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Did the Chicago White Sox Become Awful Because of Bad Players or a Bad Clubhouse?

One school of thought was the dysfunction in the clubhouse created a bad team.

By Todd Welter |
/ Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
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The Chicago White Sox contention window suddenly slammed shut last season.

There were a lot of reasons for that. Owner Jerry Reinsdorf kept putting self-imposed spending restrictions. The previous front office regime led by Kenny Williams and Rick Hahn made bad free-agent signings with the money they did spend. Tony La Russa being brought in to manage the club was a disaster. Replacing him with Pedro Grifol was even worse (and he somehow still has a job).

Injuries certainly derailed the team. For example, key hitters Yoan Moncada and Eloy Jimenez just could never stay healthy. When they were in the lineup, they underperformed at the plate. Tim Anderson had injuries zap him over his hitting ability.

The clubhouse chemistry was terrible. A bad clubhouse environment can sink any team. Although, the Oakland A's of the early 1970s and the 1977 Yankees had a terrible clubhouse, and they found a way to win the World Series. That is because they had great players.

The 2023 White Sox had some talented players, but no one was going into the Hall of Fame. Having not enough talented players might be the biggest reason the Sox lost 101 games. The White Sox could have held daily kumbaya sessions and probably still would have lost that many games because of the lack of talent.

At least that was the social media debate between NBC Sports Chicago White Sox pre & postgame host and reporter Chuck Garfien and SoxMachine.com editor Patrick Nolan recently had.

What sparked this was Chuck's recent White Sox Talk Podcast (a must-listen for anyone still loyal to the Sox) that tackled how general manager Chris Getz emphasized making sure he added good clubhouse players.

Make no mistake about it, from a value standpoint, the Sox had bad players in 2023. The lineup as a whole finished with a 3.4 fWAR and a wRC+ of 83. The pitching finished with a 10 fWAR, but you must account that Dylan Cease propped up that number. The Sox had the worst defensive value in all of baseball.

Chuck acknowledged a lot of that in his talk, but he also pointed out this team could not handle adversity once the bleep hit the fan last April. The Sox did not have the culture to turn things around after their terrible start to the 2023 season and it just went into tailspin.

Hey, that is what you get when you have guys like Mike Clevinger and Yasmani Grandal on the roster. It became well-known around the league that the White Sox were a dumpster fire.

Then again, a bad clubhouse still does not excuse the players from playing horribly. The 2021 team had the fun nearly sucked out by La Russa and still managed to win the AL Central.

There are countless tales in baseball of teams having dysfunction in the clubhouse, but when it was time to play, it was all business, and those teams found a way to win. The Sox found new ways to lose.

It also lets Grifol off the hook as he kept pointing out the clubhouse issues as a reason for bad play. The leader of the team could never get the team to pull together and he has to share some blame. Heck, Miguel Cairo got the 2022 underperforming team to play better ball once he took over the manager job on an interim basis. He did it with an impassioned speech when he took over.

There is nothing wrong with Getz wanting to fix the clubhouse culture (and the defense for that matter).

If Getz was going to get limited financial resources, it is not an awful idea to try to upgrade these two areas to see if that can help win on the margins.

The problem is his acquisitions project to have a roster that will finish with a 23.6 fWAR. Also, Reinsdorf told us the reason he just promoted Getz instead of conducting an extensive general manager search after he fired Williams and Hahn was that Chris was going to turn things around quickly. Well, a 23.6 fWAR forecast is not exactly getting things turned around fast.

This team can have all the family dinners that they want, but that is still not forecasting many victories. Turning things around quickly usually means spending money in free agency to cover holes that your system could not fill. The Sox had a lot of them, and Getz chose to plug them with guys like Paul DeJong and Nicky Lopez. Two players who have already had their career season and are now neutral fWAR players at best.

Although to be fair, Chuck correctly points out that a toxic clubhouse culture is not exactly going to attract great players in free agency.

What is probably getting missed in all of this is the fear that Getz is running the team per Jerry Reinsdorf's wishes. This means he is running the Sox like this is still not 1955 and Branch Rickey is still around. The Sox have been slow to embrace the modern run to a team and acquire players. The recent collapse is proof of that. The owner would not spend enough to put the team over the top and the previous regime did a bad job constructing the roster with the limited resources it had.

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