CHICAGO — In the second inning of another ugly White Sox loss Saturday night, manager Pedro Grifol benched Luis Robert Jr. — the starting center fielder who signed a $50 million contract extension in 2020 before he made his major-league debut, and his leadoff man for the night — after he (seemingly) inexplicably jogged out what should have been an infield single in his first, and only, at-bat.
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“I just spoke to him and said we’ve got to run hard down the line,” Grifol said after the game. “Luis is a really hard worker, plays hard. He might have had a mental lapse. And our expectations are we got to run hard down the line. This is not a common occurrence with Luis. As a matter of fact, I’ve talked to him about slowing down a little bit in practices and save some of it because he’s a hard worker. But our expectations are you run hard down the line and he might have had a mental lapse on that. I’m not sure.”
All things considered, it should have become kind of a secondary story by the end of a 12-3 meltdown loss to the MLB-best Rays. A promising Lance Lynn no-hitter bid distorted and morphed into a 10-run top of the seventh for the Rays. Fielding errors and two separate relievers propped the door open for a far superior team, who giddily and competently barged through in response. A crowd of over 28,000 pelted the White Sox owner’s box with chants of “Sell the team!” as the team slid toward its 10th straight loss, deeper into the annals of the worst starts in franchise history, and further away from relevance in 2023. This is usually more than enough ugliness for one night.
“When it’s going bad, it goes bad,” Lynn said. “We better figure something out here quick.”
A White Sox offense missing Tim Anderson, Andrew Benintendi and Yoán Moncada due to injury was limited to four hits by the Rays, whose opener Calvin Foucher proved to be the leakiest part of their pitching plan. A bullpen that has struggled all month imploded as Aaron Bummer and the heavily used Jimmy Lambert (14 appearances in 28 games) could not seal the end of Lynn’s outing, and Sox relievers yielded eight runs while recording 11 outs. The final throw of a promising outfield relay was dropped, a weak chopper snuck across the infield grass to plate the tying run, and as the Rays showed off what contender-level defense actually looks like, the failures and ills of this Sox team seemed to run beyond what a motivated and prepared new coaching staff can hope to jump in and reverse.
Aaron Bummer’s ERA rose to 8.64 after allowing three earned runs in one-third of an inning. (Matt Marton / USA Today)“At this point, there’s not a meeting that’s going to do anything anymore,” Joe Kelly said earlier Saturday. “We’ve had numerous talks. We’ve just got to go out and play better. It’s pretty simple. It’s not like there’s any kind of magic formula you can do to make a win other than playing a good, clean baseball game all the way around.”
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Robert could have just simply represented a crest of the dissatisfaction the first-year manager has been openly expressing with his team’s play more and more, as an unthinkable 10-game losing streak has persisted. Earlier this week in Toronto, Grifol noted unacceptable levels of frustration when his team was falling behind, which he felt was impeding efforts to come back from deficits. As the Rays returned this weekend to run their mark to 6-0 against the White Sox this season, Grifol pointed out a lack of focus on defense Thursday, walked through fundamental errors made Friday that allowed a bizarre sacrifice fly on a short popout to center field, and noticeably ended second baseman Lenyn Sosa’s run of near-everyday action Saturday in its wake.
It regularly seems bigger than him, since his defensive metrics have been off the charts and his tools are so loud that it puts the onus on the organization to get the most out of him, but Robert has been right in the middle of this disastrous start. Saturday ended with Robert in a 5-for-55 slump with 20 strikeouts, as Grifol has consistently batted him high in the lineup, befitting his place as a potential star-level bat who is supposed to help fill the absence of José Abreu in the middle of the White Sox order. Robert’s decreased chase rates suggest progress in swing-decision work emphasized by the coaching staff, but his drastic reduction in swings in the zone has suggested someone who’s also just out of sorts and not seeing the baseball well. And Robert’s confusing postgame explanation of events eroded a more straightforward narrative of Grifol’s enforcing a standard he pledged in spring training to uphold.
“Last night I ran, I hustled a lot down the line,” Robert said through an interpreter. “Today my legs were a little tired. My right hamstring was a little tight. Then I decide just to play conservative today. That was what happened. I think my mistake was that I didn’t tell anybody. I didn’t tell the manager because I knew if I said something to him, he probably wouldn’t let me play.”
In the wake of last year’s grueling end of the season, when Robert blamed himself for trying to play through an injured wrist, avoiding the coaching staff to play through a tight hamstring is not the ideal path to avoid the team’s health issues of the last few seasons. But Robert took it beyond that, saying he opted not to clarify the situation to Grifol or bench coach Charlie Montoyo (whose name he could not immediately recall during the interview) when they asked him what was going on after the initial play and after he was benched.
When Grifol spoke to the media after the game, he did not give any indication that Robert had provided insight on his injury. The message about the state of his hamstring, Robert speculated, eventually filtered to the coaching staff through teammates Elvis Andrus and Eloy Jiménez. But Sunday’s pregame media availability will likely be spent trying to further untangle the provided accounts.
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“I understand the decision he made because he didn’t know,” Robert said about Grifol’s benching him. “People that didn’t know what was going on, you could think it was a lack of effort on my part. To me, people who know me, they know I’m always doing my best and running hard down the line. I definitely understand why he made the decision he made.”
It dovetails with a typical feeling when mapping out Grifol’s decisions in the wake of a disastrous first 28 games. They generally read as reasonable moves and responses to situations in which poor performances have provided no good options for the manager, and now, there’s incomplete information from a team that spoke in spring about understanding the importance of communicating better. With a new slate of deeply discouraging blowout losses since Grifol said in Toronto that this awful start in the standings didn’t feel as disqualifying as it might be for less talented, less engaged teams, I asked whether that endorsement still held true.
“It doesn’t feel like that,” Grifol said. “I can’t explain that feeling. It doesn’t feel like that. I wake up every morning and my feeling is today is going to be the day we start something really good. That’s my feeling. And that’s how we prepare, that’s how we work. Address things, that’s what we do. My feelings of that don’t change. We’re 20-something games into it, it doesn’t change. I don’t go back and look at history and look at what teams have done. I don’t do that kind of stuff. But I’m sure it’s been done before. Teams feel like the sky is falling on top of them, and all of a sudden they catch a break here and there, and they’re off and running. So I just don’t feel that way. I don’t feel that this is over, by any means.”
It’s not over, but the players and their performances aren’t providing any clear answers on where it’s headed from here.
(Top photo: Jeffrey Becker / USA Today)
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