Clearly the White Sox were a competitive team for quite some time this season, but couldn’t hold it together to get into the postseason. They had the team on paper going into the 2016 campaign, and looked like it through May, but it ended in Robin Ventura leaving because he must have known he was on the hot seat. Pretty much the very next day, the bench coach, Rick Renteria was hired to replace Ventura. However, Renteria is not the right fit to get the Sox back into October ball.
The White Sox were clearly one of the best teams in the league up until the last couple days of May when they fell out of first place in the AL Central to the Indians. They remained a tough defeat throughout the remainder of the season, but never regained momentum. With 3 guys having 175+ hits, a Cy Young candidate, a good closer, and depth, the AL playoff teams that are still playing don’t have much more to offer, so why did the Sox fail in 2016? Easy, their manager. Hiring Ventura’s bench coach who has a losing record in his experience coaching in the minors and nothing better than average success as a coach in the majors, White Sox fans shouldn’t expect much more in 2017, thus far.
The south side Chicago team was 32-44 against it’s own division this year, while they were 46-40 against the rest of the MLB. For a team that has just as much talent as the rest of the squads in it’s division, they should be able to figure out how to defeat them for most of the time, but obviously the Sox couldn’t accomplish that. Since the last time they won the division they have had a losing record 7/8 years against the AL Central. A team like the White Sox who have the talent and depth to make it to the postseason, and a GM who seems to be making the right moves, like bringing in Todd Frazier to fill that third base gap and promoting Tim Anderson to be the future shortstop. However, they now need a manager who can get them over the hump, someone who can beat up the AL Central. Rick Renteria has been under Ventura for a year now, therefore knowing the direction of the franchise as well as the players, but that doesn’t mean he will be any better than Ventura. The perfect fit for this job would have been Ron Gardenhire, a man who knows how to win the AL Central.
