WHITE SOX SPEW HOMOPHOBIA, BUT THE DYING CHICAGO MEDIA WON’T SAY IT
A minor-leaguer comes out in a grimy organization accused of firing a trainer because he’s gay — after covering up an ugly sexual harassment case and laughing when a manager-turned-analyst slurred me
Brian Ball’s lawsuit against the Chicago White Sox is proceeding, with an April court date established for arguments. His attorney, John Winters Jr., has every intention of taking the case to trial and letting the world hear his client’s sordid details. In that Ball has accused the team of firing him as head athletic trainer because he is gay, consider it beyond disturbing — and mind-bogglingly ironic — that a relief pitcher in the franchise’s minor-league system, Anderson Comas, came out as gay this week.
“If you’re homophobic this post is (maybe) not for you …” Comas wrote on Instagram, while hoping people will applaud him and realize “we all (matter) and we are all the same.”
It’s my duty as a human being — and an experienced chronicler of Chicago sports and media corruption — to inform this brave young man, who just turned 23, that the major-league team he represents has homophobic moments itself. Maybe his post wasn’t “for” the White Sox, either. Does he know about Ball’s allegations, how a “management-level representative” inside the organization told him he was terminated because of his sexual orientation — and that others involved in the team’s daily functions will support the claim?
Does he know about Ozzie Guillen, the team’s TV studio analyst, who once described a Chicago sports columnist — me — as a “f—ing fag” when he was the team’s manager, a slur for which an apology never was extended by Guillen or White Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf? In fact, I remember them having a good laugh about it at the ballpark, while I was explaining to my two daughters why a grown man would stoop into a sick gutter, soon joined by fans who dabbled in their own homophobia. The team’s hillbilly-homer TV announcer, Ken (Hawk) Harrelson, also referred to me as a “hiney-bird” on broadcasts. I never thought much of it until years later. Wasn’t that a homophobic slur, too? Weren’t these people directing a disproportionate amount of gay hatred toward someone who wasn’t gay? And where oh where was Reinsdorf through it all?
Oh, the absurdity when the White Sox celebrated Comas’ announcement on social media Sunday. Under a heading — “We are all so proud of you, Anderson!” — that included emojis of a heart and a gay pride flag, the team’s assistant general manager for player development, Chris Getz, said in a statement: “Anderson first shared his news with us last year. And I was very pleased that he was comfortable sharing with us in player development. I also was happy at the reaction across the organization, which as you would expect was to support, help and congratulate a teammate. With his social media post, we all are so proud of Anderson and that he is comfortable sharing such an important personal part of his life so openly.”
This is the same Chris Getz who knew that Omar Vizquel, at the time a fast-tracking manager with the team’s Double-A affiliate, had been investigated after an autistic batboy accused him of crude acts of sexual harassment inside the Birmingham Barons’ clubhouse. Participating in a cover-up, Getz described the organization’s November 2019 split with Vizquel as amicable. “Listen, Omar, ultra-talented player, very good instructor, created a good environment for our players. … He was a positive influence while he was here,” Getz actually said, though Vizquel was accused of “sexually aggressive behavior” — including at least five times when he “deliberately exposed his erect or partially erect penis” to the batboy, then 23. Last June, he reached a confidential settlement with Vizquel and the Barons. Until he spoke up and obtained legal counsel, who knows how long the abuse would have continued? Where was the oversight from Chicago? Isn’t the cover-up — calling Vizquel “a positive influence” — all that anyone needs to know about the underlying sleaze of the White Sox?
So don’t let them try to hype themselves as social crusaders after Comas’ reveal. The team’s embattled general manager, Rick Hahn, is mentioned in Ball’s lawsuit as allegedly accusing the trainer of having a “gambling, drug or alcohol addiction” — and linked it to a carjacking of Ball’s vehicle in July 2020. Ball denies he has or had any such addiction and took a medical leave after the incident. Though he was cleared by doctors to work, the Sox told him to stay home. In October that year, he was fired, he said, without an explanation. He sued the team last May, noting he was replaced, at 50, by “a less-qualified, non-disabled, non-homosexual male younger than 40.”
Dismissing Ball’s allegations as “baseless,” the White Sox sounded mob-like in their official response. They said, “It is extremely disappointing that a former colleague, who was supported, developed and promoted over two decades, chose to attack the club in this way.” Winters wrote Monday in an e-mail that the Sox “have brought a motion to dismiss the complaint.” We shall see how the wonky wheels of Chicago justice turn when they’ve traditionally favored All Things Reinsdorf. That’s why it’s important — from my base in Los Angeles, while awaiting my next tennis reservation — to point out what isn’t being pointed out in the Chicago media.
It’s important, as well, to educate Comas about the White Sox. “This may be my most personal thing I ever share and it’s that I’m proudly and happily part of the LGTBQ+ community,” he wrote. “I’m also a human with a great soul. I’m respectful, I’m a lover, I love my family and friends and that’s what really matters … Please don’t listen to those stupid things that people say about us. Fight for your dreams, believe in yourself and go for it.”
Now he knows about the stupid things the White Sox have said.
One would think the status of Ball’s suit would merit at least a mention in stories about Comas. The topic should be front and center in Chicago, where the White Sox already look like moral failures in their negligent vetting of free-agent pitcher Mike Clevinger. If they can claim they weren’t aware of a months-long Major League Baseball investigation of Clevinger — accused of domestic violence — they have no excuse not to have known about his past character issues. A front office led by Reinsdorf, Hahn and Ken Williams either didn’t know or didn’t care that the woman who accused Trevor Bauer of assault during rough sex was sleeping with Clevinger in the same timeframe. Their vetting failures could have been avoided with a simple Google search, which would have turned up stories in the Los Angeles Times and USA Today about the woman’s sexual relationship with Clevinger.
But just as the White Sox didn’t make the connection between Clevinger and Bauer — who was suspended for a record 324 games by MLB, before the ban was reduced to 194 games, and remains unemployed despite an absence of criminal charges and a Cy Young Award pedigree — the city’s two death-row newspapers aren’t interested in investigating the growing piles of South Side dirty laundry. If Bauer was accused of sexual assault by a woman who was sleeping with Clevinger, who since has been accused by the mother of their now-10-month-old daughter, wouldn’t it behoove editors to summon their best reporters and find out more about these sex romps and how they’ve impacted Clevinger’s life? How did his accuser feel about his earlier hookups with Bauer’s accuser? Did they all know each other? How tight is Clevinger with Bauer?
Or, have a columnist weigh in with the down-and-dirty, as I’ve been doing in recent days. Nah. One might scold Clevinger for threatening a lawsuit against a Chicago radio station, which aired an interview with his accuser last week, but hammer and probe Reinsdorf and the White Sox? Never. The media are too intimidated by the owner and his legal machinery to even publish the courtroom dialogue of Bauer’s accuser, easily accessible, as it pertains to Clevinger. I’d say they’re also in business bed with Reinsdorf, as they were when I wrote there, but with the Tribune owned by a hedge fund and the Sun-Times controlled as a nonprofit organization by foundations and donors, the lack of coverage is more about a distressing shift in priorities. They simply aren’t very interested in breaking news, the supposed function of a newspaper, nearly as much as appeasing the civic power brokers — and cronies of sports owners — who might keep the papers afloat for another year or two.
Gone are the days when the Tribune and Sun-Times would compete around the clock. Now, editors are just tip-toeing to remain employed and won’t pursue deep-dives that upset the city’s old-money kingpins. Columnists are content to collect smallish paychecks without raising hell. The sports radio stations, with ratings lower than howling dogs, are dumbed-down and generally censored by WSCR’s Mitch Rosen and other programmers who never challenge teams they seek to do business with. The Athletic sports site, which should capitalize on the papers’ demise, has hired fanboys who’ve made marginal impact because they’re as soft as other media. Journalism has died in Chicago. It’s no wonder when one of the Sun-Times foundations has the name “Pritzker” on it, as in Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, as in one of America’s richest families.
It’s why the Sun-Times, once a thriving news factory, has allowed its daily print circulation to shrink to 57,000 and its much-too-late online presence to settle at a paltry 29,000 subscribers. The Tribune, formerly a national powerhouse, is at the future mercy of Alden Global Capital after a casino moves into a longtime printing facility. I left the Sun-Times of my own volition — handing back a guaranteed $1 million then, worth substantially more today — because the place was a corrupt hellhole. It was the best decision of my life. Since my departure, the paper has lost massive chunks of readership in the American city with the lowest percentage of media engagement among the highest percentage of sports fans.
I first smelled a skunk when Hollinger Inc., owned by two creeps who would go to prison for skimming revenues, wanted to fire me for no stated reason. They were trying to befriend Reinsdorf — who had close ties with their Canadian baseball pal, Paul Beeston — and didn’t like how I was ripping the MLB owners during labor warfare that led to a 1994 impasse and cancellation of the World Series. All I did was tabulate the fortunes I was owed in overtime pay, and my column quickly returned. There was more subterfuge from the next two creeps, Michael Cooke and John Cruickshank. That’s right: In my favorite poetry verse in a city known for literature, Cooke and Cruick worked for crooks cooking the books. In the hallway one day, after I’d criticized Reinsdorf for another too-low Sox payroll in the nation’s No. 3 market, they cornered me and said I knew “nothing about sports business.”
Weeks later, I saw them together again. When I asked if they still thought I knew nothing about sports business, Cruickshank said all was good, that Reinsdorf hadn’t bought a table at their social event. So, my bosses could be influenced by the two-team owner I was trying to cover in the Michael Jordan era. Years before, another Hollinger creep, Nigel Wade, forearm-shivered me in his office and “resigned” shortly afterward. He had asked at one point if I was “antisemitic,” a lie advanced by Reinsdorf in a letter to Chicago attorneys that was forwarded to me. Years later, when I received a package of photos that incriminated a very big local sports figure in 2007, I asked another boss, a non-Hollinger editor named Don Hayner, if city side should investigate the double life this person might have been leading.
Hayner instead had a question for me: “What is our purpose?”
Gee, I don’t know, I guess protecting the city’s sports franchises from major scandals and ignoring our pledge to serve readers.
Disgusted with it all, I left the paper shortly after signing another three-year contract and told the Tribune that I wasn’t going down with the ship. The ship went down, as did the other ship, and they’re both on flimsy straw rafts in the Chicago River, one more recession from leaving a large metropolis without a downtown newspaper. Every now and then, I replay the segment from HBO’s “Real Sports” when I called out the Sun-Times for dishonesty and how editors made me file two bogus stories — Michael Phelps wins, Michael Phelps loses — from the Beijing Olympics one night. Talk about cheating the readers. But then, this is the place where Rich Roeper raves about mediocre movies so the Sun-Times is listed in TV commercials, when he isn’t buying fake Twitter followers and writing fawning books about the White Sox.
I tell these stories as background for why we’re here today — a gay trainer suing a team that celebrates the coming out of a gay minor-leaguer, as the media ignore the lunacy of it all. When I was called a “f—ing fag,” the Sun-Times offered no support or guidance and exploited news coverage for days, foolishly reaching out to a gay hairdresser who defended Guillen. It was clear my editors were squarely in bed with the Sox. Hell, when I had a heart issue in New Orleans while covering a meaningless Sugar Bowl game, they didn’t bother to call and see if I was alive. Finally, with a push from my lawyer, the phone rang at the hospital in suburban Metairie.
It was Cooke. I blew him off. The paper’s security man, Mike Weaver, kept me abreast on Cooke stories inside the building. I just avoided him until I wanted my life back and chose to leave without telling him.
All these years later, with editors handcuffed by inertia and a Reinsdorfian lackey overseeing the Sun-Times sports slog, someone has to be a newshound in Chicago. So I’ll do it from 2,000 miles away. What you’ve read here about Clevinger and Bauer, what you’ve read about Ball and an April court collision, you’re not getting in either newspaper. Trust in media is at an all-time low, of course. A poll by Gallup and the Knight Foundation indicates half of Americans think “news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting.”
Or, in Chicago, through their lack of reporting.
For my next mission, I will explore why a paper funded by a Pritzker-related foundation won’t investigate the scandals of an unsavory baseball franchise. I think I know the answer, as readership free-falls toward a crash in a region of several million underserved sports sufferers.
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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.