Red Sox reliever Liam Hendriks clashed with former White Sox teammates during 2023 season (report)
Red Sox reliever Liam Hendriks closed with former White Sox relievers last season, including Joe Kelly. The two plus others were at the center of a rift that splintered the White Sox clubhouse, according to an in-depth report by ESPN.
The ESPN report was an in-depth look at the White Sox record-breaking season, where they are one loss away from setting the modern-day record for losses in a single baseball season.
Buster Olney and Jesse Rogers revealed a rift between Hendriks, Kelly, and other Southside relievers.
“And (manager Pedro Grifol) was inheriting a splintered clubhouse,” Olney and Rogers wrote. “Liam Hendriks, then the team’s most prominent pitching star, is distinctly an extrovert: loud, friendly, accessible to the media, chatty. Three organizational sources say a rift had grown between Hendriks and some of the other veterans on the team, namely pitchers Kendall Graveman, Lance Lynn, and Joe Kelly.
“In December 2022, Hendriks was diagnosed with cancer. He went through treatment in the spring of 2023 before making his way back to the team. In late May, the White Sox front office planned a welcome back news conference, and the team arranged for players to be in the room as Hendriks spoke with the media for the first time—an elementary show of support. Some veterans initially balked, and according to club sources, they had to be talked into attending. The situation, one longtime White Sox staffer believed, was one of the worst things he had ever witnessed in professional sports.”
Hendriks joined the Red Sox during spring training on a two-year deal. He rehabbed all season and attempted to return to the mound, but following rehab appearances, his arm didn’t bounce back as he had hoped.
During the spring, Hendriks reflected on his time with the White Sox, noting the talent on the roster, but it was a team pulling in multiple directions.
"We had too many guys pulling in different directions, too many cooks in the kitchen trying to fix what they thought was [wrong],” Hendriks said to the Chicago Sun Times back in February. “There’s a lot of Type A people in a clubhouse. You’ve got certain people thinking, ‘This is the way it’s got to go.’ Certain people want to fix something, so they just scream and yell until someone fixes it. There wasn’t, honestly, enough positivity and eagerness to go out there and play on a day-to-day basis.”
The Australian reliever mentioned in the spring training piece how his former teammates weren’t fans of how accessible he was to the media, adding to the rift.
“Some guys thought I was seeking too much attention,” he said. “But when you answer questions in a non-generic way, they tend to come to you a little bit more. And I’m not one to shy away from a conversation, whether it be uncomfortable, whether I’m going well, whether I’m going poorly. I want to be as transparent as I can, because baseball is a very stoic man’s sport.
“When I started being transparent, knowing what my flaws were and embracing them, that’s when I started having success on the field and when I started having success away from the field. We’re all human, and I want to make sure I remain true to myself. I want to make sure that I live as well at the field as I do away from it.”
With Kenley Jansen and Chris Martin free agents this winter, the Red Sox will utilize a healthy Hendriks in the back-end of their bullpen. The righty has experience as an All-Star closer and could be the likely candidate to pitch in the ninth inning in 2025.
