We here at Sox Machine usually spend a typical October and November reviewing the season we just witnessed, but the 2024 White Sox strike me as resistant to that exercise, at least in the standard format we've usually employed.
Generally speaking, there are two purposes for looking back:
- Recontextualizing various developments over the course of the season in light of the final overall result.
- Enjoying highlights in the vein of "The Chris Farley Show," potentially generating excitement for next season.
But given that the White Sox started the season 3-22 and finished the year with the record for most losses in a modern MLB season, the scenery never changed. Sox Machine supporters can review the Months in a Box -- April, May, June, July, August, September -- and everything holds up. It was bad at the time, and it remained that bad, as shelf-stable as listeria.
While it's tough to figure out what to get for the person who has everything, it's just as difficult to know what to give the team that had nothing, at least once you rule out middle fingers. I've taken it upon myself to look through the archives and find moments that stick out as particularly symptomatic of the 2024 White Sox, and ones that might not have to be characteristic of 2025 if enough decision-makers play their cards right.
Or maybe there is no more profound meaning, and I'm dragging you along to a creative writing workshop. It's hard to say. The play I'm singling out below is my second attempt at writing about it, because the first attempt turned into last Sunday's post about how the White Sox only scored 507 runs.
Before the season, Pedro Grifol and Chris Getz thought they had given the White Sox an identity. It turned out to be closer to a self-appointed nickname, and those usually give way to something a lot less flattering in short order.
Grifol plastered placards around Camelback Ranch bearing the slogan "PLAY FAST TODAY," which James' intrepid reporting revealed to mean "Fearless, Aggressive, Selfless and Technically sound." Getz joined him on that limb by saying his administration had succeeded in "raising the IQ" of the team, which could win a respectable amount of games by out-executing the opposition.
As it happened, that sentence required a teensy edit to maintain its truth:
by saying his administration had succeeded in "raising the IQ" of the team, which could win a respectable amount of games by
out-executing the opposition.
Any chucklehead could tell that Getz's idea of defining the White Sox as a mistake-avoidant team was bound to collapse upon itself without enough good players. Here's your local chucklehead doing so on Opening Day:
The potentially fatal flaw with building an IQ-first team is that it’s hard to play “a cleaner style of baseball” in the face of consistently wrong scores. Losing is what leads to pressing, to trying to make stuff happen, to forcing things that won’t work. It inevitably makes things look, sound and feel dumber. Look what happened to Grifol. He once made sense. Then he didn’t.
It took five games for the model to fail. On April 4, the White Sox played their first road game of the 2024 season in Kansas City and lost it 10-1. The game featured a whole host of mistakes, including but not limited to:
- Dominic Fletcher throwing to the wrong base
- Andrew Vaughn failing to catch a foul pop-up on the warning track
- Braden Shewmake hesitating on a relay home, then letting a three-hopper play him
- Korey Lee dodging a passed ball on a "wild pitch" that hit his foot
But most of those miscues conspired to push the game out of reach. The margin was only one run when the White Sox made one of their first mistakes of the evening, but one that was born more out of desperation than inattention.
Trailing 2-0 in the sixth inning, the White Sox mounted a legit threat against Seth Lugo when Gavin Sheets followed Yoán Moncada's leadoff walk with a double that put the tying runs in scoring position. Vaughn scored one of them with an inside-out single, but Sheets held at third out of respect for Hunter Renfroe's arm.
One batter later, when Shewmake lofted a fly to shallow right field, Sheets attempted to disrespect Renfroe's arm, and paid the price in the form of a 9-2 double play.
It was one of Eddie Rodríguez's poorer sends of the season when accounting for the runner, the fielder, and the number of feet by which the runner was gunned down. But looking at the replay half a year later, one could build a case that Rodríguez saw Renfroe temporarily losing sight of the fly and perhaps thought that the right fielder would be off-kilter in his setup throwing home.
Grifol instead chose to defend the play by repeating one phrase four times:
“Our team pushing the envelope, we’re always going to push the envelope. That’s just who we are and who we’re going to be. We’re going to be aggressive. We’ve got to be smart aggressive. I haven’t talked to him yet about it, I’ve got to look at the play first, too. We’ll see. As far as pushing the envelope, I’m not in on that one. We’re going to push the envelope.”
The theme turned into a leitmotif over the course of the season, peaking with a more infamous example two months later on June 2, when Tommy Pham was cut down at the plate by Christian Yelich on another iffy Rodríguez send that triggered the most embarrassing moment of John Schriffen's season.
This time, Grifol resisted making it such a sweaty identity thing in his defense of Rodriguez's calculus:
“Very few outs at home plate are made like that,” Grifol countered. “If you put it all together over the course of a season, it’s got to be a really good throw and it was. It was right on line. I don’t have a problem with that at all. Tommy can run. He’s a good baserunner. It just happened that it was a good throw and he got thrown out by quite a bit. Throw’s offline a little bit and we’re having a different conversation. We’re kicking ourselves in the ass for not going, right?”
But it still ended up sounding off-key courtesy of Pham, whose description of a man expecting to be out was reflected by his unusual path home.
"One-run ballgame. Close play at the plate. Actually, it wasn't even fucking close. It was a shallow fly ball to left field. You would expect the left fielder to throw the baserunner out on the play. The situation of the game, you know, third base coach sends you, you gotta go. I'm nailed out at home, by a mile."
Pham's technical assessment was then overshadowed by his explanation of why he wanted to fight William Contreras, but the point was that the White Sox were neither as fast nor as FAST as Grifol wanted them to be. It's a sentiment Garrett Crochet shared at the end of the season ...
“We tried to force the ‘Play F.A.S.T.’ motto. What we were trying to do with ‘Play F.A.S.T.’ was go out there and be Cleveland, and we’re not Cleveland. Though they play a very admirable brand of baseball, that’s just not who we are.”
... and while Crochet will probably be traded to greener pastures before next spring, it's still a lesson that Getz should heed as he hatches his next plan with his new, handpicked manager.
Rick Hahn's hiring of Grifol was doomed by the idea that effort and energy were the issues that most plagued the White Sox, rather than the talent and cohesion thereof. Getz stressed the little things in an attempt to make a second Grifol season more passable, only for the big things to immediately cave in their skulls.
Getz and Will Venable have so far sidestepped the first trap; they've promised no quick fixes from the managerial level alone, instead stressing the overhaul of positions that acquire and develop the talent before it gets onto the 26-man roster. The second pitfall will be harder to avoid entirely, because it's not easy to both acknowledge a talent shortage while encouraging players, fans and media to remain invested in the product, but as long as Venable doesn't show up to Glendale with an acronym in tow, he'll already be ahead of the game.
