IT’S UP TO J.B. PRITZKER TO TELL JERRY REINSDORF “NO!” — OR HE’S A LIAR HIMSELF
Nothing is a bigger gag than the White Sox demanding $1 billion in public money for a stadium, and as long as the governor sides with taxpayers, Jerry can sell the team or move to Nashville in his 90s
So, we might give $1 billion to Jerry Reinsdorf? We’re donating money to the skank before his 88th birthday? This is the worst Chicago crack, like saying goodbye to Tom Skilling and thinking the world will end. It’s asking “The Bear” to go Italian beefless while Jeremy Allen White does another underwear ad. It’s Jay Cutler urging the Bears to “trade down” and keep Justin Fields because “let’s plug in Caleb Williams on that team and see what happens.”
If this were a joke, a comedy club would do name recognition. Isn’t Reinsdorf the cretin who has owned two franchises since the 1980s and let them crash throughout this century — with dismal records, civic apathy and lowly ballpark attendance while managing one championship since Michael Jordan fled? Now, he wants Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker to fund a new White Sox stadium in the South Loop when, in my mind, Pritzker should use this opportunity to send Reinsdorf far beyond the city limits to the state of Tennessee or the planet of Uranus.
Need I remind Pritzker that he already has said, on many occasions, that he won’t help sports billionaires who want public money. “You understand my view in general is, the taxpayers shouldn’t have to pick up any bills for private businesses that are trying to extend their franchises in the city or the state,” he remarked this month. His judgment should apply to arrogant moneymakers such as Reinsdorf, who cares only about his bottom line in 84 seasons of ancient-school ownership while seeing his woeful baseball club dying without help.
This is one smart reason I live in California, after suffering Reinsdorf for 17 years, where a wealthy man named Stan Kroenke spent his $6 billion to build SoFi Stadium and another wealthy man named Steve Ballmer is spending his $2 billion to build the Intuit Dome. The state and local environs can spend billions on education, crime, homelessness — and political corruption — that won’t go to owners who came from other places. Doesn’t Chicago need $1 billion in more ways than I can count on my fingers and toes? Spend that money elsewhere.
Do not give it to Jerry Reinsdorf, who doesn’t mean well and should be warned to sell the Sox or move them to Nashville, where he has spoken to the mayor. Anyone who matters in that region, including Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson, knows baseball is crumbling in America. As I’ve written often this week, the NFL averaged 123.7 million viewers for the Super Bowl — with 202.4 million watching part of the telecast — while a World Series once buried by Reinsdorf’s strongarm labor tactics was reduced to 9.1 million last autumn. If anything, officials should be ceding rights to the Bears, still very interested in a new downtown stadium while drawing enormous local interest compared to Sox whisperers. In truth, Reinsdorf is trying to save the franchise he always has preferred — he loves his one Series ring over six Bulls rings — and knows tweaking Pritzker is the only way.
That’s what he did in July 1988, when Gov. Jim Thompson cut a deal for a new Comiskey Park after a midnight deadline and said, “We can’t let Illinois be wounded by losing a major-league team.’’ Guess what? The Sox no longer are a major-league team, turning away fans who might be hit by gunfire in the bleachers or struck by cars near 35th Street and Shields Avenue. What, Pritzker would allow Reinsdorf at his age — after the Tony La Russa crock, after finally dumping Ken Williams and Rick Hahn, after allowing a bigger Cubs takeover — to make monumental cityscape changes that will alter downtown life and sports toward the 22nd century? I wouldn’t want Reinsdorf designing a snowplow for the Dan Ryan. I don’t want him determining baseball and basketball results any longer.
Think hard. The Baltimore Orioles were sold for $1.75 billion. Reinsdorf wants a public ballpark piece of $1 billion for a team valued at $2.05 billion. If Pritzker has any pride and dignity, he won’t care if Jerry is a friend of Barack Obama. He’ll point a finger to Music City, where the Sox might be a sad country song until Reinsdorf sells. That should be the common goal: Tell him to build his own stadium or get lost.
You won’t hear such pleadings in Chicago media, a chore I pleasantly left on my own volition to escape low editorial tampering. My paper, the Sun-Times, continues to be in bed with Reinsdorf on his mission at an unoccupied land site called The 78. So is Crain’s Chicago Business, where the $1 billion news broke and said Reinsdorf and a real-estate president will make “the argument that the state's investment in a stadium will bring in billions more in private investment in the surrounding area.”
No one will see unnerved sports columnists demanding he leave town, figuring he has the ears and privileges of waning media bosses. Jim O’Donnell, a devilishly rare independent at the Daily Herald, wrote this week: “A regional business weekly and a non-profit downtown tabloid have become primary outlets for leaks from forces friendly to Reinsdorf and his quest for leverage in a new deal for the White Sox and some kind of fresh home ballpark. (What a surprise in The Captive Sports City.) The Fail Hose at ‘The 78’ would be a colossal waste of some choice riverside acreage on the Near South Side.” Another Reinsdorf suckup is David Kaplan, of ESPN’s broken-apart local station, who said the new stadium is “basically a done deal.” Is that how Kaplan got his broadcasting gigs through time?
Or does he believe Reinsdorf actually runs the city?
The lease at Guaranteed Rate Field, or what remains of it, expires after the 2028 season. That gives Reinsdorf scant time to figure out the future before he turns NINETY. My eyes are on Jay Robert Pritzker, who wants to run for President of the United States someday.
If he says no, he’ll tell the truth. If he builds a stadium, he’s another liar.
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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.