White Sox fire manager Pedro Grifol while on pace for worst modern MLB season

Pedro Grifol is out as the manager of the Chicago White Sox.

The second-year skipper’s tenure came to an end Thursday, just two days after the White Sox snapped their AL-record-tying 21-game losing streak and with the team steaming toward what could be the highest single-season loss total in modern baseball history.

That right there tells you all you need to know about this decision, the sort of decision that gets made when things are going poorly, especially this poorly, in professional sports, a results-oriented business where managers are expected to, simply, win. Under Grifol, the White Sox did very little winning, and he ended his relatively brief time as the South Side skipper with a ghastly win-loss record of 89-190.

“As we all recognize, our team’s performance this season has been disappointing on many levels,” Chris Getz said in the team’s announcement Thursday morning. “Despite the on-field struggles and lack of success, we appreciate the effort and professionalism Pedro and the staff brought to the ballpark every day. These two seasons have been very challenging. Unfortunately, the results were not there, and a change is necessary as we look to our future and the development of a new energy around the team.”

Of course, the calculus is different for a White Sox team that entered the 2024 campaign with little outside expectation of winning. They were handed a 0.0-percent chance of making the playoffs before the season began after a winter spent making low-cost additions that weren’t expected to do much to improve what had been the least productive offense in the sport a season earlier. Getz, still in his first year as general manager, eventually made it clear that the team was undergoing a long-term rebuilding project, even if that’s the sort of thing chairman Jerry Reinsdorf hoped to avoid when he promoted Getz to the top of the baseball department last summer.

Getz opted to keep Grifol in place when he took over last summer, citing the benefit of continuity for a team that had four managers – Rick Renteria, Tony La Russa, interim skipper Miguel Cairo, for a month, and Grifol – in four seasons. Certainly a frustrated fan base would have been supportive of the opposite decision. Grifol’s first season as a major league manager was a shocking disappointment. He was hired by Getz’s predecessor, Rick Hahn, with expectations of winning, of turning a team that stumbled to a .500 finish in 2022 into a division champion and World Series contender. Nothing close to that materialized, the team experiencing the same injuries and mistakes that defined the previous seasons, and finished with a whopping 101 losses.

The gears shifted to another rebuild, this one under Getz’s watch, and Grifol was suddenly tasked not with winning now but helping to develop a future winner. But on the field, the story stayed the same. The White Sox experienced another rash of stunning injuries, and the mistakes that were supposed to be exorcized by a refreshed roster focused on fundamentals didn’t go anywhere. The team has remained baseball’s worst offensive group and its worst defensive group.

But all of this has been true basically since Opening Day, and there was plenty of talk about Grifol’s job status earlier in the season. So why now?

Indeed, it seems the White Sox are at their lowest point, recently the losers of 21 consecutive games, which matched the AL record set by the Orioles in 1988. These White Sox are one of only three teams since 1901 to lose that many games in a row. They managed to snap the streak with a win Tuesday night in Oakland but lost Wednesday and limp home for this weekend’s Crosstown series a whopping 61 games below .500.

With 45 games remaining, the White Sox are on pace to lose 123 games, which would be the most losses in a single season in modern baseball history, worse than the 120 games the Mets lost in 1962, their first season as a franchise.

In what will likely be the ugliest season in team history, this is the ugliest things have been.

But Getz stuck with Grifol until this point. Then came the general manager’s media session after the trade deadline last week, and when asked if Grifol’s job would be safe through the end of the campaign, Getz offered this response:

“We just wrapped up the deadline. Just wanted to focus on that. We’ll get through tonight and kind of debrief and look through the players we acquired and move forward from there.”

That could be read as a lot of things. But what it wasn’t was a vote of confidence in Grifol, whose job status came under a new glare thanks to that answer from his GM. Later national reports described a meeting involving Reinsdorf, Getz and Grifol before the team hit the road last week.

A week after that meeting, Grifol is gone.

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It would be ridiculous to suggest that all of this is Grifol’s fault, of course. But as mentioned, this is the kind of thing that happens in Major League Baseball when things get this ugly.

Even with all that, though, it seemed Grifol would ride out the season in the manager’s chair, even if changes were coming in the offseason. Reinsdorf doesn’t seem to like to pay people not to do a job. What owner would? And with nothing to play for but avoiding the distinction of being the worst team of all time, what good will firing Grifol now do that couldn’t be accomplished by firing him after the season ends?

That question still needs an answer.

But Grifol failed to accomplish much of what he was tasked with. Chiefly, that means winning, and his win-loss record in a season and a half speaks loudly. More importantly, though, considering the team’s dramatic fall from expected contender to rebuilding cellar-dweller, is that in back-to-back seasons, Grifol’s teams didn’t come close to playing how he advertised they would.

He stepped into the job promising well prepared teams, unparalleled communication and fundamentally sound baseball. In 2023, the White Sox lost 101 times, needed a trade-deadline selloff to address clubhouse issues and made countless mistakes in all facets of the game. Grifol, after Getz’s roster makeover last winter, said things would look dramatically different in 2024, using his “play F.A.S.T.” mantra during the spring to preview a more aggressive, exciting style of play and a team that would do the little things well and not make the same kinds of mistakes that plagued the team in the previous seasons. None of that materialized. The White Sox are as far from aesthetically pleasing as ever.

That a manager cannot deliver in the win column is one thing. That a manager cannot deliver the type of team he advertises fielding is another.

Again, the White Sox’ problems are far from solved by a midseason managerial change in the worst year in franchise history, and Grifol was far from the biggest thing wrong with an organization Getz is attempting to makeover from the ground up. No matter who’s at the helm next season, there will not be expectations of winning on the South Side, certainly not from the outside, at least. And that this move is coming now seems to speak more to the optics of the current stretch of games than it does the bigger picture, as hideous as that current stretch has been.

The team will move into its latest managerial search, its third since the end of the 2020 season, trying to sell Grifol’s successor on what could be a long, long road back to contention. Getz’s rebuilding project has come with no clear timeline, and a murky one has been difficult to even estimate. While there is reason to be excited about a significant volume of pitching prospects and a minor league system that appears to be on the rise, there is no collection of big-name position-player prospects to project as a lineup of the future, as there was during Hahn’s rebuilding effort.

USA Today’s Bob Nightengale has, at various times, reported that current Marlins manager Skip Schumaker and former White Sox catcher A.J. Pierzynski could eventually be candidates for the job, though both come with the kinds of close ties to people at the top of the organization – Schumaker played for La Russa, now a front-office adviser, in St. Louis, while Pierzynski helped deliver the 2005 World Series to Reinsdorf – that Getz, and Hahn before him, talked about hoping to move away from.

In the meantime, one of the team’s coaches will step into an interim position and become the White Sox’ fifth skipper in five seasons, per The Score’s Bruce Levine. There will almost certainly be a sixth in six next year, with the team saying it expects to announce Grifol’s replacement after the end of the season.

That revolving door in the dugout is as big a statement on the state of the franchise as any. Of course, that will perhaps be overtaken by this dubious distinction that can be the big explanation for why Grifol is out: These 2024 White Sox could well wind up the worst baseball team ever.