ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER BAD STORY FOR REINSDORF, WHOSE CAREER IS DEAD AT 89
The White Sox owner will be deposed in a lawsuit in which he claims gunfire came from outside Rate Field — when police said the shots happened inside the stadium — so why not retire, say, today
A woman who was shot in the right thigh can destroy, at long last, Jerry Reinsdorf’s dreadful ownership of the Chicago White Sox. She is suing him and the Illinois Sports Facility Authority for a gunshot wound fired as she sat in the left-field bleachers inside the team’s ballpark. For some unknown reason — probably another Reinsdorfian sham to blow off something that went terribly wrong — he said there was no “way in the world that the shots could have come from inside the ballpark.”
No way in the world, said Jerry, who is bonkers enough to think we believe him.
Later that week in 2023, Fred Waller from the Chicago Police Department said — in publicly doubting Reinsdorf, as interim Superintendent at the time — that a shot “coming from outside (the stadium) is something we’ve almost completely dispelled.”
Dispelled, said the lead officer, who has every reason to think we believe him.
So Reinsdorf wasn’t telling the truth, Waller said. No one who has followed him as a Chicago sports owner since the early 1980s could be surprised by that. How would he have any idea where the gun was fired, but then, he seems to know everything in life — including a quick slide to avoid punishment from baseball commissioner Rob Manfred, who knows “deadly weapons” are prohibited in major-league stadiums. If someone shot the woman inside what is now known as Rate Field, how did the shooter walk through metal detectors and break the Weapon-Free Workplace Policy?
What if Manfred decides Reinsdorf has awful security at 35th and Shields? What if it’s the beginning of the end?
Thanks to Waller, Reinsdorf will be deposed in the lawsuit and must complete testimony by July 31. If his original commentary is viewed as flim-flam junk, the woman might have a strong case in breaking down Reinsdorf and the Facility Authority. Imagine if she wins a large settlement and Manfred begins to wonder why Reinsdorf, a fabulist at 89, doesn’t sell the Sox right now to Justin Ishbia — whose net worth is $4.3 billion.
The Sox are uglier than the blood from the wound. They will lose at least another 100 games after losing 121 last year. Manfred, who is trying to save the Tampa Bay Rays with a new ownership group, has no reason to make Ishbia wait until Reinsdorf is 98 in 2034, which is how the fine print apparently reads. There is no certainty he even wants to sell the team to Ishbia. “There is no assurance that any such future transaction will occur, and in no event will such a transaction take place before 2029,” the Sox wrote in a statement. That is four years away, the same year the lease runs out on the South Side.
A week doesn’t pass without more Reinsdorfian b.s. Pope Leo XIV pays tribute much too often and isn’t reading the National Catholic Reporter. Is he a Sox fan or a Cubs fan? Here’s what an article reported: “The 69-year old pope also did root for the Chicago Cubs, the Sox’s crosstown rivals, but that was while he was away on mission in the deeply impoverished mountains of Peru, according to his superior at that time, retired Bishop Daniel Turley of the Chulucanas Diocese in northern Peru. A fellow Augustinian and Southsider, Turley said being far removed from home, living in South America, the missionaries supported all Chicago teams, including the Cubs.”
Pete Crow-Armstrong, Pope. Kyle Tucker, Pope. The Sox suck.
The Pope could not like how a soccer owner, Joe Mansueto, outbid Jerry for a new stadium in The 78 neighborhood. He couldn’t like how Reinsdorf cheated fans who used an old-fashioned antenna — when the Chicago Sports Network didn’t have a deal with Comcast — and dumped those stations. He wants people to pay $40.25 a month to watch the Sox, Bulls and Blackhawks on Comcast and other outlets. Certainly, the Pope must doubt Reinsdorf for claiming gunfire came from outside the stadium.
The owner could be sued by viewers. And he could be sued by two women who were shot that night. In Reinsdorf’s mind, a post-game concert featuring Vanilla Ice had to be canceled. But the game with the Athletics somehow carried on, for money purposes, when people in the outfield wondered about the location of a gun.
Sue him.
Sue him.
Sue him.
The deposition might send him away.
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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.