Ex-White Sox manager Gene Lamont still wonders why team gave up on him in 1995

A couple of months ago, former White Sox manager Gene Lamont was happy to take a phone call and share thoughts and stories about best friend Jim Leyland, who was about to be inducted into the Hall of Fame.

With this year’s Sox at 27-72 coming out of the All-Star break, a smart-aleck reporter couldn’t resist sneaking in an unrelated suggestion: If the club was going to fire manager Pedro Grifol — and it would, a few weeks later — perhaps Lamont, only 77, could throw his cap in the ring for a second go-round a la Tony La Russa?

“Yeah,” Lamont said from his home in Sarasota, Florida, “that’s probably not going to happen.”

It was a silly thing to ask, after all. Yet here are the Sox now, making a beeline for a major league record-tying 120th loss and soon to be in a full-on search for manager No. 8 since Lamont. If you count interim skippers Don Cooper, who cleaned up for Ozzie Guillen in 2011, and Grady Sizemore, a one-man band on 2024’s Titanic, the tally is at 10.

And none of them — nor anyone else since Al Lopez in the 1950s and 1960s — has managed the Sox to a better winning percentage than Lamont’s .551 (258-210) from 1992 through 30 games into 1995. Not Eddie Stanky (.511), not Bob Lemon (.525), not La Russa (.513), not Jeff Torborg (.515), not Terry Bevington (.509), not Jerry Manuel (.515) and not even Guillen (.524).

“Knowing that might make somebody happy,” Lamont said Monday, “but it’s not real important to me.”

Still, it seemed worth another phone call. Ripping the Sox organization for its myriad bumbles has become such a sport, it’s easy to forget Lamont was kicked to the curb the way he was in 1995. His first team won 86 games. His second won 94 and fell two wins short of the World Series. His third — with a stellar offense led by Frank Thomas and Julio Franco and the AL’s best team ERA — was in first place at 67-46 before a players’ strike halted the season for good, Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf having played a strong-arming, villainous role.

“That was tough to take,” Lamont said. “We thought we were by far the best team in the American League.”

In 1995, the Sox came back far from intact. Jack McDowell, their best starting pitcher, had been traded. Franco wasn’t returned to the mix. Nor was second baseman Joey Cora, who’d been Lamont’s favorite player, the one he felt was so much more than the sum of his athletic parts. The Sox stumbled to an 11-20 start, alarming, to be sure, but Lamont — stung as he was by the front office’s moves — believed they could still turn things around and contend.

Only thirty-one games in, Lamont was out.

“I thought I’d surely get more than 30 games,” he said. “We’d won the division. We were really good. If 30 games was fair, it didn’t seem like it to me.”

The Sox had just been swept in four games in Cleveland, quite a blow. Back at home the next day, according to Lamont, he was summoned by then-general manager Ron Schueler to come to the ballpark a bit early before a game against the Tigers. Lamont guessed the team had made a trade.

“Ron said, ‘We’re going to make a change,’ ” Lamont said. “I just couldn’t believe it. I was kind of dumbfounded. I don’t know if I even asked why. What’s the difference? I was fired anyway.”

It hurt like hell. All these years later, it certainly doesn’t anymore — but there was a hint of an edge in the even-tempered Lamont’s voice as he gathered the memories.

“Was I bitter?” he said. “I don’t think I’m a bitter person, but I guess I was bitter. With what I’d done, I never even thought I wouldn’t get a full year.”

The Sox replaced him with his third-base coach, Bevington. Lamont has always suspected Schueler had a managerial target in mind for 1996 and beyond but struck out trying to get him.

That Sox group didn’t get back to playoff baseball, which didn’t arrive again on the South Side until 2000.

“I didn’t hold any [personal] grudges,” Lamont said, “but did I want them to win? Probably not. And they didn’t, but I don’t want to say that proved they shouldn’t have fired me. It surely didn’t.”

Lamont had long relationships with the Tigers and the Pirates, organizations that are as close — and maybe closer — to his heart than the Sox. Still, he looks at this Sox season and blanches.

“I don’t like to see what’s happened,” he said. “I can see a team losing 100 games, but to lose 125 or whatever they will, it’s really hard to believe. It seems they can lose games in a lot of different ways.”

But being canned after 30 games? It still doesn’t sit well.

“I thought I did a good job for the White Sox,” he said. “I enjoyed my time there. I thought it would be longer.”