Sympathy for the Grifol: There’s a unique perspective to covering bad teams
Sports fans remember the championship moments.
Reporters experience every moment.
One unique part of this job is you can never tune out or change the channel. After crushing losses, during depressing seasons, the beat writers must stare into those faces of disappointment. They stand around deadly silent locker rooms trying to find answers while trying not to offend anyone too much. After all, you've got to talk to them again the next day.
In some ways, these teams are easiest to root for. I'll admit working up a bit of a soft spot for the White Sox in recent weeks.
The Sox went through an excruciating stretch recently. Playing in lively and hostile environments at Milwaukee and Wrigley Field, they lost five games in a row after holding the lead. They finally broke the 14-game losing streak against Boston, then dropped five more on lost leads, extra innings and walk-offs as the team moved on to Seattle.
From afar, it's easy to mock and ridicule. When you interact with players who are doing their best, getting no results and going back at it the next day, sympathy can be generated pretty easily.
There's a phenomenon that happens everywhere in the sports world, but is particularly frequent in Chicago: A team starts the season with no expectations of winning, then the losses start piling up and people begin to lose their minds. Why? What did you think was going to happen?
In the case of the White Sox, it's manager Pedro Grifol who has to take the heat, before and after every game, then get roasted on the postgame show.
Sure, Ozzie Guillen is important comic relief for suffering fans. But Guillen starts to sound like a certain ex-president when he talks about how he would have done everything perfectly if he were in that seat.
This White Sox team, expected to be one of the worst in MLB, lost Luis Robert Jr., Yoan Moncada and Eloy Jimenez to the injured list in April. No manager would have this team anywhere close to .500. So why pass out so much grief to Grifol?
This has happened plenty of times before and it's usually the same lesson. Whether it's Tim Floyd, Fred Hoiberg, Mike Quade, Terry Bevington, etc. — just because a team is forecast to be bad, it doesn't make losing any easier.
Coaches and manager are very well paid, so there's no reason to go overboard with sad feelings. But they also got to that point in life by being extremely driven and competitive, so poor results are always a bad mix.
This stretch of tough losses by the White Sox brought to mind one of the Floyd seasons, when the Bulls lost five in a row while holding leads well into the fourth quarter. Those Bulls teams would play their rear ends off, but the other side was always more talented and determined not to lose to the worst team in the NBA. So they would crank it up late, get some foul calls and clutch plays, and almost always pull out a win.
The bad teams know the drill. Their most frequent quotes usually contain the phrase, “No one is going to feel sorry for us.”
So laugh or curse at the White Sox if you must. Just keep in mind, there's a certain honor to being a player that gives their best every day, even when there's very little chance of success.
Twitter: @McGrawDHSports