CHICAGO — Their pitchers don’t throw enough strikes. Their hitters don’t hit enough of them. Their guys in the field still don’t catch enough baseballs. And they’re on their third manager in four years.
Other than that, the Chicago White Sox are right on track for that World Series they’ve been talking about since tanking all those seasons to make the playoffs in 2020 and 2021.
Who the hell’s great idea was it to assemble this group and start selling playoff dreams?
“Put it on me,” Hahn said.
Done.
In fact, if Rick Hahn worked for any baseball owner than Jerry Reinsdorf, the most loyal employer of executives in the game, he probably would have been done long before this 11th season at the helm of baseball’s latest failed tank-to-rebuild effort.
“Put it on me,” Hahn repeated Thursday before his third-worst team in the majors tried to snap a seven-game losing streak against the MLB-best Tampa Bay Rays.
“That’s the job. That’s the absolute gig,” Hahn said.
“But I’ll tell you this,” he added. “Let’s make it real clear: It sure as heck isn’t on Pedro [Grifol] and his coaching staff.”
Right. Because even if the first-year manager was the problem, that’s also on Hahn as the one who put him in charge of the dugout and lineup with championship expectations alleged.
What happened to Chicago White Sox champagne dreams?
The Oakland Athletics are by far the worst team in the majors, by design, so mission accomplished. The Kansas City Royals are an underfunded, widely flawed team with the second-worst record in MLB, and not even the fans in KC think twice about that.
But the Chicago White Sox? Weren’t we told for years at this point that this was a championship-caliber team on the way to the franchise’s first title since 2005?
That makes the White Sox, pound for expectation pound, the worst team in the league.
At least the biggest frauds.
“Ultimately, it’s the players who play the game, and when they don’t achieve at the level that we’ve projected, they certainly bear a level of responsibility for that,” Hahn said. “But at the end of the day, the people who put the players on the roster, and put them on the field, are the ones who bear the responsibility if that group doesn’t achieve. That’s me. That’s fine.”
That should also put Hahn on the hottest seat among the game’s general managers, even if he likely has more job security than his performance has earned, thanks to the nature of his employer.
But maybe the 81-81 season that amounted to a six-month root canal last year, coupled with their worst 25-game start (7-18) since 1986, has changed attitudes of Hahn’s bosses?
It at least seemed to provoke a message sent by executive vice-president Kenny Williams through the Sun-Times while the Chicago White Sox were getting pantsed by the Toronto Blue Jays earlier in the week.
“Accountability is not an issue around here,” he told the Sun-Times beat writer, Daryl Van Schouwen, saying that if the team’s performance continues its sideways trajectory through the season, “then changes have to be made, it’s as simple as that.
“It’s professional sports,” Williams added. “There’s no way around it, and that’s whether it’s in the clubhouse or here with us in the front office.”
Williams then added the caveat that any of those kinds of front office decisions are made by ownership.
In other words, round and round the circular accountability goes on the South Side, backhanding an increasingly roiled fan base with every turn.
A tanking plan that failed
To be fair to Hahn, there’s plenty of organizational arrogance to go around since the Sox began tanking to build this underachieving team, a process started about the time the Chicago Cubs’ double-decker buses were rolling down Michigan after their tank-built 2016 championship.
Hahn pulled off the easy part: stripping down the roster and payroll. He’s had his own hits (Jose Quintana to the Cubs for Dylan Cease and Eloy Jimenez) and misses (Carson Fulmer drafted eighth overall, Nick Madrigal drafted fourth overall).
But he also got saddled with manager Tony La Russa, who was pulled out of a decade-long retirement by old friend Reinsdorf to replace Rick Renteria in 2021, in a move that smacked of personal over practical and of treating the rebuilt team like a cruise-control contender capable of being driven by anyone.
They also didn’t spend at industry-standard levels for the final pieces once the young core was assembled — spending $55.5 million for key rotation piece Dallas Keuchel instead of, say, the $155 million the Cubs spent on Jon Lester to get a foundational, big-game pitcher that helped them win the World Series.
In fact, when the Pittsburgh Pirates this week committed the franchise’s first nine-figure contract to extend Bryan Reynolds, it left the White Sox as one of only three franchises that never had signed a player to a deal worth at least $100 million.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the others are the only teams worse this year than the Sox: the Athletics and Royals.
So, again, ownership.
Hahn, a Harvard-educated lawyer who sometimes answers questions like one, claimed he hadn’t read Williams’ comments in the Sun-Times when asked about them.
“But I’ll answer the fundamental question,” he said. “When you said, who’s responsible for this, and I said, ‘Me,’ I think that makes it clear that my job is potentially on the line.
“But I want to make something abundantly clear: I’m not a king,” he added. “I don’t sit in this chair by divine birthright. It’s an absolute privilege to be general manager of the White Sox, one that I need to continue to earn.”
Hahn said job security is the last thing on his mind as he makes decisions with the best outcome for the team in mind.
He also said he believes his oft-injured, long-underperforming team can bounce back this season to reach expectations expressed in spring training:
“We felt we had the talent to contend for a championship. … That goal hasn’t changed.
And if not?
What if he were that mythical king he referred to, or at least the equivalent — Reinsdorf? How would he evaluate the performance of the not-a-king sitting in the GM’s chair?
“I will put it this way: I know that there is, or I assume there is understandably a fair amount of criticism of me personally, our department, all that. I completely understand that for a number of reasons, including that there’s probably nobody harder on me than myself.”
He feels the fans’ pain, he said, “living and dying with losses,” and he’s dedicated to pulling out all stops to right the ship, he said.
“We feel that, and where we are at right now is not acceptable, and we’ll do everything in our power to get it right as long as we have the ability [jobs] to try to get it right.”
A few hours later, the Chicago White Sox lost again.
Gordon Wittenmyer covers Major League Baseball for Sportsnaut. You can follow him on Twitter at @GDubCub.