White Sox manager Will Venable rates, celebrates and self-evaluates as upstart team heads into home stretch
One year ago, when the White Sox had exactly 29 games to go — same as now — a bumbling columnist poked around the clubhouse and dugout asking questions based on a rather flimsy premise.
Look, you try coming up with dazzling late-summer storylines on a team bound for its third straight 100-plus-loss finish.
The premise that day: How important was it to the Sox to avoid the ignominy of triple-digit “Ls”? They’d have to finish with a 15-14 “tear” to do it. (They went 12-17 instead to end up 60-102.)
Then-rookie manager Will Venable humored me on the subject despite its superficiality. There are no parades for 99-loss teams, after all.
“Of course, no one wants to lose 100 games,” he said, “but I don’t think it will come up as a topic of conversation with us.”
The good news: There are far better things to discuss when a team is 70-63 and in first place heading into the final 29 of the regular season.
The Sox have pitching issues, yet they hit the road for Minnesota having won eight of their last 13 and 11 of 18. They were a bit gassed by the end of 16 straight games without a day off, yet they more than survived the gauntlet. Munetaka Murakami and Colson Montgomery are slumping badly, but red-hot Tristan Peters and Miguel Vargas are carrying the lineup just fine.
Have the Sox — in first place since July 4 — reached the point where even when they stink, they don’t stink? It seems so.
Players claim they saw all this coming a year ago.
“I’m not surprised where we’re at,” said second baseman Chase Meidroth, who added five hits to the mix as the Sox beat the Rangers in the last two games of a 4-3 homestand.
“Yeah, for sure I thought we’d be here,” said third baseman Vargas, owner of a 1.022 OPS in August. “This is our identity now.”
But Venable? He was a bit more thoughtful when I asked him how much he would have believed a year ago — on a scale of 1 to 10 — the Sox would be where they are now.
“A 5,” he said after some consideration. “I don’t want to say I didn’t expect us to be here, but I also don’t want to say I [did].”
Normally, Venable — like his boss, general manager Chris Getz — holds even tighter than most to the “one game at a time” mantra that reveals little of good use, narratively speaking. As we talked Wednesday before the Sox walloped the Rangers 10-4, he loosened his grip on the wheel a little.
“Obviously, we know it’s about tonight’s game,” he said. “But I think that it’s totally fine to take a step back and — I don’t want to say celebrate — but, I don’t know, you know what? Maybe that is the right word. It’s OK to take a step back and celebrate the fact that we’ve made a ton of progress. And there are indicators everywhere; certainly in our record, and you just look out on the field and we have really good players that play the game the right way. We have a ton of great things happening behind the scenes. …
“[We’re] in a much better spot than we were a year ago.”
I asked him to do some self-evaluation as a second-year manager. He has a good shot to win the American League manager of the year award, but to some extent that’s superficial, too. At 43, is he good at this?
“A lot better than last year,” he said.
Venable hasn’t been perfect. For one thing, there was the blunder during a game this month when he made a second visit to the mound during the first inning, forcing starting pitcher Noah Schultz to depart prematurely with the bullpen already thin on available arms. That one stung.
“But it’s OK to make mistakes. We make mistakes and we get better,” he said. “I’ve been part of that and want to be a leader with that mindset. I feel like I’ve grown a ton, but I have a long way to go, too.
“If I’m evaluating myself, am I creating an environment for our players to be at their best? I think there’s a lot of good things to point to in that area; there’s things I’m learning every day that I can do for our group, our environment. There’s also the in-game stuff; I have a ton of support with that and it’s something we’re all working at.”
These Sox are on target to become baseball’s most unexpected division winner, whereupon — just being honest — next to no one outside Sox walls will pick them to beat anybody in the playoffs.
Next year, though, there’s a decent chance the Sox will go in as the favorites to win the AL Central. With the right offseason maneuvering by Getz and his crew, the Sox should move closer to what they view as contention for something even bigger. Eventually, a decision will have to be made about whether or not Venable is the skipper to steer the Sox over the top.
At this point, there’s no reason to think Getz has any doubts about the guy he already has. Let’s be clear on that.
Yeah, yeah: Flimsy premise alert.
But there is a history in the sport — and in Chicago, notably, of recent vintage — of teams bailing on first-time managers just as so-called winning windows open wide. A month after Cubs chairman Tom Ricketts called David Ross “our guy,” Ross was kicked to the curb and replaced by star Craig Counsell. If Counsell hadn’t been there for the stealing, Ross surely would’ve gotten another season.
Before that, the Cubs dumped Rick Renteria after one season to go after Joe Maddon. Renteria, poor guy, later was gut-punched by the Sox, freeing chairman Jerry Reinsdorf to make a buddy movie with Tony La Russa.
Venable humored me on this one, too.
“I’ll say this, these jobs have such volatility that you don’t make any assumptions about what the future looks like, whether that’s a positive thing or a negative thing,” he said. “Truthfully, you just are grateful for every day and you know the reality of the industry is that everyone is replaceable and eventually, at some point, you’re not asked back.
“I think that has nothing necessarily to do with my situation, but it is reality.”