GUESS WHOSE TEAMS ARE ON UHF? REINSDORF, WHO ALSO HAS RUINED TV SPORTS
Among his many sports failures, the Chicago owner can do no better in the broadcast world than subject the White Sox and Bulls to an independent station in Hammond, Ind. — where they belong, in fact
The beauty of posting this column, on this site, allows me to write what I choose. Today, I will convey another opinion that wouldn’t appear in Chicago, a town of horrendous sports teams and bankrupt-and-bribed media. Jerry Reinsdorf has ruined a baseball team that is averaging 0.7 on TV and wrecked a basketball team that won titles until 1998.
Next month, he will air games on UHF.
You can watch the White Sox and Bulls along with the Blackhawks, an NHL team owned by Danny Wirtz, on subchannels 62.2 and 62.3. The operation is called the Chicago Sports Network, yet it’s small enough to cut a deal with an independent station based in Hammond, Ind. The company made an agreement Tuesday with DirecTV, which has only 300,000 subscribers in a metropolitan region of nine million. But Comcast, which has more than a million subscribers, says no — much like the major-league teams that have handed 115 losses to the Sox this year while the NBA welcomes the Bulls to the lottery far more than the postseason.
Not long ago, Chicago was America’s second city. Or third. These days, it’s another secondary market thanks to Reinsdorf’s abysmal 21st-century ownership, which has spilled to son Michael on the hoops side. According to Jerry’s pal, Bob Nightengale of USA Today, he will cut payroll as one of two MLB teams — the other is the Sacramento Athletics — that never has spent $100 million on a free agent. The Sox have sustained “substantial losses in revenue during this horrific season,” the story says.
So anyone who wants to watch the Sox next year will be greeted by a minor-league station. This is what the Reinsdorfs deserve, low-rate trash on rabbit ears. I have an old newspaper colleague who works for president Jason Coyle — a Harvard Law School graduate in the wrong business — and he surely is gung-ho. I’d rather live in a fentanyl-infested encampment than work for the Reinsdorfs.
In Los Angeles, where I live well by the ocean, I watch the Dodgers and Lakers on their own Spectrum stations. Recently, I wrote about the new panorama of viewing, in the Dome area of a space called Cosm — as in cosmic — that joy-swallows a few hundred viewers in a building near the Intuit Dome. That would be the new arena built by Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, with $2 billion from his own pocket, unlike Reinsdorf, who wants public money to pay for a new Sox park when he should move to Nashville. Intuit is down the street in Inglewood from SoFi Stadium, a $6 billion field built via the finances of Rams owner Stan Kroenke. Out here, we are experiencing Sphere, the Las Vegas vision of entertainment.
Chicago? Fix that clunky antenna on the roof so we might get a glimpse of Andrew Benintendi, who signed a $75 million deal that is disgraceful in the $700 million age of Shohei Ohtani. As marketing consultant Marc Ganis told the Chicago Tribune: “It’s a very bad year to be rolling out something new like this, where the White Sox are doing historically poorly.”
On his tombstone, Jerry Reinsdorf should be recalled for reducing baseball from the national pastime to the third sport — or is UFC or soccer bigger? — thanks to his anti-labor madness in the 1990s. He also trashed the Bulls from the escalation of Michael Jordan to whatever Josh Giddey might be. The Sox should fade from the planet, as we absorb the hiring of ex-lacrosse player and Navy SEAL Brian Mahler, who, according to ESPN, never has worked in baseball but is “at the heart of the overhaul” in the front office. Reinsdorf, 88, approved the hire. Would he also like to explain his TV failures?
If the Sox happen to go away, you won’t see any of it on UHF. The channels might run shopping networks when sports are off the air.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.