Chicago White Sox Name Pedro Grifol Next Manager

In a press conference Thursday, the White Sox made it official: Pedro Grifol will be their next manager. Grifol, 52, heads to Chicago on a multi-year contract.

He is joining the White Sox after ten years with the Kansas City Royals, from 2013-2022. Grifol spent the last three seasons as the Royals’ bench coach after serving in a variety of other roles with the team.

“Pedro is a bilingual, modern baseball thinker who brings two-plus decades of experience in a variety of roles – bench coach, hitting coach, winter ball and minor league manager, director of player development and scout,” said Rick Hahn, White Sox general manager/senior vice president. “He is an excellent communicator and an experienced game planner who brings a high energy and detail-oriented approach to leadership. He is committed to building an inclusive and cohesive clubhouse, and we could not be happier to have Pedro leading our club.”

Grifol was with the Seattle Mariners from 2000-2012. There he had a range of duties, including managing at the minor league level and in the Venezuelan Winter League. He was drafted by the Minnesota Twins out of Florida State University in 1991 and played in the Twins and Mets systems for nine years before joining the Mariners as a coach.

Having never reached the majors as a player, Grifol joins Baltimore’s Brandon Hyde, St. Louis’ Oliver Marmol, Toronto’s John Schneider, Pittsburgh’s Derek Shelton, the Mets’ Buck Showalter, Atlanta’s Brian Snitker and Philadelphia’s Rob Thomson as active managers who did not play in the major leagues.

Grifol takes the reins after two tumultuous seasons with Tony La Russa at the helm. La Russa was hired after the 2020 season, returning to the organization for the first time since he was fired mid-season in 1986. During La Russa’s second tenure, the White Sox reached the division series in 2021 but were beaten by the Astros, and then they went 81-81 and failed to make the playoffs this year.

Among the criticisms of La Russa was his reluctance to employ a modern approach to managing. That’s a problem the White Sox are hoping they have solved by hiring Grifol, who they expect to be able to walk the line between the data and the people behind the numbers.

“Analytics is a big part of this thing,” he told reporters Thursday. “However, these are humans. They aren’t robots. I feel like we’ll have a good base on what we need to …whether it’s analytically or dealing with the human element.”

Grifol will have most of the core of the 2022 team back next year, but he will likely be missing a key piece or two. Namely, José Abreu is headed to free agency and has already drawn attention from the crosstown rival Cubs.

The White Sox are expected to go into 2023 with a payroll of about $154 million, according to Roster Resource. There will be gaps on the roster to fill, but that’s not necessarily going to be one of the biggest issues Grifol has to work around. Last season, repeated injuries to key players kept La Russa from being able to write a full-strength lineup more than a few times during the year. That, and in general, the White Sox failed to play up to expectations, so a new face in the clubhouse and dugout might be what helps shake them out of the malaise the plagued so much of the 2022 season.

On that front, the energy around the White Sox is already more upbeat. At least for Hahn.

“You may see me smiling a little bit more than you have over the past year and gushing a little bit more than I have in the past year and that’s because it’s a little difficult for me to contain the excitement that many of us feel,” he told reporters Thursday.