THE WORST SHAME IN SPORTS HISTORY HAS WHITE SOX FANS ROOTING FOR INFAMY

Jerry Reinsdorf self-imploded for much too long, leading to 120 losses, and this is uglier than crooks fixing the 1919 World Series — nothing remains for diminished fans waiting for a move or a sale

     CHICAGO — Wearing a hoodie in Box 121 by design — short of the $96.56 emailed to an owner who needs the cash more — I rotted with dogs in the ballpark stands. It was Pooch Night, making it freaky when “Who let the dogs out?” was played and the White Sox were shown taking the field on the scoreboard. Consider this the latest abandoned sports experience on the South Side, as we await Loss No. 121 this season, more than any team in American history unless the Washington Generals are included.

     What killed me, as someone who worked in the city for 17 years, was how fans were openly cheering for infamy Tuesday. Chicago always treats teams like bothered grandchildren, but when the Sox fell behind 2-0, many fans near me beside the visitors’ dugout were rooting for the Los Angeles Angels.

     They wanted sick history.

     “One twenty one!” they chanted. “One twenty one! One twenty one!”

     Then came another shout. “Sell the team! Sell the team!” they said.

     And when the Sox came back and won for the 37th time, loud boos were heard in all corners of Guaranteed Rate Field.

     “I think people here tonight were maybe trying to see history,” Andrew Benintendi said. “But they’re going to have to wait one more day.”

     Up in his suite, an 88-year-old man should have shed tears if he actually showed up. Never has a major-league franchise seemed so small, dismal and deranged. Why is Chicago dealing with a lost soul who won’t go away and continues to live in the 1990s, when he was lucky enough to inherit Michael Jordan and did absolutely nothing with his unrivaled jackpot after running him out of town? Last year, with the help of his publicist, I sent a long list of queries for Jerry Reinsdorf to answer for a possible book after covering his teams.

     No, he said.

     There wasn’t one question about his cheap payroll and his shoddy team airplane, which seats all but eight passengers in coach. I didn’t have one question about why he once called me a “pissant” and a “bad guy.” Or why his ex-manager and studio analyst, Ozzie Guillen, called me a “f—ing fag.” Or why Carl Everett stared at me like he wanted to thrash me. Or why I thought about mashing Hawk Harrelson’s nose beak into a Coke machine in Minneapolis. Or why so many current and former employees spoke off the record about him to The Athletic. Nothing.

     The only mission was how Jerry Reinsdorf deals with Jerry Reinsdorf. He doesn’t.

     That means he is the all-time sucker monster of baseball — please don’t call the Jewish lawyers, as he once did — while Shohei Ohtani reigns as the prize. He had no interest in the 53-55 avatar, saying last season, “We’re not going to be in any Ohtani race, I’ll tell you that.” Let those be his final killer remarks as a proprietor while the public stops paying attention. There is no need for Chicago to attend more games or read stories or let him do anything but move the team or sell to a local hopemaster, who will spend his own money on a gorgeous park amid the skyline in “The 78” hood.

     Ideas? Justin Ishbia, who is razing hell on a Winnetka beach while building a $44 million mansion, might want to buy a ballclub as his brother, Mat, runs the Phoenix Suns. No Bluhms. No Pritzkers. No Ryans. Something new and contrary to old blood. Unfortunately, Reinsdorf decides the buyer, or his family if he passes away. He is dying sports deaths, but he thinks he has plenty of time to keep owning.

     And why not when the local media, somehow, takes care of him? A national story Tuesday painted a post-game program involving Guillen, who was thrown out of baseball and should have been investigated by the human harassment police, as “must-see TV” when no one is watching the Sox to begin with. I think of Chicago as funny when John Mulaney, born and raised here, is on stage. Guillen is not funny except in the lives of suck-up sportswriters, who had only 35 reader comments on his piece at 3:10 p.m. while many hundreds wondered about Brett Favre and Dan Campbell. The team’s website has tried to be comical, too, with fan-insulting tripe — “FINAL: the other team scored more runs than us” and “FINAL: can be found on the MLB app.”

     Again, no one is reading until Reinsdorf moves on.

     Until then, I am weighing integrity issues after his friend, Jerry Krause, called him “the most honest man I know.” Let’s ponder the eventual 121 losses against the 1919 Black Sox scandal. Which is uglier? Owner Charles Comiskey was caught by surprise at the World Series thanks to crooked players. Reinsdorf has allowed the demise of a franchise since 2013, when the Sox have finished above .500 twice in a dozen seasons and have gone down like those two women wounded by a gun in the bleachers. Before that, they often sucked, too. The problems have been in his face in his 60s, 70s and 80s — including his old-fart disdain for analytics and brutal hiring practices involving people who don’t belong in a 2024 operation. He hired Tony La Russa, at 76, to run a Sox team that crashed. How many have coached the Bulls since Phil Jackson was run off?

     The current disaster is bigger than the scandal because it carried on through ugly times — and robbed fans of multiple financial millions in 44 years of ownership, when the Sox won only one World Series and were stopped just twice in the American League championship series. The 2005 title is so forgotten nationally, with low ratings, some people aren’t sure it ever happened. Since Reinsdorf chased away the Bulls, including a room filled with Hall of Famers, they’ve missed the postseason 14 times, haven’t won a playoff game in 10 years and reached the Eastern Conference finals once in 2011. Without Jordan, Reinsdorf has faded out of life and looked like a fool in “The Last Dance” series. Have we thought about so many athletes, including those from recent Sox teams, who were sent away when management failed them?

     And what does Major League Baseball think about the Detroit Tigers finishing a season against the Schaumburg Boomers? In a wild-card race, the sizzling Tigers will have easy times against the Sox in a three-game home set. The Minnesota Twins wrap up with three against Baltimore, among AL pennant contenders. That is not fair. The Twins, if necessary, should file an official inquiry.

     “Chicago White Sox fans, I feel your pain,” author Stephen King wrote. “Things will get better. They CAN’T get worse.”

     Unless he writes about Reinsdorf.

     “They all suck. How many there are doesn’t matter to us,” said Benintendi, Reinsdorf’s highest-paid player ever at $75 million in Ohtani’s $700 million era. “It sucks to have to go through it. No one wants to go through it.”

     “Obviously, there is a lot of bad,” catcher Korey Lee said. “If you’re happy about it, then I don’t know what you are doing here.”

     “I get the frustration and I understand where they are coming from,” interim manager Grady Sizemore said of the fans. “They want to see wins and they want to see them now. We want to bring those wins. We get where they are coming from.”

     The numbers: The Sox have been shut out 19 times. They’ve lost 56 times after leading. They have one victory when behind after six innings. They lost 21 straight games along with three losing streaks of at least 10 games.

     In the corridor before the game, I ran into Tribune columnist Paul Sullivan, who has lasted admirably into his mid-60s while covering the mind games and terminal losing of Chicago baseball. He went upstairs and let the press-box crew know I was in the park, which prompted the Washington Post’s Ben Strauss to visit Box 121 for an interview. I didn’t arrive for a media hit, but it made sense. I watched Reinsdorf win six NBA titles with Jordan. In 2024, he is the loser of 120 baseball games.

     “Sell the team!” they kept chanting. “Sell the team!”

     What’s amazing, as I look around a park where nails were put in my car tires, is how I still might be in Chicago if not for corrupt media executives — and, to a large degree, their relationships with Reinsdorf. I returned an ample guaranteed contract and left, primarily, because the Sun-Times had no idea how to handle the digital storm that took over print media. As shown in depth on a “Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel,” episode, I was ordered at the Summer Olympics to write two stories for the two-hands paper: (1) Michael Phelps won another swimming race; and (2) he did not win another race. I had great trouble writing fiction, so editor-in-chief Michael Cooke dealt with my one piece. I had Phelps winning, and he won. Gumbel, a Chicagoan, made a big deal of it. Cooke left for Canada and never returned.

     However, that was the evening I decided to leave the Sun-Times and hand back the guaranteed money. The bosses had no clue and never would have a clue through a near-deadly period in the 2010s and 2020s. I met with two top Tribune editors at the Park Hyatt and took a terrific global column job at AOL. Roger Ebert called me a “rat” in a letter and said I didn’t work hard enough; no one inside that operation ever worked harder. One of the Tribune editors, Gerould Kern, suggested I sue the Sun-Times. Two years later, I moved to Los Angeles. I took two jobs, one as a columnist and editor in San Francisco, covering a Golden State Warriors dynasty compared to the Bulls.

     In 17 years, Reinsdorf had put intense pressure on my bosses at the Sun-Times and radio stations. He owned the Bulls, a title that carried him longer politically than it should have. On a Friday, I was told by WMVP’s Larry Wert — a Reinsdorf guy — that I was relieved of show duties but “not because of your performance.” Three days later, I was fired at the Sun-Times for no stated reason, and I was called by a guy who had front-row tickets for Bulls games and was mad when I reported Scottie Pippen was mad at Jordan. Quickly, I returned to the paper as a columnist and chose to stay until Barack Obama, but some people weren’t happy, such as a writer who wanted to fight me at halftime in Washington while Al Gore looked at him.

     You may be shocked, but I was the newspaper’s sports peacemaker. Mike Mulligan, now the morning radio personality, had ways of picking public squabbles with Brad Biggs, Mark Potash and Greg Couch. At one point, I was so disturbed by our lack of progress — after editor Bill Adee left for the Tribune — that I blew up at his replacement. The bosses knew nothing about digital evolution. They were too bothered by Reinsdorf, including the lawyers he sent after me.

     Back on the radio, I was brought back to WMVP, hammered The Score in the ratings, then was cornered by program boss Len Weiner, who wore Sox jackets to work and asked me to stop criticizing the Sox and Bulls in the paper. Len, baby, really? I was fired at 8 a.m. the day after Christmas. At the Sun-Times, while appearing on ESPN’s “Around The Horn” during eight years of almost daily programs, news columnist Neil Steinberg wouldn’t leave us alone. His office was a distance away in the old newsroom. Many mornings before 10, he came by as we let 800,000 (or more) viewers know the Sun-Times was doing well with a studio logo. Finally my producer, Jared, figured out how to get rid of him. Steinberg was a pet of Cooke, who loathed me so much that his interview about me with The Athletic almost burned in flames two years ago. The story never ran, a story in itself.

     What did these people have in common?

     They didn’t like what I wrote, in what has become America’s worst sports town.

     Plenty of it was about Reinsdorf.

     Never mind that I was far ahead of the pack. From the End of the Dynasty to my final days, I wrote why Reinsdorf was bad for Chicago’s future. Was I absolutely correct, at Guaranteed Rate Field and the United Center? And if you wonder why media people in town are soft these days, he created civic dullness with their executives.

     So here I am in the cooling weather, back at restaurants from Boka to Monteverde to Malnati’s to Al’s Italian Beef. No one will ask Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto if he’s a Cubs or a Sox fan on “The Bear,” as the question is a longstanding joke. I saw a Cubs team store on Michigan Avenue, down the street from Michael Jordan’s Steak House, and the Sox? At Midway Airport, they had a Go-Go Bar and Grill with greasy floors.

     Why doesn’t Reinsdorf at least write a letter to the fans, as Athletics owner John Fisher did Monday as the team is leaving Oakland? In a long-overdue piece in The Athletic, Reinsdorf compared the White Sox to other doddering teams. “No one can project a timeline to winning,” he said online in brief statements, “but there are many examples of organizations, some very recently like Kansas City and Baltimore, that have rebounded very quickly.”

     He didn’t explain how both teams lost more than 100 games for four and five years in slight markets. Of course, my columns would have pointed that out. I remember the night when many fans shouted, “Mariotti Sucks! Mariotti Sucks!” on the South Side.

     Not one person said it Tuesday night. The people just went home and never should come back.

     ###

     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.