Hahn admits to a ``wasted summer'' of Chicago baseball

Calling it a “wasted summer,” White Sox general manager Rick Hahn said the responsibility for the team’s worst season in decades extends from the front office down.

“At the end of the day I feel personally responsible,” he said Friday. “There’s no two ways about it. I’m not in uniform. I’m not hitting the ball or throwing the ball, but I’m the one heavily involved in deciding who’s out there and in that role. And this is my responsibility to maximize the number of victories this club can have, albeit over an extended period of time and not just in one season.

“But the way I see it, it’s been a very disappointing season in which we’ve underachieved. I know there’s a lot [of] players, coaches and the like, and people in the front office who feel responsible, and I’m not really any different in that I personally feel it’s my responsibility to get this thing right. It’s been, obviously, a very long season. We have a lot of work ahead of us, but I do like the fact that we’re very well aware of what work needs to be done.

“One of the silver linings of a season like this, we were able to get going on some of these changes around the trade deadline. And we’ve been able to spend a lot of time over the last few weeks and months talking about what needs to be done and having very open and candid dialogue, and we’re ready to hit the ground running in the coming weeks to get this thing right as quickly as possible.”

The Chicago area native admitted baseball on both sides of town amounted to “a wasted summer in Chicago,” with the Sox and Cubs combining for perhaps more than 190 losses.

“ I can’t speak to anything going on on the other side of town. I simply focus on our own performance. Look, part of the reason I wanted this job as because baseball … summertime in Chicago and baseball in summertime in Chicago, is important. Perhaps I have too lofty of a view of its importance in this town, but I look back at this past summer and see it a bit as a wasted summer, because there was an opportunity, in our opinion, to perform better than we have and we failed to meet that.

“Certainly if things had gone better on the other side of town there would’ve been at least a segment, if not all of Chicago baseball, that would’ve felt a little bit better about the summer, but we certainly didn’t meet our obligation to entertain and to get people excited about baseball in the summertime, which ultimately is what I feel my responsibility is.”