Reasons Why

In spite of Jerry Reinsdorf, I really do want the White Sox to win, and win consistently; it makes my daughter happy, and it could rub off on her son. That said, I have reasons to question the apparent hiring of Pedro Grifol to take Tony La Russa’s place in the dugout. The positive spin on Grifol is that he’s one of those highly regarded baseball people we so often hear about. But, like I said yesterday, if he’s so highly regarded, why didn’t the Royals hire him to replace Mike Matheny? Instead, he comes to the Sox as a first-time manager at the age of fifty-two. In my opinion, the best two managers to work in this town since, oh, say, 1970, were Chuck Tanner and Ozzie Guillen. They both started their managerial careers on the South Side, Tanner at age forty-one and Guillen age forty. If Grifol is as good as those two, what took him so long to get a managing job? Grifol spent two years as one of the Royals’ hitting coaches. What exactly does a career .226 hitter in nine minor-league seasons tell major-league ballplayers? Sorry, but in my book hitting and pitching coaches need career stats to back up their ideas. Anything else is…Walt Hriniak and Don Cooper. Here’s hoping the next Sox hitting coach had a big-league career of some note. I’m also supposed to be impressed that Grifol was a catching coach and Salvador Perez swears by him. That’s nice, but how do we measure Grifol’s influence on him? It’s not as if Perez came out of nowhere and all of a sudden blossomed because of this one coach. I will admit to being impressed by one stat attached to the new Sox skipper—he had a career forty-four percent caught-stealing rate. Perez is at thirty-six percent, so maybe that reflects Grifol’s influence. Lord knows Yasmani Grandal could use some pointers in how to get the ball to second base ahead of the next Ice Age. We’ll see.