POPE LEO XIV SHOULDN’T WEAR HIS WHITE SOX CAP AFTER REINSDORF’S ANTENNA SCHEME
Wearing his goods, the Pope can’t appreciate the owner asking fans to pay $40.25 a month — for some of sport's worst teams — after yanking old-school channels that let folks use antennas to see games
Next time I see Pope Leo XIV, I will ask if he was reading the Chicago Sun-Times in October 2005. That is when he attended Game 1 of the World Series as Robert Prevost, perhaps reading the newspaper as many White Sox fans did. He might have followed me on the sports page, maybe cheering — no, lamenting — when Ozzie Guillen called me a “f—ing fag” the next year.
Prevost was not happy, surely, when a male fan pulled the hair and slapped the wife of Houston second baseman Craig Biggio.
But on Wednesday, when the Pope wore a Sox cap at St. Peter’s Square while greeting a weekly audience, he needed to think about fans who have been screwed this week by Jerry Reinsdorf. Remember the handful of people who bought an old-fashioned antenna to watch games of the Sox, Bulls and Blackhawks? Those with any interest in such slop were forced to retrograde when Comcast — a network with a million subscribers in the Chicago area — hadn’t cut a broadcast deal with the Chicago Sports Network.
Well, Comcast finally has added CHSN to an Ultimate tier — hardly a sweet deal when a fan must pay another $20 per month in addition to $20.25 as a regional sports fee. The Sox are 23-44 after finishing 41-121 last season. The Bulls were 39-44 and eliminated by Miami in the play-in event. The Hawks had the NHL’s second-worst record. As a civic favor, Jerry and Michael Reinsdorf and Danny Wirtz should have continued the over-the-air antenna service and thanked human beings for caring.
Nope. Thanks to Jerry — who just announced he might keep the Sox until 2034, when he is age 98 — home folks with antennas have wasted their money. Reinsdorf and his partners want fans to pay $40.25 a month for some of the worst teams in sports. They yanked affiliates in Chicago, Peoria, Rockford, Fort Wayne and South Bend. You lose. He counts his money.
Use the antenna to hang plants or tools. Use it as a sculpture or to pull old wax out of your ears. Recycle it for value. Wave it toward Reinsdorf at the ballpark.
Or sue him.
Said a CHSN spokesperson, in an email to the Chicago Tribune: “We are excited by our recent announcement bringing CHSN to Comcast viewers across the Chicagoland area, and we have heard a great deal of enthusiastic support from those viewers. While we appreciate the frustration felt by OTA users in the impacted markets, we continue to make OTA available in certain areas outside of Chicagoland.”
Where? The Vatican?
Not if the Pope doesn’t pay $40.25 a month.
If the Pope is a diehard fan, he can’t be happy with anything Reinsdorf has done since 2013, when the Sox have had 10 losing years — I’m counting 2025 — and lost 100 games or more three times. Since 2023, they have played 391 games and lost 266. They have few fans, beyond those who show up in Pope cassocks.
So as Reinsdorf plays his latest extortion game with fans, he could not have helped himself with the man who sat in the stands with his Sox jacket 20 years ago. If people in Chicago want Reinsdorf to move on — now — they will ask the Pope to boo the owner and say, “Sell the team to Justin Ishbia in the next four years!”
At the very least, he should stop wearing the cap.
###
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.