It pales in comparison to owning the worst winning percentage of anybody who's managed the White Sox over their 124-year history, but now that Pedro Grifol's 2024 season is over, he'll also finish with the worst managerial challenge record this year.
Grifol challenged 13 calls in 2024, the fewest of MLB manager. He won just three of those challenges, by far the worst of any manager. That's a success rate of 23.1 percent. The league average is 53.3 percent.
That sums up the Grifol era rather fittingly: He didn't often put up a fight, and when he did, it was soundly defeated. In both cases, he leaves with a winning percentage starting with a "2."
The sympathetic read of Grifol's tenure was that he was the wrong man at the wrong time, but that assumes two facts not in evidence:
- That there would be a right man for taking over the Late-Stage White Sox in the last months of the Kenny Williams-Rick Hahn era.
- That Pedro Grifol would be the right man for any managerial job.
And I'm skeptical that there's an answer in the affirmative for either.
Even if a credible veteran manager took over for La Russa -- let's say Ron Washington -- he'd still have to deal with busted Plan A's at half of the defensive positions, unless the White Sox wouldn't have inherited Andrew Benintendi's wrist issue without Grifol's endorsement. Maybe this alternate result would've been more palatable because Washington would be a better motivator, but then again, that might have only worked to save the jobs of Hahn and Williams, which wouldn't have helped in the long run.
But even judging Grifol when accounting for the doomed environment, he still managed to underperform, and to a staggering degree.
It's not just that Grifol somehow finished 101 games under .500 in fewer than 300 games total, although that explains it well enough. Beyond the results, Grifol was devoid of any enduring attribute of leadership during his time ostensibly leading. He showed no capacity for problem-solving, no capacity for conflict, no capacity for messaging, no capacity for reading a room, no capacity for reflection.
He came into Chicago planting a flag with a memorable mission statement -- "We're going to prepare every night to kick your ass" -- and his first spring training emphasized efficiency to reduce pointless exercises. Then the games started to count, the White Sox lost 10 in a row to start the season 7-21, and Grifol chose self-preservation at every turn the rest of the way. He let underperforming veterans take as long as they needed, regardless of how little they produced or how into the game they appeared to be. If he needed to make a point, he usually did so with rookies, or anybody else without standing.
As the losses piled up, Grifol never changed course. He seldom even offered specific examples of what he could do differently, which would at least show that he could identify issues. Instead, he responded by sucking up to the people who could best sustain his status, and loudly. He went over the head of Hahn and Williams and told reporters to "talk to Jerry" back in June 2023, a curious appeal to his boss' boss' boss because he probably sensed who was the best bet for continued employment. When Chris Getz took over, Grifol couldn't stop calling him "smart," and saying he wanted a team that played baseball the way Getz did, not understanding the risk of getting what he asked for. While those covering thought La Russa's constant presence complicated the chain of command, Grifol simply couldn't get enough of the guy.
This penchant for excessive flattery culminated last week in a tone-deaf paean to Reinsdorf as the White Sox sought to end a losing streak that was only 17 games at the time:
‘‘He’s an incredible owner, an incredible man,’’ Grifol said. ‘‘I know how much he loves Chicago and how much he loves those fans.
‘‘Jerry’s a winner, OK? He’s an absolute winner."
Grifol simply was never aware of how he sounded, which is tragic considering all the energy he devoted to guessing what people wanted to hear. Most of the time, there was only a small gap between the two that revealed itself over weeks, like repeatedly insisting the White Sox were building a foundation and a culture, when in reality it was as close to fruition as the new Sox ballpark in the South Loop. Other times, he'd make a questionable assertion that required revision within hours (his tell for reducing a struggling player's responsibilities was saying he hadn't even thought about it).
And sometimes the artifice was immediately apparent. When his team objected to being called an expletive-sauced kind of "flat" when they were nearly no-hit by Kyle Bradish in May, Grifol doubled down by literally saying, "I'm doubling down." Nobody does that without worrying levels of self-consciousness, and it ended up being one of Grifol's few known regrets.
The best example, of course, remains his baffling reaction to the solar eclipse in April.
“I’ll see videos of it, see what it looks like,” Grifol had said, “but there’s baseball. I probably shouldn’t say that, [but] family and baseball. People don’t believe it, but I live it. That’s all that matters.”
What he thought sounded best was complete devotion to his job, but it instead came off as a performative, phony, tryhard act, because players and coaches on both teams took advantage of their luck to watch totality on the field, and Grifol admitted after the game that he saw the eclipse after all.
Grifol's entire White Sox career is an effective counterpoint to the strategy of "fake it 'til you make it," because if you don't end up making it, then you're simply a fake.
Which is what Grifol was, at least when it came to his outward-facing responsibilities. Whether or not he was a decent man who meant well, those on the outside looking in simply had no reason to trust his read on a player or a situation. If you asked him the weather and he said, "70 and sunny," you'd learn pretty quickly to have an umbrella on hand, because you'd have no way of knowing whether Grifol was being real or aspirational. Only the 2024 White Sox can make optimism a crime.
In that sense, it's poetic that Grifol's success rate challenging umpire calls matched his larger record. Was he asking for a second look because he really thought the play unfolded differently, or because he desperately needed others to see it a way it never was?
