PHOENIX – They say hope springs eternal, and nothing gets the imaginations of baseball fans going like shots of guys playing catch on green grass under the Arizona sun.
But while White Sox fans might be happy that the Earth has continued to revolve around the sun and brought baseball back to them, hope doesn’t exactly seem to be in ample supply.
And few are arguing it should be, not after a 101-loss 2023 campaign that went down as one of the worst seasons in franchise history and not after an offseason devoid of headline-grabbing additions.
None of that, though, is stopping the White Sox themselves from charting a new course.
The team is mostly assembled in the desert on the eve of pitchers and catchers’ official report date, with Pedro Grifol estimating only six or seven players – pitchers, catchers or otherwise – yet to show up. The second-year manager is understandably brimming as he starts a new year, happy to rid himself of the taste of last year’s 101 losses.
But frustrated fans aren’t likely to put 2023 in the rear-view mirror as easily as their team’s skipper. Grifol was a favorite target during last year’s jaw-dropping disappointment, and his return for a second season manning the bench is still sitting poorly with plenty. But he is, once again, promising something that should be music to those fans’ ears, even if they’re well within their right to be skeptical after watching his preseason promises fail to materialize last year.
“I’m not going to sit here and tell you (things went the way I expected them to) when our record says what it says. It didn’t go that way,” Grifol said Tuesday in Arizona. “But there’s things we’re looking to do a little different that set the tone of the direction that we want to go in as an organization, the style of play, and we’re prepared to do that.
“We turned over our roster. It’s a different message, a message we believe in, and we’re going to start applying it tomorrow.”
Indeed, the new White Sox brain trust, helmed by first-year general manager Chris Getz, focused plenty on getting back to basics this winter. And we’re talking really basic basics. Since starting his offseason work in November, Getz hammered home a priority on improving the team’s defense, which ranked near the bottom of the sport in each of the last two seasons. In fact, Getz revealed during his pre-spring media session Monday that free-agent pitchers voiced hesitation about signing with the White Sox considering how bad the defense has been.
In the world of pro sports, a dump truck full of money has a tendency to smooth out such concerns, and if the offseason moves the White Sox actually converted on are any indication, there might not have been a dump truck full of money available for Getz to offer, the payroll down significantly from where it was a year ago. But it was an attention-grabbing admission nonetheless, explanatory of why the White Sox operated the way they did this winter, adding fundamentally sound defenders in Paul DeJong, Nicky Lopez, Martín Maldonado and Dominic Fletcher rather than anyone who does a lot of damage with the bat.
But it says a lot about the state the team was in before Getz took over last summer that an emphasis on simply catching the ball on a consistent basis had to be made.
“Across the diamond,” Getz explained, “you have Paul DeJong and Nicky Lopez that are known for, at the very least, catching the baseball and making tremendous plays up the middle. You’ve got Luis Robert, who’s one of the best defenders in the game. And they all have offensive potential, they’ve shown it in the major leagues, but bare minimum, they’re going to catch the baseball, they’re going to be in the right position and make sound decisions. So that in itself, I think, is going to position us much better.”
Fans should be happy that the White Sox are promising fixes to the mistake-filled play that defined consecutive seasons of disappointment. But they’re justified in wondering whether it will produce vastly more wins than the meager 61 the team managed last year.
Getz acknowledged the obvious, saying the White Sox are far from a championship-caliber team. That’s putting it mildly, of course, and most preseason prognosticators are forecasting a lot of losing this summer on the South Side. But in prioritizing the littlest of things, Getz is showing exactly how big a makeover he’s planned for the organization, looking to establish an identity far from the one the team saddled itself with the last two seasons.
“Do I think we are, as an organization, where we need to be to be a championship-caliber club? We’re not there yet,” Getz said. “I want us to play cleaner, winning-type baseball. I’ve never been part of a team where anyone within our roster steps into the clubhouse and says, ‘Hey, we want X-amount of wins this year.’ It starts with the day in front of you, and when the season begins and Opening Day hits, you want to win that game. And then you just want to continue to play quality baseball, and then the wins start stacking up.
“I’m well aware of what the projections are. Our goal is to go beyond what the projections are, and I think most teams could say something like that or believe in something like that. You know what it takes, it takes a team to come together. We’ve got individuals that I think are selfless players, still have something to prove to themselves. We certainly don’t want to play games in which we beat ourselves.
“These guys are very capable players, and if they play to their potential they can beat anyone on any given night.”
The White Sox are looking to do a little bit more than just not screw up as much as they did in recent seasons, though, with Grifol ecstatic about the idea of a different style of play, one that features speed and aggression and running and doing the sorts of things that propelled the Diamondbacks to an NL pennant last year and the Guardians to an AL Central crown the year before.
If the White Sox are truly able to do that and look like a different team, Grifol pledges he could look like a totally different manager.
“I’ve talked a lot about the style of baseball I want to see us play. When we start executing the style of baseball I want to see us play, the managing part of it will be different,” he said. “We were a conservative club last year. We didn’t take many risks. We weren’t taking extra bases, we didn’t steal bases. I’m not looking to see that style of baseball this year. I’m not.
“You’ll see some of that here in the spring, you’ll see the differences here in the spring. That’ll change your managing style, just because guys are going to be doing more, they’re going to be more aggressive, they’re going to be a little more fearless. That’s what I’m asking these guys to go out there and do.”
Still, of course, questions remain. The new additions like Lopez, DeJong and Fletcher might be able to play that style of baseball. But what of the core of the lineup that remains from last year, most of whom are coming off disappointing campaigns and have yet to live up to their immense potential? Will Robert, Yoán Moncada, Eloy Jiménez, Andrew Benintendi and Andrew Vaughn suddenly start playing in a way they mostly didn’t last season? With Getz’s front office opting to make few offensive improvements via offseason additions, the bulk of turning around an offense that was one of baseball’s least productive in 2023 sits on those players’ shoulders.
Again, hope is perhaps in short supply outside the walls of Camelback Ranch. But inside, there’s an intention to deliver something different, something more exciting and something way more fun to watch. It might not make the biggest difference in the standings, where these White Sox are projected to finish near the bottom. But the hope is that it might lay the necessary foundation to bring wins in the years to come.
A frustrated fan base might find that a tough sell. But the White Sox are hoping to win folks over with the way they play.
“Last year’s last year. This year’s this year. And that’s why there’s a new schedule, 162 games to be played,” Grifol said. “If that’s the way my evaluation or our evaluation is going to be, great. If not? So be it.
“We’re going to have to prove it on the field every day.”
