After every new loss of the 2024 season, Chicago baseball fans flock to social media to remind Pedro Grifol and Craig Counsell how bad they are at their jobs.
It’s an occupational hazard for any manager but particularly so in a town with so many passionate fans during a season of so much angst.
Grifol usually is reminded he’s a dead manager walking and someone such as the Florida Marlins’ Skip Schumaker will soon take his place as the next White Sox manager. Counsell typically is informed he’s no David Ross and this prolonged stretch of losing wouldn’t have happened if the previous Cubs manager was still in the dugout.
Of course, we don’t know what the future holds for Grifol, whose team was on pace at the halfway mark to tie the expansion 1962 New York Mets’ record of 120 losses in a season. General manager Chris Getz has thus far refrained from giving Grifol the dreaded vote of confidence, and this Sox team is so awful that perhaps no other coach or manager would want their name attached to it.
On the North Side, no one can honestly say whether the Cubs’ lack of clutch hitting and regularly scheduled bullpen implosions would have been avoided had Ross remained manager in the final year of his contract. But it’s safe to speculate Ross would’ve been on the hot seat with a team as underachieving as the one currently managed by Counsell.
Unlike Grifol, Counsell doesn’t have to worry about his immediate future, thanks to his record five-year, $40 million deal.
Throughout the losing, our two Chicago field bosses have tried to keep their sanity with vastly different approaches to dealing with the local media.
Counsell has been matter-of-fact about the Cubs’ problems, even as they remain in the muddled National League wild-card race, in which being near .500 means you’re right in the thick of things.
“You can look at the standings all you want,” Counsell said Sunday at Wrigley Field. “It’s June, (the jumbled wild-card race) is going to go on for a long time. When you want to feel like a good team and a playoff team, we’ve got to be better than this, no question about it.”
Grifol tends to accentuate the positive, with one memorable exception: saying his players looked “f−−−ing flat” after a May 26 loss to the Baltimore Orioles.
When Paul DeJong forgot how many outs there were in the ninth inning Friday in Detroit and was doubled off first base on a routine fly to center in a mind-numbing loss, Grifol gave his usual rundown of the action. He spoke about how well Erick Fedde pitched, how Tommy Pham and DeJong hit some balls hard and noted Pham and Gavin Sheets had two hits apiece. He didn’t mention DeJong’s game-ending gaffe.
When reporters brought it up, Grifol asked if they had spoken to DeJong. When told that DeJong called it a brain cramp, Grifol replied: “Well, if he already answered, he answered. That’s what it is.”
Typically we would have spoken to Grifol before DeJong. MLB protocol for every team I’ve covered in 36 years has been for the manager to speak first. The media then are allowed to go inside the clubhouse to interview players. It’s commonly referred to as a “cooling off” period.
Grifol prefers the opposite, so his players speak first and he talks when they’re finished. I asked him Saturday at Comerica Park why he does it that way, and it led to an interesting conversation that lasted several minutes.
“You guys are used to going to the manager first,” he said. “Well, this manager changed his protocol.”
Why was that?
“There’s a lot of moving parts at the end of the game. I actually do it for (the media) so you can get in there and talk to these guys right away before they leave,” he said. “Because if I have to stay in the office for 15 or 20 minutes, going through roster management and making moves and all kinds of stuff, by the time you get in there, you won’t have a player to talk to.
“One of the reasons is that. The other reason is I’ve got stuff to do after the game. It’s not like, ‘Oh, yeah, let’s go do the media,’ and the front office — the general manager and the assistant general manager — we have to make moves and then I’ve got to leave you guys (outside) for 20 minutes.”
But the Sox don’t often make moves after games.
“Not always, but we talk a lot after the games,” Grifol said.
So why not talk to the front office after talking to the media?
“You’ve also got to wind down a little,” he said. “We’re human. We’ve got some emotions, you know?”
I’m guessing that’s the main reason. It’s hard for managers to compose themselves after a tough loss, and after covering the likes of Don Zimmer, Dusty Baker, Lou Piniella, Tony La Russa and Terry Bevington, I’m sure they all would have preferred a longer “cooling off” period.
Grifol said “more guys would consider” doing it his way if managers were asked their preference. But I told him sometimes what the manager says after the game factors into what we ask the players.
“You can cause a little more controversy,” he said. “It’s good for a story.”
Not really. It depends on what the manager says. He generally sets the tone with his postgame remarks, as Grifol did this season when he called the Sox “f−−−ing flat.” Sox players were then asked their thoughts on Grifol’s remark, which several of them disputed.
“In life, everybody gets used to one thing and this is the way it’s supposed to be,” Grifol said. “Then when there is change … Last year I started off doing it (with) me (talking) first. I didn’t like it.”
Grifol brought up a time when he coached in Seattle under manager Jim Riggleman, who conducted his postgame briefings in the middle of the clubhouse because “he wanted all the players to hear what he said.”
“I thought that was kind of cool, but that was in 2006,” Grifol said.
Riggleman also did it that way with the Cubs in the ’90s, when he sometimes had to compete for media attention with Mark Grace’s interview sessions.
Different strokes. Different folks.
Grifol said he was glad to be asked about his methods and seemed certain that his way is the right way.
Maybe he is the wave of the future. Or maybe not.
Check back in October.
