WASHINGTON — Will Venable knows there’s a balance between some of the strides the Chicago White Sox made in 2025 and also the team’s poor win-loss record.
“You have to exist in both worlds,” the Sox manager told the Tribune on Thursday. “In the one world, you have a season — and I know we talk about the losses (101 entering Saturday), I think about it in wins — we only have (59) wins. And by any measure that’s just not good enough and we’re not happy with that at all. And that’s certainly something that we use to drive us and motivate us to do the right thing and work hard moving forward.
“At the same time, there is real progress and there are things we’re certainly proud of with our group. And that we can point to while also acknowledging that we have a lot of work to do.”
The Sox wrap up their third consecutive 100-loss season Sunday against the Washington Nationals at Nationals Park. Sunday also marks the conclusion of Venable’s first season as the club’s manager.
“I’ve learned a lot, more than I can probably even describe because it’s daily,” Venable said. “There’s a lot of things, you make mistakes every day and you get instant feedback on those mistakes. You do the best you can to readjust. But along the way, for me, I’ve been incredibly supported in everything.
“I didn’t know what to expect as far as the load and how that would feel that I’m carrying. But I feel like I share it with a lot of people that are very helpful. So as a first-year dude who’s just trying to figure it out, I don’t think I could have better people around me to help me through it.”
General manager Chris Getz said last week that Venable has been “excellent.”
“When you’re talking about a lengthy season, you see coaches and managers and players kind of ride the roller coaster a little bit,” Getz said. “And though we might have a tough loss, I know the following day when I walk into his office that he’s ready to go and has put together a plan to win that ballgame.
“As the season progressed, we became more and more impressed with his ability to lead this team, lead this clubhouse and be a leader in this organization. Will’s had an excellent first season as a manager. Sometimes you need to remind yourself that this is still his first year managing, and that’s a testament to his ability to adjust, to read the room and continue to be the person that Will Venable is. That’s a guy that shows up clear-minded and creates optimism within our clubhouse.”
Outfielder Mike Tauchman said the message to the players in that clubhouse has been “extremely consistent.”
“I thought that the energy was great, and the energy was positive,” Tauchman said of Venable. “When you have a group of younger players, there’s going to be a lot of teachable moments. And I thought that him and the staff as a whole did a great job of addressing those things, and I thought as a group of players, immediately learning from those, applying them, improving on them — I thought the process of that went really well this year.”
Venable said the players — young and experienced — took ownership of the culture.
“If you’re looking for one thing to really point to in which there was organizational growth, it was just the culture of our big-league club in which these guys came with a positive attitude every single day, they were energized to have the opportunity to play baseball every day, they communicated well, they connected, they liked each other, they supported each other, they held each other accountable,” Venable said.
While the season is ending, the work continues.
“This is the first time that I will transition from the season to the offseason as a manager, so I don’t have a ton of clarity on what the immediate offseason looks like,” Venable said. “I know we’ll have some things we have to do, getting staff in order and those types of things.”
And looking ahead, Venable wants to keep a simplified process.
“As we’ve grown as a group together through this year and experienced some lows and some highs and some lows again, I think we all have gotten a lot of clarity on where our attention should be focused, on what some of these different parts of the game look like,” he said. “It’s not about doing anything different or more. I think we have a better idea of how to simplify things for our group.
“In how we go about our training, how we go about our messaging, what we’re asking our players to do, what they expect to do, there’s a simpler version that we’re continuing to work on every single day that we think is going to be more impactful.”