I wasn't going to use it in my Pedro Grifol Year in Quotes series because he pretty clearly misspoke and there were enough regrettable lines that he intended as stated, but there's a sentence he uttered in the wake of the Keynan Middleton fiasco last August that keeps coming back to me this season:
“We’re moving forward with a new-laid foundation on rock — not on muck, on rock — that is going to sustain any little problem that we may have.”
Reading the other accounts of Grifol's sermon, most of the writers were taken by the rock-muck-Jayhawk metaphor in yet another attempt to pretend he was doing great things nobody had the experience to understand, but I was distracted by the Freudian slip with "sustain." From the context, he either substituted an incorrect verb (replacing something like withstand) or skipped over a preposition (sustain through), but watching a mucked-up White Sox team stumble through the first two months of 2024, the verbatim line is still the truest version of it.
Under Grifol, the White Sox truly sustain problems. You need look no further than the WAR leaderboards. Andrew Benintendi is baseball's least productive player both by fWAR (-1.6) and bWAR (-2.1). Martín Maldonado is right behind him on the former list (-1.5), and ranks third on the latter (-1.2). Andrew Vaughn is bottom five on FanGraphs (-0.9), while Baseball-Reference.com is slightly more forgiving (-0.8, only tied for 15th-worst). They're negatives on offense, they're negatives on defense, and even Benintendi is grading out as a negative baserunner this year.
Yet as James relayed in the pregame notes before Wednesday's 3-1 loss to Toronto that cinched the longest winless homestand in White Sox history, Grifol still can't shift gears. The same guy who called his players "flat," preceded by a saucy expletive and followed a day later by the world's most conspicuous doubling-down, demonstrated some crepe-thin work of his own.
With regards to the Andrews, Grifol said:
“You can get creative with some stuff but you also can’t overreact to a couple months of baseball,” Grifol said. “When you’ve done something for such a long time and you’ve done it consistently, two months of baseball, two months of facing adversity is not going to force me to overreact on anything. I’m not going to do that. I believe in these guys. I believe in their ability. I’ve seen what they can do on the field and I’m not going to overreact to 150, 160 at-bats.”
Meanwhile, Scott Merkin tweeted Grifol's thoughts about Maldonado:
"I understand it. I get it. I talked about it before on things that are happening internal that we feel is best for this team. I don’t want to share and I’m not going to. There’s a method to this that we know, that we feel this is the best system right now ...
"This can change from day to day, week to week. Right now we are comfortable with what’s going on. Martin Maldonado is not a .300 hitter but he’s not a .100 hitter either. So eventually he’ll run into some balls and he’ll do what he normally does."
Maldonado isn't even a .100 hitter right now -- .081 with a 37-percent strikeout rate -- but he is wearing some new glasses. That doesn't seem like the root problem of a 37-year-old catcher who will play his 1,150th game the next time he takes the field, but by trying something he's never tried before, it's more than Grifol is doing.
Coming off a season where the White Sox were sunk by veterans who never approached their career norms no matter how many games and plate appearances they racked up, Grifol still doesn't respond to alarms. He rolls over, hits the snooze button on his carbon monoxide detector, and goes back to sleep. Every possible reaction is an overreaction to him, which means he's doing nothing, but in a condescending fashion.
A guy with the worst record of any White Sox manager to last a full season shouldn't count on having so many games and months left for regression to save him, but since Grifol continues to profess a staggering ignorance to the bigger picture, there's probably no point in bringing up his 76-143 record, or the fact that Lew Fonseca's .380 winning percentage is a distant second.
Grifol on the first 0-7 homestand in franchise history, how tough it is: "15 and 40-whatever is tough. I don’t break it down that much to 0-7 the first one in history. I don’t break it down that much. I just break it down that today we didn’t win a baseball game."
— Scott Merkin (@scottmerkin) May 30, 2024
It's 15-42 now after eight straight losses, but Grifol's alleged focus is so narrow that he doesn't realize he's living in a Groundhog Day scenario. The outcomes are never going to change because he never attempts any meaningful changes. Alas, Phil Connors realized something was amiss when every morning started with "I Got You, Babe," and Grifol doesn't recognize songs.
So Andrew Benintendi and Andrew Vaughn are this year's Andrew Benintendi and Honorary Andrew Tim Anderson, and rather than adapting or growing from experience, Grifol's instinct for self-preservation still only leads him to flatter his bosses to excessive levels. Instead of Chris Getz, this time it's Jerry Reinsdorf, with Daryl Van Schouwen catching Grifol on a roll of prolonged obsequiousness:
“He’s not just a fan. The questions he asks, he knows exactly what’s going on. He knows the game. You’re not in the game for 44 years, around 1,000 coaches, sitting in on meetings and listen and listen and listen and watch and watch and not know the game. He’s passionate, he’s extremely competitive.” [...]
“He’s a smart, smart business guy and baseball guy. And believe it or not, he’s a good evaluator as well.”
Granting that Grifol generously gave people the option to not believe it, maybe this approach will work because Reinsdorf likes to have his baseball acumen audibly appreciated, or maybe it only looks like it's working because Reinsdorf wants to avoid paying two managers for as long as possible, but is happy to take the compliments while he waits. Either way, it's a miserable outcome for customers, because Grifol is only serving an audience of one, and his real actual audience of thousands loathes that one.
Retaining Grifol is the ultimate in fan disservice, not just because a head needs to roll, but because he can't bring himself to acknowledge what everybody else sees. That makes him impossible to trust, and when players are openly questioning his interpretation of events, the presentation of dual realities can no longer be considered an external issue. Firing him wouldn't make a course-changing impact for a team ZiPS now projects to go 56-106, but it also wouldn't be an overreaction, because Grifol is one of the problems the White Sox are sustaining.
