The Chicago White Sox announced this morning that manager Pedro Grifol has been fired. “As we all recognize, our team’s performance this season has been disappointing on many levels,” general manager Chris Getz said in a statement within this morning’s press release. “Despite the on-field struggles and lack of success, we appreciate the effort and professionalism Pedro and the staff brought to the ballpark every day. These two seasons have been very challenging. Unfortunately, the results were not there, and a change is necessary as we look to our future and the development of a new energy around the team.”

Ya think? Under Grifol, the White Sox just finished tying the all-time American League record for consecutive losses at 21. He leaves with the third worst winning percentage of any manager in Major League history who has managed more than a single season. But believe it or not, his two and a two thirds-season tenure at the helm of the ChiSox was even worse than those stats indicate.

Last season, Keynan Middleton publicly criticized the White Sox’ clubhouse culture after he was traded to the Yankees. The pitcher said that there were “no rules” and “no consequences;” he said he knew of instances of “rookies sleeping in the bullpen during games” and players skipping team meetings and fielding drills. Veteran pitcher Lance Lynn was asked if Middleton’s comments were just the complaints of a disgruntled ex-, and he said that Middleton was “not wrong.” This year there were reports that the White Sox had a “fractured” clubhouse that wasn’t helped any when Grifol told his players that they would be remembered as the worst team in MLB history if they didn’t shape up. One player told a local sportswriter, “It’s been really tough in there. Pedro is a really good guy, just not the man for the job.”

So he was fired. That’s what’s supposed to happen to the leader of an organization that falls flat on its metaphorical face with terrible consequences. Was the White Sox losing all those games—nobody expected the team, which is a re-building mode, to be good this season, just not so spectacularly bad—as spectacular an organizational failure as, just to pick a random example out of the air, the Secret Service? Nobody has been fired for its astounding incompetence in Butler, Pa., although many culprits have been identified. Nobody has been fired from a leadership position during the entire Biden Administration, although the culture of incompetence is throbbingly obvious. (I guess Joe himself comes the closest to having been fired.)

In an essay on substack, conservative law professor and blogger Glenn Reynold sees the culture rotting from the head down:

Almost everywhere you look, we are in a crisis of institutional competence….The Navy, whose ships keep colliding and catching fire. Major software vendor Crowdstrike, whose botched update shut down major computer systems around the world. The United States government, which built entire floating harbors to support the D-Day invasion in Europe, but couldn’t build a workable floating pier in Gaza.

And of course, Boeing, whose Starliner spacecraft is stuck, apparently indefinitely, at the International Space Station…..At present, Starliner is clogging up a necessary docking point at the ISS, and they can’t even send Starliner back to Earth on its own because it lacks the necessary software to operate unmanned – even though an earlier build of Starliner did just that. Then there are all the problems with Boeing’s airliners, literally too numerous to list here. 

Roads and bridges take forever to be built or repaired, new airports are nearly unknown, and the Covid response was extraordinary for its combination of arrogant self-assurance and evident ineptitude.

Reynold’s diagnosis is that the culture has abandoned the core ethical value of accountability, and it’s hard to argue with him. Indeed, as often as not incompetence and failure are rewarded today: look at Kamala Harris. I would say that this progressive (in both meanings of the word) ethics rot would be a inviting target for attack by the campaign of the former President who once made “You’re fired!” his trademark, except that much of the American public as well as our institutions seem to have embraced the concept of a no-consequences society.

“Restorative justice” is on the rise; so is letting criminals walk away from anything short of a felony. Illegal immigrants get benefits, not punishment. Corrupt politicians (if they are in the right party) get faculty jobs at prominent universities. Dan Rather, who used fabricated evidence to try to defeat President Bush, still is featured on MSNBC. The Washington Post and New York Times are apparently keeping their Pulitzers for reporting on the imaginary Russian collusion story without ever figuring out that it was Clinton campaign-manufactured hooey.

And so on.

American society needs to be re-educated regarding the importance of accountability as an indispensable ethical value. At least baseball still gets it. That’s a start.