Just like we figured earlier today, Grant & Danny (especially Grant Paulsen) were ALL OVER the idea that maybe, just maybe, Mike Rizzo’s lack of an extension so far is a glimmer he may head home to Chicago to take over the White Sox job that just opened up Tuesday night.
Grant mentioned how Rizzo was on with the Junkies this morning, and recalled how The Athletic suggested the GM’s extension was almost done on Monday after Dave Martinez’s deal was done, and since then, the White Sox have cleaned house, and this could be a better deal at best and a leveraging tool in any case.
And then, after playing Rizzo’s answer on the extension idea to the Junks, well…
“I don’t have knowledge, this is all speculative, but what I do know is that the White Sox job is a bad job right now,” Grant said. “If you lined up all 30 teams, maybe the A’s are the worst because of ownership, although there’s a little juice with the move to Vegas, and the Pirates, who never spend money, can’t be a good job. Those are your bottom-feeders, but the White Sox are a bad major-league team and a bottom-five system in baseball, with only a couple high-end prospects.”
So then, why would Rizzo want to leave to go to a situation worse than he had here?
“If you’re Mike Rizzo, you just went through three years of a painful start of a rebuild which is about to bear fruit, and the fun part will be next year,” Grant said. “You basically would have run 20 miles of a marathon to stop, peel off, and start another marathon, because that team needs to be gutted, and it’s a three or four-year rebuild at least.”
And what makes the White Sox worse, beyond the fact they haven’t won anything in 20 years, is that unlike the 2020-22 Nationals, there are no crown jewels to sell off for better young assets.
“You don’t have a Juan Soto, or guys like Max Scherzer and Trea Turner, to flip to change the outlook and bring in a couple future All-Stars,” Grant said. “They have some major-leaguers they can flip, but it’s just a bad job…unless they paid him A LOT more than the Nationals. I know it’s home, but he’s lived here for 15 years and the team is on the way to being competitive, so I find it hard to believe he would walk for that job. If a different good organization came calling, maybe, but home or not, that’s the No. 2 team in the city with a bad big-league club and a system light years away from being able to win.”
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Rant over, all Danny Rouhier could do was agree.
“It’s a great summary,” Danny replied. “There is some Chicago pull, so I don’t know if it’s a leverage thing, or the Lerners doing business the way they usually do, or it could just be they haven’t done it yet.”
Grant, again, could see that leverage play being the situation…because he also thinks the White Sox, who just fired the GM with the third-longest tenure in MLB behind Rizzo and Brian Cashman, might want to change direction?
“If he doesn’t mind everyone speculating publicly about the timing – maybe he could flirt with them, and come back to the Lerners and ask for what the White Sox could give him,” Grant said. “Maybe you overplay your hand and bite off more than you can chew, and you have to go to Chicago…but as much of an advocate as I have been to re-sign Mike Rizzo, if you’re the White Sox, who just got out of the Rick Hahn business, wouldn’t you want to go young and analytical? He’s in his 60s, do they want him to come over and take years and years to build up, or should they be looking for their Farhan Zaidi, so to speak?”
“If I’m Jerry Reinsdorf, I’m going to tell them that I need you to do this on a budget, which he sort of did with Jerry Krause with the Bulls years ago and pissed everyone off,” Danny replied. “He’s always been a ‘we’ll have the next guy figure it out’ type, so I don’t know how strong the appeal is; maybe on paper, because it’s Chicago, that’s enough, but it is hanging over the team.”
Grant speaks the truth when he posits that the longer we go without a Rizzo extension (or a White Sox move), the more fuel the rumor mill’s fire gets, and he gets why the dots are being connected – but ‘it’s just such a terrible job, you’d have to really pay me to take it.’
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“If you’re a Nationals fan, they’ve started something that really seems to be working, so I’d be rooting for him to stay here,” Grant said. “Maybe give him two years like Davey, get to the end of the rebuild, and assess by how you feel the prospects have panned out by then?”
“You know the expression ‘don’t change horses mid-stream?’ Well, you won the title and tore it down, and right then would’ve been the time to maybe move on to a fresh set of eyes,” Danny replied. “You let these guys embark on the rebuild, so they need to be here to finish the rebuild.”
Follow Grant & Danny on Twitter: @granthpaulsen & @funnydanny
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