Chris Sale‘s flirtation with the sartorial industry has without a doubt been one of the strangest subplots in this White Sox season, a sentence that should not have been possible four months after learning that a 14-year-old boy was a clubhouse leader. But the fact that the Drake LaRoche saga was even capable of occurring said enough about what everyone had been thinking about the clubhouse for the past few seasons: what exactly does Robin Ventura do that keeps him gainfully employed? Because it’s not winning ball games, and after Sale’s recent interview with Scott Merkin, it’s become fully apparent that it’s not effectively managing the clubhouse either.
The first half of the interview does a good job of further illuminating how Sale acted like a petulant child this weekend. I was grounded in middle school for something once and broke every pencil in our house out of rage for some reason, so I get it. Then again, maybe a grown man shouldn’t act like an unstable preteen boy. But it starts getting interesting about halfway through.
Those are pretty damning sound bites and it’s fairly hard to imagine this not ruining their professional relationship. Sale has attempted to lead two mutinies against management this season over ridiculous things. That’s bad, silly, and hard to sympathize with. But the subtext in that interview shows that this isn’t just about middle schoolers hanging out in the clubhouse or wearing some of the more hideous jerseys in franchise history: the team’s ace doesn’t have faith that management is actively trying to put together a winning roster. And he has a point.
The White Sox should be a competitive team. Yes, they’re the second most popular team in their city. But it’s the third-largest city and media market in all of Major League Baseball. The owners are rich, the stadium was basically free, and there is no salary cap. They have two of the best pitchers in the AL signed to essentially interns wages. They had two star hitters coming into the season also signed for pittances. And yet they spent nothing on free agents and were unshockingly burned by their (hopefully) hubris or (more realistically) thriftiness. The fans were already mad about it, but now the best player the franchise has drafted since Frank Thomas has announced he’s pissed off about it too.
Sale’s horrid temper is forcing White Sox management into a position they’ve never been terribly good at handling. The respect is gone between their homegrown cost-controlled ace and at the very least his lame duck manager. Someone has to go.
It seems like a simple enough decision to make. One of the two has actually shown positive value and will going forward. The other is Robin Ventura. But this is the White Sox, an organization built on overt and unyielding loyalty that isn’t really deserved. We’re also talking about the same front office that’s biggest free agent signing this winter was either a catching tandem of a crash test dummy and an aging defensive Ozymandias replica or Austin Jackson. Do you trust them to not make this worse?
“… it’s the third-largest city and media market in all of Major League Baseball.” Correction: 4th largest. Toronto is a larger city and a much larger media market because it covers all of Canada.