Chicago White Sox manager Grady Sizemore photo

By Morris Phillips

SAN FRANCISCO—Making out the lineup isn’t a mundane act for Chicago White Sox interim manager Grady Sizemore.

“It’s something that I enjoy,” Sizemore said. “But again, there’s nothing set in stone. I’m just trying to get guys comfortable, playing in their spots. We’re evaluating it every day on where we want guys. I just want the best matchups.”

The best matchups on Tuesday night at Oracle Park weren’t very favorable for Sizemore. The woeful Sox were limited to three hits by Robbie Ray, a pitcher who didn’t survive the first inning in his last start against the Braves. On Tuesday, he was reborn, or more accurately, given a dream matchup against one of the worst teams baseball has ever seen.

The White Sox fell to 30-97, an unforgivable 67 games below .500, and they dropped their 14th consecutive series in losing the first two games against the Giants. A 14-game losing streak, and 21-game skid after that drew national headlines. And if Sizemore’s club falls behind, they fold their tents early and get ready for the next game. On Tuesday, the game was played in a brisk two hours, twenty minutes, and Chicago fell to 0-74 when they trail after seven innings.

To say Sizemore has his work lumped upon his clubhouse desk so high he can’t see out the door would be fair. But none of this is fair. Pedro Grifol was shown the door on August 8, and GM Chris Getz tabbed Sizemore to get the team through the final 45 games with grace, dignity and a whole bunch of humility.

Of course, those needs pointed Getz to rock-solid, super-steady Sizemore.

“We knew this season was gonna have its struggles based on the roster that we had,” Getz said on the occasion of Grifol’s dismissal. “When you make a change, you want to be very certain that it’s going to be effective.”

So what does effective mean in this very unusual case? It means that Sizemore, who has just one year of coaching experience as a minor league instructor for the Indians in 2023 must win at least 11 of the final 36 games to keep his club out of the record books as the worst team ever by losing percentage in the 20th and 21st centuries, a period of 125 years. It’s a weighty assignment that will draw a bunch of unwanted attention on a city and a fan base that at this point just wants to be left alone.

The 42-year old Sizemore doesn’t particularly like attention. So he is the right guy for the job. When asked if he would like this interim job to morph into a managers’ job somewhere else in 2025, a possibility if not a likelihood, he characteristically didn’t bite.

“Right now, I just focus on what I can do for these guys now,” he said after the 4-1 loss. “I don’t think past tomorrow.”

Sizemore’s words have never been terribly entertaining, but his tale of the tape is.

He’s originally from Seattle, and he graduated from high school in nearby Everett, Washington, where he played football, baseball and basketball while compiling a stellar 3.85 GPA. He’s bi-racial; his father Grady II is black, and his mother, Donna, is white.

From the managerial pedestal, his background sets Sizemore apart. African-American managers are often older not unlike Dusty Baker and Ron Washington, and have far more coaching experience and grooming, again like Baker and Washington. Yeah, black managers have been chosen to lead a bunch of reclamation projects, but not one this dire.

But here he is, and really isn’t trying to make light of any of it.

“I’m never going to waste my time worrying about stuff,” he said in an interview and article granted to ESPN in 2006. “I am going to enjoy my time on the planet, and that’s it.

“I don’t judge people. I just accept them for who they are.”

GAME NOTES: Tuesday’s game was a matchup of starting pitchers who both have had Tommy John surgery, and missed a large chunk of playing time, which today, is an occurrence that’s becoming more and more frequent.

“It’s great seeing (the Giants’) Robbie Ray, another TJ guy, pitch,” Chicago’s Davis Martin said after the game.

Martin said he felt great afterwards, departing in the fifth inning after throwing 82 pitches, which was a mandated max by Sizemore and his staff.

Ray completely turned things around by pitching into the seventh inning, after he didn’t survive the first inning against the Braves in his previous start, a 13-2 loss that was the low point of last week’s four-game slide for the Giants.