Pedro Grifol Continues To Embarrass Himself As White Sox Manager

There is plenty of blame to go around for the last two years of miserable baseball that has taken place on the South Side. 

Like Rick Renteria and Tony La Russa before him, Pedro Grifol will likely take the heat for another disappointing season. The manager always is the easiest scapegoat.

This season cannot be blamed solely on Pedro Grifol. After cycling through three different managers who have failed to produce the results the organization is looking for it is clear the White Sox have much larger problems than the manager. That being said it’s hard to find anything that Grifol has done well this season

Rick Renteria’s teams showed some fight and development. Tony La Russa led an injury-riddled team to an AL Central title. Both had their shortcomings as managers but at least they produced some positive results. The same cannot be said for Grifol. 

Grifol was tasked with reviving a talented roster that had gone 81-81 the year before into a contender. He came in with talk about building a winning culture and changing the way the White Sox prepare for games. Over 100 games into his first season as a big league manager it is clear that he has no idea what a winning culture is supposed to look like. 

The first warning sign should have been the fact that he came from a Royals club that hasn’t had a winning season since 2015. But he said all the right things in his press conference and received rave reviews from former players so that could be easily overlooked. The hire seemed to make sense at the time. 

Despite saying all the right things in public he failed to set the tone behind the scenes. Keynan Middleton’s comments in a recent ESPN article shed some light on just how dysfunctional things were. Not all of this can be pinned on Grifol since these issues had been occurring long before he was hired. 

But after getting the job because of his communication skills, Middleton’s comments showed that Grifol is in way over his head. 

“We came in with no rules,” Middleton told ESPN’s  Jesse Rodgers. “I don’t know how you police a culture when there are no rules or guidelines to follow because everyone is doing their own thing. Like, how do you say anything about it because there are no rules?

“You have rookies sleeping in the bullpen during the game. You have guys missing meetings. You have guys missing PFPs, and there are no consequences for any of this stuff. 

The second warning came in April after the White Sox started the year 8-21. That record wasn’t for a lack of talent. Everyone knows the White Sox have talent. It’s the reason their players were in such high demand at the trade deadline. 

Grifol’s in-game moves were puzzling and his refusal to move Tim Anderson out of the leadoff spot despite his abysmal numbers left many scratching their heads. 

Now the focus of the season has shifted to development. The White Sox flew the white flag at the trade deadline and now it’s time to see what some of their younger players can do. Nobody cares about wins at this point… except Grifol. That ship sailed in April. 

His comments about Elvis Andrus were laughable and despite his insistence on focusing on winning his moves don’t reflect those of a winning manager. (Andrus running the White Sox out of an inning just before the White Sox lost by one run on a walk-off home run just adds insult to injury.)

Take the White Sox loss to the Cubs on Wednesday night for example, a loss that Grifol called “the toughest loss of the year.” 

One sign of an inexperienced manager is overusing the same pitcher in high-leverage situations. In this case, it was Gregory Santos, who he trotted out in the ninth inning to protect a two-run lead despite the fact he had thrown 1.2 innings the night before. 

If Grifol had come out and said he wanted to see how Santos in back-to-back days to see how he could handle a potential closer role in the future it would be one thing. But he didn’t. 

“I don’t ever want to compromise a major-league win to find out what somebody can do,” the White Sox manager stated before the series.  “However, that’s important for us too, moving forward. There’s a fine line we have to walk through to get to where we need as far as evaluation purposes.”

This was just the latest in a long list of comments from Grifol that show he is out of touch. 

He failed to correct the mistakes that Tony La Russa left behind, he has failed to push the right buttons during his in-game strategy and now he is failing to properly develop and evaluate players. His first year as a manager has been a complete embarrassment which fits in perfectly with an organization that embodies the word.