Who Is the Interim Manager the White Sox Deserve?

On Thursday morning the White Sox sat at 28-89, recently having broken a 21-game losing streak. Which looks bad, but consider that Chicago is on pace to lose three more games than the 1962 Mets did. Or that over a comparable period — their last 117 games — the Vanderbilt Commodores football team is 40-77. (Vanderbilt’s past 117 games includes a winless season.) So the White Sox cashiered manager Pedro Grifol.

Yeah, that’ll fix the problem.

Immediately, thoughts turned to which unfortunate would be handed this hospital pass of a team. Especially because the traditional next man up for an in-season firing is the bench coach, and Charlie Montoyo (who has recent MLB managerial experience with the Blue Jays) was among the casualties.

As it turns out, the next skipper on this voyage of the damned, apparently, is Grady Sizemore.

Make no mistake, the 42-year-old Sizemore is woefully underqualified to manage a major league team. This is his first season on a big league staff, as sort of a minister-without-portfolio role titled “major league coach.” He got that job having worked full-time in baseball for only one season, which he spent as an intern under Diamondbacks GM Mike Hazen. Going from last year’s Diamondbacks to this year’s White Sox is quite an adjustment. At least we know Sizemore isn’t prone to whiplash.

But let’s be real. Chicago’s season being as dead as it is, there isn’t much Sizemore can do, for good or ill. He only needs to fill out a lineup card and do pre- and post-game media scrums with the beat writers. Sizemore might not have decades of coaching and front office experience, like some of the other 29 guys in similar jobs, but all he needs to do is get nine guys on the field for the last seven weeks of the season. And it’s not like he can do any worse than Grifol did.

Sizemore has another important asset: Name recognition. When he was announced as the interim manager, it took me a minute to think about how undercooked he is as a coach, because my first reaction was, “Oh, sweet, Grady Sizemore rules!”

If you know Sizemore’s name at all, you remember him as one of the best players in baseball in the mid-2000s, a thrilling five-tool center fielder for Cleveland who made three All-Star teams and accumulated 28.3 WAR by the end of his age-25 season. And Sizemore was one of those players to whom WAR didn’t do justice; he went 20/20 in each of his first four full major league seasons and scored a staggering 134 runs in 2006. He was cool as hell.

Then the injuries started to pile up. Sizemore was on track for the Hall of Fame with room to spare in 2008, but by 2010 he was basically done. He’s somewhere between the Millennial Vada Pinson and the Millennial Pete Reiser. I’ll let you decide.

As much as Rocco Baldelli, who is of a similar age with a similar career arc, has done a good job as manager of the Twins, Sizemore’s playing career is most relevant to his managerial tenure in one respect: The more time we spend talking about how good he was and YouTubing his career highlights, the easier it will be for the White Sox to run out the clock on this mortifying misadventure of a season.

I’m not saying it’s going to work. This might be a bit of a stretch as a comparison, but it reminds me of when Newcastle United tried to salvage their season by installing Alan Shearer as interim manager. Shearer had recently retired as the Premier League’s all-time leading scorer, having played for more than a decade for his boyhood club. He had no coaching experience or qualifications to speak of, but man, wouldn’t it be cool to see such a legend in the dugout again?

Shearer managed eight games, winning one, and Newcastle got relegated.

At least that can’t happen to Sizemore.

To be clear, I like this hire. It gives everyone a chance to remember how good a player Sizemore was, and — most importantly — whether he’s any good as a manager is entirely beside the point.

Sizemore could more than double this team’s winning percentage and the White Sox would still lose 110 games. Even if he transforms them into the 2001 Mariners overnight they’re still going to lose more than 100 games. This team is doomed, but at least this is more interesting than promoting Montoyo.

Nevertheless, one thinks about the road not traveled. Who else could’ve landed this job? Let’s consider the possibilities.

Let’s get Drake LaRoche out of the way. Those jokes were very funny for a while, not only because the original kerfuffle was so bizarre but also because it included players citing the then-14-year-old as a leader in the clubhouse. And then the younger LaRoche was even in the news this summer, as he pitched Birmingham-Southern to the verge of a Division III national championship as the school itself was going defunct.

But I think the Drake LaRoche-for-manager jokes have been beaten into the ground. Not unlike the White Sox themselves, now that I think of it.

Option no. 2 is the classic “Well let’s get that guy from TV!” move. As bad as things have been in Chicago, it’s not helping that two figures from the World Series-winning 2005 White Sox are in prominent media positions. For White Sox fans who can’t understand why their team turned into the laughingstock of the league, it must be maddening to turn on the TV and see Ozzie Guillen and A.J. Pierzynski articulating the very frustrations those fans must be feeling.

Bringing back Ozzie, or handing the reins to Pierzynski, might be cathartic, but I doubt it would be productive.

The final two options are similar, representing a well the White Sox have gone to repeatedly under Jerry Reinsdorf. Both would be ex-White Sox players; the first is of the Future Manager archetype I mentioned in my managerial taxonomy piece back in November. This is someone we’ve all seen in a White Sox uniform, ideally a light-hitting catcher or middle infielder with a big personality. So, maybe not literally Guillen, but someone like him and 15 or 20 years younger.

The other half of the ex-player (or, in some cases, ex-manager) category is what I like to call The One Who Got Away Hire. In 1982, the Phillies swapped shortstops with the Chicago Cubs — Larry Bowa for Ivan de Jesus — and threw a rookie second baseman into the deal to even things out. That second baseman, Ryne Sandberg, went on to a Hall of Fame career and left a psychic wound on the team and its fans.

Some 30 years later, the Phillies had a chance to make amends, and groomed the by-now-retired Sandberg for management. To make room for him, they fired Charlie Manuel, the most successful manager in the team’s history. Sandberg lasted 278 games, in which he finished 40 games under .500.

Joe Maddon wasn’t an ex-star player, but he was a longtime Angels coach before he left to manage the Rays and then the Cubs, during which time he won two pennants and a World Series and was largely considered to be the best and most forward-thinking manager in baseball.

So when the Angels had a chance to bring Maddon back, in 2020, they jumped at it. And Maddon rewarded their patience by finishing under .500 in each of the two and a half seasons he lasted in Orange County.

By now you know where this is going. This is the White Sox with Tony La Russa, the young manager who got them to the ALCS in 1983, but no further. He was fired in mid-1986, caught on with the A’s and later the Cardinals, and went on to win six pennants and three World Series before he retired in 2011. At the time of that retirement, he’d won more games than any manager except Connie Mack and John McGraw.

So the White Sox tried to roll back the clock in 2021, and by the standards of Sandberg and Maddon it was a huge success. At least the White Sox made the playoffs in Year 1 before the wheels fell off midway through Year 2. Paul Molitor’s Twins tenure is another example; Molitor played for the Twins at the end of his career, not the beginning, but the Hall of Famer is from St. Paul and played at the University of Minnesota, entitling Twins fans to similar feelings of bereftness as he played his best years in Milwaukee.

Let’s put names to these options for the White Sox. Who could be the next Ozzie Guillen, and who could be the next Tony La Russa?

To find the former, I went to the career games played leaderboard for the White Sox since 1990. I was going to joke about how Hall of Famer Ray Schalk, who caught for the White Sox for 18 seasons, would be perfect for this role if he hadn’t been dead for 54 years. But it turns out the White Sox actually did hire Schalk as a player-manager for two years at the end of his career. He went 102-125.

(A player-manager opens up all sorts of possibilities. The White Sox should bring back Tim Anderson and make him player-manager.)

But let’s wait for Anderson to actually retire first. Because there is no shortage of candidates.

I bent the positional requirements a little, because Crede, despite playing third base, hit like a shortstop. And Podsednik is the most second baseman-coded left fielder of the 21st century. Pierzynski is obviously on this list, as is Gordon Beckham, who is probably the best offensive and temperamental comparison for Ozzie Guillen among the generation who followed. I have no idea what Ron Karkovice is up to.

Cora, on the other hand, is actually highly qualified to manage the White Sox, having spent the past 20 years on major league coaching staffs. He is the all-time major league hits leader among Cora brothers who played 10-plus seasons in the major leagues and spent exactly one season on A.J. Hinch’s coaching staff. And if the lesser Cora can win a World Series in his first season, the sky’s the limit for Joey.

But let’s end by taking a bigger swing. Who, apart from La Russa, is The One Who Got Away? A player who appeared for the White Sox only as an unfinished product but went on to superstardom with another team?

I don’t have the kind of intimate knowledge of White Sox minutiae to answer that question off the top of my head, so I went to Twitter. Not exactly a reliable source for information these days, but that’s where angry and depressed people spend their days ranting, and I figure any sufficiently large population of angry and depressed people is going to be full of White Sox fans.

And they delivered. Not only that, they quickly formed a consensus. I was able to draw two conclusions for their answers.

First: If Reinsdorf lives long enough, Marcus Semien is absolutely, 100% going to manage the White Sox after he retires.

Second: The man to lead the White Sox through this trough, the one who can heal a psychic wound with one pitching change, The One Who Got Away, is Sammy Sosa.

I say it’s worth a shot.