Pregame Notes: With White Sox on cusp of record skid, Pedro Grifol on hot seat

Geez, you start to wonder if Pedro Grifol is going to wind up answering questions about his job status every day.

“I’m fine with it, addressing these questions,” Grifol said. “But I’m not going to sit here and address it every day.”

But with the White Sox on the precipice on matching a franchise record 13-game losing streak – a record that is literally 100 years-old – and all the other reasons Grifol’s reign in the dugout seemed unlikely to run past this year before the results of this season started rolling in, he addressed the obvious.

“It’s a part of the job,” Grifol said. “We’re not winning. So when you’re not winning, speculation gets higher and higher. It’s a part of what we do. We get signed up to win baseball games, and when you don’t, there’s always a possibility of a change being made. I didn’t read the article. I understand the question, I understand the stories. I get it all. I’ll answer the questions, but my answer’s always going to be the same.”

Grifol said he did not talk to Chris Getz to get an assessment of where he stood in the wake of Ken Rosenthal’s article in The Athletic about his status. A cynical read would be that if he did, Getz wouldn’t be able to give him great assurances, but Grifol simply termed it as not his place.

“Why would I do that? I don’t make those decisions,” Grifol said. “And I’m certainly not going to worry about it. My concern is making sure that this team is ready to play tonight, making adjustments from yesterday and trying to see if we can snap this losing streak that’s no fun and extremely painful. We’ve lost some painful games. But I’m certainly not going to make this about me and my future here. I’m not going to decide this anyway.”

Lenyn Sosa has put together a few days of impressive contact before at the major league level, only for “hunting his pitch” to transition sharply into “chasing in the dirt.”

But since returning to White Sox action last weekend in Milwaukee, Sosa is 4-for-10 with a walk and an authoritative homer, and maybe his least impressive swing Tuesday night was an infield single. For someone Sox fans have understandably tired of at times, Sosa is one of precious few major league-ready infield options in the organization with actual youth (24) and a notion of untapped potential that a .282/.333/.506 career line at Triple-A suggests.

“Last time they sent me down, when I went down to the minors I said to myself ‘Why am I thinking so much? I usually don’t do that,” Sosa said through an interpreter. “I just try to keep it simple and try to keep my focus. That’s what I was doing before, last time [in the minors], but now I’m able to do that here.”

To be blunt, Sosa’s chase rate has exploded in his brief major league stints. A jaded, forever scarred White Sox fan might posit that he lacks the bat speed and/or pitch recognition to be a disciplined hitter at the speed of major league level. A dispassionate viewer less scarred by their lived experience might hold out hope that the 24-year-old will relax when provided a sustained opportunity to acclimate to this level. A third person trying to mediate the conflict between these two theoretical people could reason that the White Sox infield depth simply leaves us with no other choice than to watch and find out.

“He looks relaxed,” Grifol said. “Sometimes it happens really quick and sometimes you've got to make two, three adjustments. Sometimes you have to get sent down a couple of times. But the fact that he's so young still and he's got experience here and he's shown some ability and he's made adjustments down there, it's extremely promising for us."

On the topic of viable infield options, a source confirmed the White Sox are close to a minor league deal with 28-year-old infielder Michael Chavis. Having recently opted out of his previous minor league contract with the Mariners, Chavis is likely to start out at Triple-A Charlotte, where he immediately offers the Knights more offensive potential at second base than Wilmer Difo and Angelo Castellano.

And since Chavis was hitting .290/.367/.485 with Triple-A Tacoma in 46 games this year, that could be of interest to a major league team getting a combined .249/.303/.298 line from their second basemen.

It’s been a decade since Chavis was a first-round pick, nine years since he was teammates with Yoán Moncada and Michael Kopech on the Low-A Greenville Drive, and five years since his promising rookie season with the Red Sox. Yet somehow Chavis is still younger than Nicky Lopez, who is batting second Wednesday night.

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