How can the White Sox get back on track? Follow the Cubs’ game plan and clean house for 2024. – The Denver Post

The Chicago Cubs and White Sox have traded places since the finale of the 2021 City Series, when the Sox pummeled Kyle Hendricks in a 13-1 win at Guaranteed Rate Field for a three-game sweep.

The ’21 Cubs, coming off their vaunted sell-off, went into that game on the South Side with a 6-20 record in August and the third-worst record in baseball since the All-Star break, ahead of only the Baltimore Orioles and Texas Rangers. The Sox were 19 games over .500 with a 10-game lead in the American League Central.

The future looked exceedingly bright for the Sox, while the Cubs were entering the rebuild that president Jed Hoyer wouldn’t call a rebuild.

As Hendricks took the mound again Tuesday night at Wrigley Field, the Cubs were back in the hunt for a playoff spot for the first time in three years, while the Sox had the fourth-worst record in the game and were 14 1/2 games out of first, playing out the string after a mini sell-off of their own.

Time flies whether you’re having fun or counting the days until the start of the offseason.

No one could’ve predicted back in August 2021 that Hoyer’s plan would soon start paying dividends, or that Sox general manager Rick Hahn would be under fire for the collapse of a rebuild he’d been lauded for while it was going on.

But here we are, and now the two biggest questions are whether the Cubs can ride on Cody Bellinger’s shoulders into the postseason, and if the Sox have to tear apart the core, as Hoyer did in ’21, and try something different to get back in contention in a relatively short time frame.

The difference between the two teams was noticeable before Tuesday’s game.

Dansby Swanson said the Cubs have “done a lot to build chemistry” in the clubhouse and have gelled together as the season went on and players grew more comfortable with their roles. They went into the start of the City Series 19-10 since the break, and playing as good a brand of baseball as we’ve seen on the North Side since 2019.

No matter what their overall record is at the end of the regular season, getting in gives them a shot, and it’s up to them to make it count.

“You want to be playing at your best when October comes,” Swanson said. “You see a lot of teams that catch fire at the right times and always have a chance. That’s all we’re asking for.”

On the other side of the park, Sox center fielder Luis Robert Jr. said in the visitors’ clubhouse that he didn’t view himself as a potential leader. Robert was then asked if there were any leaders in the Sox clubhouse.

“I don’t know,” he said through a translator.

At least he was honest. Tim Anderson should be that guy, but the one-time face of the franchise has studiously avoided the media since the José Ramirez knockdown punch went viral.

Whether the core of the Sox is salvageable is a question no one can answer. This team was built around Anderson, Robert and Eloy Jiménez, who all remain, along with starters Michael Kopech and Dylan Cease.

Could the Sox get back to winning next year with the same core and a bit of tinkering?

“That’s out of my hands,” Robert said. “That’s the front office’s job. They’ll do what they think is best and I don’t have any vote or any major opinion of players or what they have to do.”

He doesn’t have a vote, but he should have an opinion. Unfortunately, it’s much easier to say nothing and go about your business like it’s just another job. That’s the new Sox culture. “Change the Game” was the mantra in 2021 when the team was cocky and full of life. Now they’ve gone in the opposite direction — saying nothing and looking lifeless.

Manager Pedro Grifol, who came into the job talking about “kicking ass,” has resorted to repeating the same talking points.

“I don’t ever want to compromise a major-league win to find out what somebody can do,” he said Tuesday. “However, that’s important for us too, moving forward. There’s a fine line we have to walk through to get to where we need as far as evaluation purposes.”

What Grifol doesn’t know is that somewhere in the baseball world, someone is evaluating him to see whether he should stick around next year. Hahn may or may not be the one asked to fix this mess, but if he’s not back of his own volition, his replacement needs to watch what Grifol is doing and saying these final 42 games.

While Hahn deservedly gets much of the blame for the downfall, (along with executive vice president Ken Williams) at least he did a decent job of getting rid of some deluded would-be leaders who not only declined to lead but showed no accountability for their own roles in the team’s regression.

You can’t have good clubhouse chemistry with self-serving players like Lance Lynn, Joe Kelly and Kendall Graveman backstabbing their teammates along the way and pretending they weren’t part of the problem. If any of the current Sox pitchers still revere their former teammates, perhaps the clubhouse chemistry is doomed to fail again in ’24.

Only a handful of the Cubs who played in that 13-1 loss in the City Series finale of 2021 remain with the team now. Hoyer cleaned house and found a group of players who put their egos aside for the betterment of the team.

The Sox can turn things around relatively quickly with the same kind of game plan.

Who will execute that plan, in the executive suite and in the dugout, remains to be seen.

But at least we know it can be done.

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