Paul Sullivan: Tony La Russa 3.0 is a fitting way to end the White Sox trilogy
CHICAGO — Tony La Russa 3.0 is the sequel you didn’t know you needed.
Every trilogy needs an ending to tie up all the loose ends, so the return of La Russa to the Chicago White Sox as adviser, consultant, resident sage or whatever title the team prefers was probably inevitable.
A meeting among Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, manager Pedro Grifol and La Russa took place Wednesday night, as first reported by USA Today’s Bob Nightengale.
It came a day after Reinsdorf fired executive vice president Ken Williams and general manager Rick Hahn, who hired Grifol to replace La Russa after he left for health reasons after the 2022 season.
“I’ve had these meetings before,” Grifol said. “I said it a couple days ago. This is not my first meeting. I had a couple meetings in April, a couple meetings in May. This is an ongoing thing. We’re all in this thing together, top to bottom. So this is not because of what transpired. This is something that we do in ways that we’ve done all year to get us better. That’s what this is about — getting better.”
Grifol said Reinsdorf was “setting it up just not to win one year but multiple years and try to sustain it.”
I asked Grifol if he spoke with Reinsdorf about next year.
“In regards to?” he asked.
The direction of the team? His job status? Anything?
“Oh, yeah, I talked to him (Wednesday) about it,” Grifol said. “He’s a big-time competitor. He wants to win. He wants to set this thing up right. That’s what we’re in the process of doing.”
So any talk of a rebuild in 2024?
“It’s not a rebuild,” Grifol said. “It’s definitely not a rebuild. When you have (Luis) Robert in center field and Eloy (Jimenez) and (Andrew) Vaughn, Timmy (Anderson), I don’t consider it a rebuild.”
Of course not. So did Reinsdorf give Grifol any assurance he was returning?
“I’m not going to get into that,” he said. “I’ll let time play that out.”
We don’t know La Russa’s role in the meeting, but the mere fact he’s back caused massive panic on the South Side.
When we last saw La Russa, he left the Sox on doctor’s orders with a month left in the debacle that was the 2022 season. His health had been a concern in spring training, we later discovered, and with a team going nowhere it was imperative for La Russa to deal with his medical issues.
La Russa was out of sight and out of mind as Grifol took over a clubhouse with most of the same players from last season. But instead of getting more out of them, he got less, as evidenced by a 50-78 record after Thursday’s 8-5 loss to the Oakland A’s, who hit five home runs in sweltering 91-degree heat before a few thousand fans at Guaranteed Rate Field. Some of those fans directed a “sell the team” chant toward Reinsdorf in the fifth inning.
Grifol’s voyage of the doomed ended with the firing of his two bosses. Normally a manager whose bosses are axed also can expect to be gone when the new boss arrives and picks his own man.
If assistant general manager/player development Chris Getz is that man, and former Kansas City Royals general manager Dayton Moore joins him, as Nightengale has reported, the Royals connection probably makes Grifol safe.
Neither Getz nor his new co-partner, assistant GM Jeremy Haber, have made themselves available. Haber has top billing on the flow chart, though Getz knows the farm system that he helped build, for whatever that’s worth. Williams’ son, assistant director/player development Ken Williams Jr., is third in the minor league operations flow chart under director Kathy Potoski.
Getz and Haber walked hurriedly through the clubhouse Thursday, avoiding making eye contact with media members.
They have no need to worry. The blame for the Sox’s downfall was shared equally by Williams and Hahn, the ones responsible for the personnel decisions that led to the fast-forward collapse of a team one ESPN baseball expert predicted would be world champions in 2022.
Reinsdorf also spared Grifol, perhaps with La Russa’s tacit acknowledgment that it was the players only who were at fault. Certainly La Russa takes no share of responsibility, so who else could it be?
The 78-year-old Hall of Famer, who suddenly looks his age after ditching the dye and sporting a more distinguished, silver-haired coiffure, appears to be back in the thick of things following treatment for cancer.
It makes perfect sense for La Russa to want to help his old friend in planning the direction of the Sox in the post-KW/Hahn era. It was Reinsdorf, after all, who rehired La Russa after Hahn fired Rick Renteria for reasons no one even remembers. What are friends for?
After the perfect ending in St. Louis, winning a world championship in 2011, La Russa 2.0 ended in the worst way possible. He saw the Sox’s playoff window start to slam shut under his watch, then left the job for health reasons in September and for good in October before his contract ended.
La Russa surely didn’t want to be remembered going out that way. Now La Russa 3.0 has a chance to help reshape the team’s future, as Sox fans shudder in disbelief. The “Fire Tony” banners that were packed up and stored in the basement near the stacks of bottled water have been taken out of the cardboard box and sent out to dry cleaning.
La Russa’s return might be bad news for Sox fans, but it’s good news for baseball writers.
No matter what he did, what he said or how he looked in the dugout, La Russa was always the most interesting thing about the Sox in 2021 and ‘22. You could not invent a character like him — gruff, vain, opinionated and combative — and make it believable in the 2020s.
Grifol and Miguel Cairo, September’s acting manager, were the complete opposites of La Russa — good soldiers following Hahn’s directions. Perhaps Grifol will be following La Russa’s directions on how to manage the clubhouse culture. That’s the circle of baseball life on the South Side.
La Russa 3.0, the final chapter, figures to be epic.
What could possibly go wrong?
