Pedro Grifol future as White Sox manager gets national spotlight amid franchise-record losing streak

Only twice has a Chicago White Sox team lost 13 straight games in a single season.

One was 100 years ago, just one year into Calvin Coolidge’s presidency. Most recently, it’s your 2024 edition, which saw its ugly collection of consecutive losses reach a baker’s dozen Wednesday night at Wrigley Field.

“Thirteen straight,” Michael Kopech said, “it’s not fun.”

It’s the latest unwanted distinction for a group that’s on pace to be the worst bunch of South Siders in club history, currently sits as baseball’s worst team and could wind up among the worst major league teams of all-time.

This is not, of course, what Pedro Grifol signed up for.

Grifol jumped from the bench-coach job with the division-rival Royals to lead a White Sox team in win-now mode, a team that even in the wake of a massively disappointing .500 finish in 2022 was pegged as a favorite in the AL Central and built with an October run in mind. Instead, there were a stunning 101 losses in Grifol’s first season as a big league manager, significantly altering the expectations for his second, with a new general manager helming another long-term rebuilding project.

This year’s team was not expected to be good, and it hasn’t been good, with baseball’s worst record, at 15-47 after Wednesday’s defeat at the hands of the Crosstown-rival Cubs.

It was a replay of what happened a night earlier, this time the White Sox blowing a 5-1 lead and getting a clutch homer, only to cough things up at the very end, Kopech’s second pitch of the ninth inning blasted for a walk-off homer by Mike Tauchman that punctuated a second straight 7-6 final.

“It’s a broken record,” Nicky Lopez said after the game. “We have a hard time just putting everything together. We had a lead in four of the (last) five, but it’s a team game. It’s unfortunate. … We’ve got to put together those team wins.

“It sucks right now, obviously. We’re scuffling. We want to win so bad, trust me, but I feel I’m just a broken record.”

Two more losses Thursday and Friday against the Red Sox, and these White Sox will match another ugly franchise mark, the one for the most consecutive losses in club history, 15 straight “Ls” stretching across a couple seasons in the 1960s.

It’s been a whole lot of bad. And in this business, when things get this miserable, there’s talk about the manager’s job status. This is nothing new or surprising, of course. But when that talk reaches the national-media level, folks tend to consider it anew.

Ken Rosenthal wrote Wednesday for The Athletic that Grifol’s days are numbered, the losing so bad that he’s not destined to hold his job for much longer, even if it’s a mystery when Chris Getz or chairman Jerry Reinsdorf will actually make the call to make a change.

Much like Rick Hahn spent last summer reminding folks that talk of his job status stemmed from the results-oriented business of professional sports, Grifol took a similar tack in addressing questions about the story and his job before Wednesday’s game.

“I don’t focus on that stuff,” he said. “It’s a part of the job. 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.

“I don’t make those decisions. 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. I don’t make those decisions.”

It’s important to remember that things got so bad for the White Sox last summer that Hahn and Ken Williams lost their jobs atop the baseball department, a shocking move by Reinsdorf considering how long both men were at their posts.

Things are worse now, at least from a win-loss standpoint, and with Getz at the very outset of his rebuilding effort, the most logical place for consequences to befall team leadership would perhaps be the manager’s chair and Grifol.

Indeed, whether judging by the expectations set before a win-now 2023 season or the ones set prior to a rebuilding 2024 campaign, little that Grifol has promised about the way his teams would play has come to fruition.

The 2023 club was not delivering nightly ass-kickings, and the idea that Grifol and his staff were brought aboard to help perennially disappointing players reach their potential is somewhat laughable in hindsight as many mainstays of Hahn’s rebuild had career-worst seasons brought on by underperformance, injury or both, triggering a trade-deadline sell off right before Hahn and Williams were fired.

This past offseason was supposed to be about cleaning up the fundamental issues that plagued last year’s team, and though Getz’s mostly low-cost additions did little to inspire a turnaround for one of the least productive lineups in baseball, they were supposed to bring dramatic defensive improvement and allow for a different style of play emphasizing speed and fundamentals. Instead, the White Sox are the worst offensive team in the sport, the worst defensive team in the sport and have not exactly exorcised the mistakes that defined their downfall over the previous two seasons. And again injuries are everywhere.

It’s not to heap all the blame on Grifol alone. As Rosenthal wrote, he’s far from the biggest problem for a White Sox team full of poor performers. He’s not the one failing to score runs or blowing late leads.

“(The manager and the coaching staff) have a tough job,” Lopez said. “Our job as players is to go out there and compete the best we can. They give us the lineup and (say), ‘Hey, you guys ultimately got to go out there and get a W.’

“He’s not in that box hitting, and he’s not on that mound pitching. We have to wear it a little bit. They handle it a little differently than we do, and we handle it differently than they do.”

Other than his team’s daily worsening record, Grifol is catching national attention now thanks to his postgame comments more than a week ago, when he assessed his team as “f—ing flat” after it was no-hit across seven innings by Orioles pitcher Kyle Bradish. There was disagreement and disappointment throughout the clubhouse when it came to that outburst, if you want to call it that.

Grifol insisted he wasn’t trying to fire anyone up with those words, and all this time — and all these losses — later, he’s got nothing but good things to say about his team’s energy and effort.

“I have zero complaints about the effort, the energy, the willingness to play, the work we do,” Grifol said Wednesday, “just the way they go about it, the energy in the dugout, the adjustments they make, when I pinch-hit how they root for their teammates.

“These guys have given us everything they’ve got. … These guys are busting their ass, man, they really are. And I’m proud of them for that.

“At some point, this is going to break, and things are going to start rolling our way. You’ve got to believe that. If you don’t, then this is the wrong game for you.”

But no matter how things turn out, that “f—ing flat” moment will be a memorable one.

As focus intensifies on what Getz will do at the trade deadline — more national reports say he’ll listen on everyone and anyone, including young stars like Luis Robert Jr. and Garrett Crochet — it makes it hard to see things getting markedly better for the big league squad. Every sellable piece could depart, making it even harder to score runs and hold leads.

Even when this losing streak ends, another could be right around the corner.

Indeed, things should get more interesting for future-looking fans as the White Sox swap out traded veterans for younger players who figure to be part of Getz’s plans, guys like Colson Montgomery and some of the intriguing pitchers currently throwing at Double-A Birmingham.

But Grifol’s job will then change again, to one tasked with capitalizing on “learning experiences” and developing that group into successful major leaguers. All while the losses are likely to keep coming. At least that’s how things went the last time this team was in rebuilding mode.

“I’m comfortable with who I am as a baseball man and what I bring to the table. And these coaches are really good coaches that really care,” Grifol said. “We bleed this. This is what we do for a living. There’s a lot of sacrifices being made every single day by these coaches and myself to help these guys perform and continue to improve on a daily basis for us to win games.”

Win games. That’s the gig. The White Sox aren’t doing that.

And so we’re talking about Grifol’s job status.

But for how much longer?

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