has offloaded blame from his manager for the team's fortunes multiple times since. Adding a coaching search to an offseason already filled with organizational overhaul, or saddling a new manager with a roster universally expected to struggle never seemed worth the effort for a franchise more focused on rebuilding their talent base this year.
But even with an organization that was prepared to give Grifol the year for a season where contention was never expected, a historically awful start regularly raises the question: When do the results become unacceptable? When does continuing with Grifol at the helm become untenable? Getz will surely get pressed with that question during this coming White Sox homestand, but Grifol was not surprised by it at the end of another nightmarish road trip.
"Last year we went through it in the middle of the year," Grifol said. "I said it: 'This is on the manager. This is on me.' It is what it is. It’s part of the job. You don’t take this job thinking ‘Oh, man. Maybe there’s pressure. Maybe there’s no pressure.’ You take the job knowing there’s pressure. It just comes with the job.
"I actually enjoy pressure. I really do. It just keeps me going. It motivates me. It gets me up in the morning. It keeps me creative. That’s just the way I’m wired. I enjoy it. I don’t like losing. I don’t think anybody in this clubhouse does. We know where we are at and we know the work we have to put in to get out of it. The rest of the stuff is not something we control."
For as many issues already get raised publicly about the way Grifol has managed the White Sox, looking over his shoulder surely wouldn't help. But he didn't come off as a man worried about the organizational machinations above him that are beyond his control.
"I can tell you I’ve had conversations, good conversations with Chris and I’ve had conversations with Jerry [Reinsdorf], not about my job or job security or anything like that," Grifol said. "I talk to [Getz] quite a bit, either in text or on the phone. I’ve talked to him a couple of times this morning already. We are all in this thing together and we are all trying to get out of this and start moving in the direction we feel like we are going to be. There’s some things that have to get done and we have to continue to stay true to the process."
Players, coach and executives pride themselves on all being process-oriented, but at some point the results say plenty on their own. And the White Sox's results under Grifol continue to put his performance under the microscope.
