Reportedly sticking around, Pedro Grifol knows ‘the day you get hired, you’re on the hot seat’

Pedro Grifol might get a break from answering questions about his future now that USA Today’s Bob Nightengale has reported that the Chicago White Sox have no immediate plans to make a managerial change in the middle of the worst start to a season in franchise history.

But Grifol also knows what he got himself into.

“It doesn’t matter what job you have, in any sport, if it’s a high-profile job, which all these jobs are, the day you get hired you’re on the hot seat, to be honest with you,” he said in a Sunday conversation with CHGO. “That’s just the way it works.”

The White Sox are in a much different place than they were when Grifol got the job in the wake of the disappointment of a .500 finish in 2022. He was hired to get an underachieving group to championship-contender status. That obviously didn’t happen, with the South Siders stumbling to a shocking 101-loss campaign in 2023, forcing a trade-deadline selloff and a rare change of leadership atop the baseball department, spurring the start of a new long-term rebuilding project under new general manager Chris Getz.

But with the team piling up losses in record fashion — they’re on pace for 120 of them, which would rank as the most in club history — the frustrations in the fan base are as loud as ever, and plenty of that angst has turned toward Grifol.

Not only have typically quick-to-react fans advocated for a new bench boss, but in the wake of assessing some of his players as “f—ing flat” in a May game against the Orioles, Grifol’s job status became a national talking point, with Ken Rosenthal writing for The Athletic that Grifol’s days are numbered, even if it was a mystery when Getz and Jerry Reinsdorf would actually make a decision to end Grifol’s tenure.

And indeed, that tenure has been tough. A brutal first month as a major league manager crippled the 2023 team from the get-go, then came the opening month of this season, which was worse. The White Sox started 3-22 before a couple weeks of better play. That proved short-lived, though, preceding a just-snapped 14-game losing streak.

All told, Grifol’s managerial record is objectively putrid, at 78-150 after Sunday’s fall-from-ahead loss to the Red Sox.

That number alone doesn’t pack in much context. Grifol is not the biggest thing wrong with a team that has underachieved for three years now. But it simultaneously stands as an example of how black and white things can be in pro sports, a results-oriented business where failing to get the job done in the win column often comes with consequences.

Grifol might be in his first major league managerial gig, but he spent plenty of time watching former Royals skippers Ned Yost and Mike Matheny during his days coaching in Kansas City, where he got an education in how to handle this type of firestorm.

“Those guys were always on the hot seat, always,” Grifol said. “And until Ned won a championship there, went to a World Series and won a championship, he was always on the hot seat. Shit, he was on the hot seat in Milwaukee when he should have never been, in my opinion. And the hot seat became burning at one point. They made a change with 10 games left or something like that. And Matheny, if you look at it, he was probably on the hot seat in St. Louis for the back end of his career over there. And that was an instrumental part (for) me, watching them.

“The thing I get out of it is: Don’t focus on that. … Those guys were really instrumental for me, man, watching how they handled the players, watching how they handled the clubhouse, watching how they handled the media and the speculations about their jobs and never made it about them. It was actually cool for us to see, as a staff. ‘This guy’s on the hot seat, but it he’s protecting us and caring for us.’”

Nightengale wrote Sunday of the White Sox’ belief that changing managers at this point in a rebuilding season wouldn’t change much from a win-loss standpoint, and that sounds plenty reasonable. A roster full of low-cost offseason additions, and again plagued with injuries to key players, has turned in some of the worst offensive and defensive numbers in baseball. Considering Grifol hasn’t been the one out there swinging the bats or making mistakes in the field, removing him from the equation might not change much.

Per Nightengale, the White Sox are planning to wait until the offseason to make their ultimate decision on Grifol, who has one more season on his contract following this one. Shifting gears from last year’s win-now mode to this year’s rebuilding mode, Grifol and his staff will be focusing on development more than expected over the remainder of the 2024 campaign. How that goes and what steps the team can take toward a better 2025 figure to play a large role in that decision-making process.

“I’m always going to do what’s right for the organization and for the players,” Grifol said. “There’s a fine line with compromising a major league game and development and the organization, so there’s a lot of things you have to put together when you make decisions, especially at this level. In the minor leagues, it’s easy. In the minor leagues, you can compromise a game for the sake of development. Here you can’t do that. But you’ve still got to develop, and you’ve still got to win a game.

“I’m always going to do what’s right, even if it affects me. I’m going to work as hard as I can possibly work. I’m going to care. I care for this, for everybody around here, my job. I’m going to give my best every single day, no matter what, because this is what I live for, this is what I have passion for. This is what I was born to do. In my mind, in my heart, this is what I was born to do.

“How they evaluate me? That’s not my job. I leave that to the people whose job that is. I don’t really focus on that.”

Grifol’s win-loss record might not tell the whole story of his tough tenure, but certainly he hasn’t been able to deliver on what he pitched for this team two years in a row. He excited fans during his introductory press conference by talking about how he expected these White Sox to be prepared — “to kick your ass” — on a nightly basis, only for that team to turn in one of the sport’s least productive lineups and worst defenses. A year later, he was focused on improving fundamentals and the idea of “playing F.A.S.T.” That hasn’t materialized, either, at least not consistently enough, and the numbers have been equally woeful, if not worse.

That’s the definition of not getting the job done, even if he wasn’t the one who put the rosters together, spent time on the injured list or made mistakes in the field.

But Grifol feels he can point to positive progress in the early stages of this rebuild, whether that’s on-the-field success stories like Garrett Crochet or the work of building a foundation in certain areas, such as what’s going on in a seemingly strong White Sox clubhouse.

“That’s where it starts,” Grifol said. “You set a foundation of a place that everyone wants to be a part of. It frees everybody up to be themselves and to go out and perform. It also opens up the doors for everybody on the outside to want to be a part of this. That’s where it starts.

“I know people don’t want to hear it, because it’s all about wins and losses. … But over time, I’ve learned that a really good foundation in there sets the organization up for sustained success. … That’s how you continue to build this thing, and that’s how you continue to develop the guys that are in there and attract everybody else that wants to be a part of it. We’re in the process of doing that. That’s what we’re doing.”

We’ll see if stuff like that is enough to convince the decision-makers to give Grifol another year at the helm, if Nightengale’s reporting turns out to be how the White Sox play things, or if Rosenthal’s reporting that Grifol’s departure is more a matter of “when” than “if” winds up being the case.

In the meantime, Grifol has a job to do, and that’s what he’s focused on. It might not be the job he anticipated when he signed up, captaining a rebuilding team through what could end up the worst season in franchise history.

But he knew what sort of industry he was part of, what sort of expectations come along with the gig, one where being on the hot seat and hearing about your future was included in the description.

[MORE SOX: Lucas Giolito and Liam Hendriks weigh in on latest South Side rebuild]

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