When the ball flew off Andrew Vaughn’s bat and sailed toward the left field bleachers in the ninth inning of Wednesday’s second game against the Texas Rangers, Chicago White Sox general manager Chris Getz was calmly sitting in his suite behind home plate.
Assistant general manager Josh Barfield, standing behind Getz, began yelling as Rangers left fielder Travis Jankowski backed up toward the fence separating the field from the Sox bullpen.
“Oh my god, he got it, it’s going (out),” Barfield said of what looked to be a walk-off, three-run home run by Vaughn.
“And then I stood up and said, ‘He caught it, he caught it!’” Getz recalled Thursday morning in a conversation with the Tribune at the White Sox dugout.
Janikowski’s amazing, leaping catch robbed Vaughn of what would’ve been the best Sox moment of the second half and perhaps the entire season. Instead, the Sox fell 4-3 for their 103rd loss, leaving them on pace to break the modern-day record of 120 set by the 1962 New York Mets.
It was a catch that will be remembered for a long time, especially if the Sox set the record by one game.
“Definitely a rollercoaster of emotions,” Getz said. “More than anything, I was just in shock that it happened, but they were in no doubles (defense) and he was set up so close to the wall that it gave him more time to react and get comfortable where he was at to make that catch.
“It was a great catch, let alone the fact it was either a walkoff home run or it would save the game.”
These are hard times for the Sox, and as the architect of what will soon officially be the worst team in franchise history, no one will take more blame than Getz. It’s an occupational hazard he accepted when he took the job one year ago with the knowledge that a teardown was necessary to rebuild the organization.
“I don’t pay attention to it,” he insisted. “I don’t. I understand you take these jobs and when you’re in these jobs, part of the job is getting criticized. And until we start winning at the major-league level, there’s going to be more criticism on the decisions and the performance of our club than positives. That’s just the reality of professional sports. We welcome that. I do.
“The important thing is not to allow it to affect your thinking and your decisions. You don’t want to cave to those pressures just to quiet the noise. You want to do what’s best for the organization. We’re committed to doing what’s right from the long-term point of view, not just a Band-Aid approach or to cut corners. It may lead to success, but it certainly won’t be sustainable, that’s for sure.”
Getz made the right decision Aug. 8 in firing Pedro Grifol, and probably should’ve done it much sooner. Interim manager Grady Sizemore hasn’t stopped the losing, though he at least has the respect of his players, something Grifol lacked.
Sizemore insisted Thursday he’s still having fun, which doesn’t seem possible with the non-stop losing. The Sox were 3-14 under Sizemore entering the finale against the Rangers.
Getz said that positive demeanor is why he feels Sizemore is the right man to get them through the rest of this season, with the help of a coaching staff focused on development over wins.
“You look at the other club that day and you know that it’s probably going to be a challenge to win this game and you almost have to play a perfect game to win,” Getz said. “They’ve been very positive. That’s just Grady’s nature. He’s a fighter. He understands the ups and downs of this game.”
Getz spoke Thursday morning to Cubs president Jed Hoyer, who lives nearby on the North Shore and has become a sounding board of sorts. Hoyer was the Cubs GM in 2012 when he and former president Theo Epstein executed a similar teardown on the North Side. The early returns gave no indication a World Series championship was in the offing and both executives were criticized in 2012 for fielding a horrible team.
A local newspaper had heralded Epstein’s arrival with a photoshopped illustration of him walking on Lake Michigan.
“As if by showing up I was going to miraculously turn around the team’s fortunes,” Epstein later recalled when speaking to Yale students in 2017. “Imagine their disappointment, then, when I announced immediately a long-term rebuilding plan, built around acquiring young players and winning five years down the line. So one season and 101 losses, the same paper ran an identical photo of me, but this time, the only thing above water was the tip of my nose.”
Getz didn’t arrive with the same lofty expectations as Epstein. He was already suspected as a ringer by a sizable segment of Sox fans because Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf promoted him without looking outside the organization for Rick Hahn’s replacement.
But the task at hand for Getz is similar to the one Epstein and Hoyer faced in 2012. Hoyer has given Getz some advice on what to do and what not to do.
“We actually have had those conversations,” Getz said. “I was talking to Jed this morning and we weren’t talking about the 2012 Cubs, but we have talked about that at length, about when he and Theo took over, the state of the organization and the challenges along the way. And they actually got to the point where they made some (free-agent) additions (after the season).
“He even talked about some of the additions they made that he felt may have been a little premature for what they should have done at that time. I’ll let him fill those (names) in. But there are some similarities, and through his experience and my experience, there is always a lot to talk about.”
Getz wouldn’t name names, but the Cubs’ four-year, $52 million deal for starter Edwin Jackson in the second year of the rebuild was one Epstein later admitted was a “mistake,” adding “we wouldn’t do it over again.”
Surely Getz will make moves in the Sox rebuild that he later regrets and wishes he had over again. It’s the nature of the beast. But he doesn’t come to the ballpark with a defeatist attitude and expects his players to have fun and avoid the gloom and doom that tends to accompany a season as trying as this.
“We get the opportunity to come to the ballpark every day,” Getz said. “In comparison to whatever else we could be doing in our world, in our society, I think we’ve got it pretty good, even though we’re going through tremendous struggles at the major league level.
“We’ve got most of our executives in town (this week). They’ve been in town, and we’re looking forward to building things and creating something special here. And that in itself is really motivating.”
