Our long national nightmare is over.
Pedro Grifol is no longer a Major League manager.
I don’t recall any organization run worse than this current White Sox situation.
But let’s talk about how horrific Pedro Grifol was as a manager.
Pedro Grifol wasn’t just the worst manager in baseball.
Pedro Grifol is the worst manager who has ever lived.
I’m not going to take too much stock in John McCloskey.
Those, by the way, are actual names of starting pitchers on the 1908 Cardinals.
I can talk about Doc Protho a little bit.
The Philadelphia Phillies from 1939-41 were terrible and lost 100+ games every year.
But they lost 105 games the season before Protho got there and 109 games the year after he left.
They lost 100+ games 12 times in that span.
It’s the greatest stretch of failure in baseball history.
That can’t all fall on Doc Protho.
The organization was a train wreck and they literally had an elderly man as manager.
But you know what?
That’s still a better winning percentage than the 2024 White Sox had under Grifol.
It’s also not really fair to pin shit on an interim manager.
The 2003 Tigers went 43-119 under Alan Trammell but that was an AAA team.
No Tigers starting pitcher over the age of 27 started a game that year.
Bill James wrote that Fred Haney in 1959 is the worst season by any manager ever.
But that’s a whole different scale.
The 1957-58 Braves (both also under Haney) each won NL Pennants and the 1957 won it all.
I agree with James that the 1959 Braves had way too much talent to not make the World Series.
But what are we doing here.
The White Sox are 28-89.
Comparing Haney to Grifol is like comparing a jaywalker to John Wayne Gacy.
I’ll miss Pedro Grifol.
We are so quick as a society to honor the greatest at something.
Bur for every Michael Jordan or Babe Ruth, there has to be someone who is the absolute worst.
It’s just as rare.
We all got to see the worst manager in baseball history.
Sure, tell your grandkids about Wayne Gretzky and Lebron James.
But double-check to tell them about Pedro Grifol as well.
