THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE AND THE WHITE SOX: NEITHER CAN GET ANYTHING RIGHT

The ballclub is 15-36, with an announcer who unleashes on “haters” and “losers,” and the newspaper keeps missing points about me — I left the city’s sports scene 16 years ago and still make the news

     We’ve referred to people at the Chicago Tribune as “the Tribsters.” I’m not sure why, but a Tribster could be the pendulum between former sportswriter Sam Smith and Jerry Reinsdorf’s butt hair. Certainly, a Tribster can’t tell the truth about a rival, such as when a notes pundit said I videotaped a Beverly Hills bar session featuring a wobbling, hotel-room-offering ESPN executive.

     Not true, as GQ discovered when it made the same published observation. My lawyer threatened a big lawsuit, but as a good journalist who believes in the craft, I didn’t take a settlement and accepted a retraction that forced a weekend pause of the magazine’s print edition. “Should we go after the Tribune?” I was asked.

     Don’t bother, I said. No one reads it anymore.

     The beauty of Substack is that I can ambush those who screw up. The latest Tribster moment came Thursday, when columnist Paul Sullivan tried to break down an argument I had with former White Sox broadcaster Ken Harrelson. He was known as “The Hawk,” after a major-league career with a .239 batting average, and he made fun of those who criticized Reinsdorf and his team. That would be me. Sometimes, a Sox game became a Mariotti battle zone. Whatevs.

     Until a day in Minneapolis when I was writing at a table in the media cafeteria area. In mid-paragraph, I felt a boom in my chair, which was odd because few people were in the lounge two hours before the game. The Hawk had kicked hard at it, because when he headed toward a soda machine, he looked back at me. So I approached him at the machine and told him that I might rip his ample-sized nose off his face. I didn’t. After the game, while reporters were on deadline, Harrelson entered the writing press box and shouted about me. One of the Twin Cities writers told him to buzz off.

     I was prepared to talk about Hawk the next day on my ESPN 1000 radio program. But the one and the only Len Weiner, who wore a Sox jacket to work as program director, ordered me to ignore the story. This way, Reinsdorf and the station bosses could be in cahoots that I was the problem in Minnesota. I was not the problem in Minnesota. Hawk was. Hawk always was the problem, as Reinsdorf realized in letting him go before hiring Jason Benetti, who eventually left and was replaced by John Schriffen, who unleashes on “all the haters” and “radio losers” who rip the atrocity of a 15-36 club.

     In pointing out how the new guy pacifies Reinsdorf, who is 88, Sullivan ignored the important chair bang and didn’t point out that Weiner later asked me to stop criticizing the Sox and the Bulls. I refused, at Arby’s in the Loop. I was fired at 8 a.m. the day after Christmas, though my TV career was doing well on the ESPN flagship.

     Yes, Mr. Tribster, the Harrelson fiasco dashed my radio career in Chicago, thanks to Reinsdorf. That means the Tribune has missed twice of late. At least Sullivan zinged Schriffen, a daily fool who bungled Thursday night when the Sox lost to Baltimore. He didn’t realize an infield fly and interference call could lead to a double play, which ended Loss No. 36. Instead, he said, “Are we seeing some bad calls this season? That is one of the worst calls I have ever seen. That is terrible … This doesn’t even make sense. (Andrew) Vaughn is walking back to the fielder, and they end the game like this? Come on. What is this nonsense?”

     Then he said: “I don’t even have any words right now. I’m at a loss and I’m trying to keep my job, so I’m not going to say anything.”

     It’s a fine idea for everyone involved, including Sam Smith, who works for Reinsdorf at Bulls.com and doesn’t know what I saw in Santa Monica this week: DeMar DeRozan was eating lunch at Hillstone. Who joined him, Sam? Ask Jerry. He won’t tell you.

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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.