Lopez believes White Sox can bounce back from abysmal season
Nicky Lopez spent four-plus seasons with the Royals, so he knows all about playing for bad baseball teams.
Traded from Kansas City to Atlanta last year, he was a part of a Braves club that won 104 games and advanced to the playoffs for the sixth straight season.
Lopez, a Naperville Central High School product, was traded from Atlanta to the White Sox in mid-November.
His hometown team lost 101 games last season and doesn't seem to be markedly better as the start of spring training nears.
FanGraphs is projecting the Sox to win 65-70 games this year, which sounds about right.
Having experienced some serious highs and lows during his five-year career, Lopez was asked the bleak outlook for the upcoming Sox season Thursday during a community outreach event held at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Chicago near Guaranteed Rate Field.
“You can use that for fuel or you can use that as you have a chip on your shoulder,” Lopez said. “But also, everyone knows that baseball's a crazy game. You can be picked to be first or be picked to come in last and you rewrite the script. I've seen both sides. I know what it takes, but it's more just a belief in the clubhouse.”
Many of the veteran players from last season's dysfunctional clubhouse are gone. The list includes Tim Anderson, Lance Lynn, Lucas Giolito, Yasmani Grandal and Liam Hendriks.
New general manager Chris Getz has added a crop of new players that includes Lopez, Michael Soroka, Erick Fedde, Paul DeJong and Martin Maldonado, a series of moves that have not exactly stirred a jaded fan base.
Lopez sees a team capable of doing a positive rewrite.
“Everybody starts 0-0 and all it takes is a team to get hot,” he said. “I like what we've got going on here. It's going to be a scrappy team. It's going to be a team that's not going to lay down easy. It's going to be a team that scraps and hustles and plays good defense. And were going to score runs, too.”
After taking over as the White Sox's manager before the 2023 season, Pedro Grifol was talking about meeting some big expectations.
A 7-21 start knocked the Sox out early and they never came close to regaining any footing.
This time around, Grifol is not looking too far ahead.
“I’m not thinking about playoffs right now, I’m not thinking about the first game of the season,” Grifol said. “I’m thinking about the first week of spring training. We’ve got to win that first week. We’ve got to go into spring training and prepare ourselves to win baseball games.
“There’s a lot of work to be done before that first game. There’s a lot of conversations between our staff and the players and we’ll be ready to play come Day One.”
Grifol learned last year that winning is the only thing that interests White Sox fans.
“We’ve got to prove it on the field,” he said. “I can stand here today and say we’re going to do this or do that. That’s not what this is about. This is about us preparing ourselves to play and prove to our fans once again that they had a difficult year last year and we’re going to come out and play a different style of baseball.”