Rozner: White Sox firing Renteria hardly a shock

When last week went by and there was no postseason media availability with White Sox general manager Rick Hahn, I texted a front office employee on the South Side.

"Any chance you guys are trying to figure out what to do with the manager?" I asked.

It was unusual to not wrap the season as quickly as possible, was my thinking. No reply. Radio silence all weekend. The guess was it was bad news for Rick Renteria, but it was only a guess.

It became official Monday morning when the Sox issued a release saying the two sides had parted ways, but make no mistake about what occurred. Renteria was fired because he is not good at managing a baseball game, especially handling a pitching staff late in the game.

It's a shame because Renteria was loved by his players and admired by the front office, just as decent a man as you could ever have in a major league manager.

This will be tough on the players who have grown to think of Renteria as a father figure, especially with so many young Latin players who are new to America, new to Chicago and new to the majors.

The painful reality is Renteria is a Point A to Point B guy and we knew that when he took over for Robin Ventura. He got the job just as the rebuild began and when I said on the radio that he will probably get whacked just as the Sox are about to compete for a title, I wasn't kidding.

It's incredibly cruel that it happened to him with the Cubs when Joe Maddon became available, and now it has happened again.

Incredibly cruel.

Rick Renteria deserved a better fate, but baseball - like life - is rarely fair and if the White Sox go on to win a World Series under the next manager, Renteria's picture will always be associated with the definition of a guy who couldn't catch a break.

But in the words of Will Munny, "Deserve's got nothing to do with it."

It's time for a manager to take them to Point C and Renteria is not that guy. Pitching coach Don Cooper was also fired, more evidence that the Sox are trying to get younger and modernize every aspect of the organization, suggesting a move to Alex Cora or A.J. Hinch - or someone like that - in the weeks to come.

Joe Girardi has a contract with Philadelphia and is less analytically driven than the others, but he fits the bill as a guy who has won and is great at working with young players.

As for Renteria, Hahn was genuine Monday in expressing his respect for Renteria, who did what he was asked and helped develop, teach and hold accountable this fabulous young core of players.

Still, you had to know this was coming. Renteria probably knew it was coming.

When I spoke to Renteria at SoxFest in 2017, fresh off watching the Cubs win the 2016 World Series, Renteria insisted there were no hard feelings.

"I think you learn really early in your career that certain things happen in the game that are out of your control, and you can only worry about the things you can control," said Renteria, who was a first-round pick of the Pirates at age 18 and played parts of five years in the big leagues. "So you look in the mirror. If you can say you did everything you could to enhance the organization during the time you were there, that's where you leave it.

"You reflect on it and you try to figure out if there was something you fell short on. I'm not perfect. No one is.

"But I don't think about it too much. I don't think about how that could have been my team. I just take it as an experience, a great opportunity. Try to take advantage of it from a learning standpoint and move on."

A class act at all times, Renteria would not express any disappointment about watching his team - what a normal person would think of as his team - win without him.

"It's like Rocky Balboa," Renteria said. "How hard can you get hit and get up again and keep moving? That's what you're supposed to do. That's what life is about. I'm an optimistic person by nature."

When asked about being put in charge of another rebuild, Renteria said, "There have been five or six clubs over the last five or six years that have gone this route, so it's not unheard of for this model to work. It would be foolish of me to say I didn't learn from my experiences on the other side of town."

If he truly did, Renteria knew that the timing of this ending was always a possibility, that he would suffer through the worst of it and then be sent packing just at a moment when it was all starting to come together.

Cruel. Just incredibly cruel. But that's life.

And that's baseball.