WASHINGTON – This has been the worst year of Pedro Grifol’s baseball life.
It wasn’t supposed to be when he was hired for his dream job, his first major league manager’s post, to lead a team to the postseason.
With 11 games to go heading into the White Sox’ latest inconsequential game against the Nationals Tuesday, the Sox were 58-93, with many of the star players on the Opening Day roster traded away weeks ago.
“I heard this the other day and it’s true,” Grifol said from behind the manager’s desk in the visitors clubhouse Monday. “In the middle of these storms, they wipe everything clean, and it’s true. We’ve gone through a storm this year. This is an opportunity for myself and [new general manager] Chris [Getz] and the staff he assembles to not start over — because this isn’t a rebuild — but to implement things that are part of his vision and maybe a part of mine as well that I want to see done.”
Grifol knows fans have heard enough rhetoric and only want to see a winning product. He believes they want to see the same brand of baseball he wants – max effort, hustle, sound defense and pitching.
“We have to pitch better and we have to hit better,” he said.
“We have to play defense.”
Having been a coach on a Royals staff that won a World Series, Grifol said he knows what a winning product looks and “feels” like.
How bad has it been overseeing a team that felt like defeat since a 7-21 start?
“It’s been the most painful year of my baseball career at any level,” Grifol said. “We had expectations coming in, we didn’t meet them, and I’m the manager. So it falls on this table. And I take full responsibility. I’m not going to hide from that. We have to play better baseball.”
Getz has said Grifol will be back next season. Grifol says he has looked in the mirror and assessed his own performance. He might not be as hard on himself as fans are – a vast majority of them, if social media and numerous polls are an indication, want him gone.
But he’s not easy on himself, he says.
“I do it all the time, I do it every day,” Grifol said. “I ask these coaches every day. I’m not going to hide from criticism and I never will because it fuels me, it makes me better. I don’t lie to myself. There are things I could be better at, and I have them all written down. And I’m going to be better. And our coaches will be better.”
Grifol said at his opening press conference that the Sox would come to “work every day, as hard as we possibly can, to kick your ass at 7:10.”
But it was Grifol’s Sox who took the whuppings.
“We thought we had a good plan coming in, we executed it in spring training the way we wanted to and we just didn’t get it done,” he said.
Publicly, players have been neither strongly supportive or critical of Grifol, although traded reliever Keynan Middleton saying there were “no rules” cast him in a poor light.
Does Grifol believe the current players are behind him?
“That’s a difficult question because you have conversations, I communicate with everybody almost every day,” Grifol said. “As far as my conversations are concerned, your answer is yes. But there are 26 guys in there so you can’t know what everybody is truly feeling. I can tell you this – this is a really good opportunity, this last month, for them. To be a part of it, perform and show us and Chris that they’re a part of this going forward.
“Yeah, it’s a tough question for me because I only get what they tell me. We’ve had some conversations, difficult ones and nice ones, and hopefully they appreciate my honesty and communication. I’ve been nothing but honest. They know they’re going to get the truth.”
