A tale of White Sox revenge
Rick Morrissey had an excellent article in the Sun-Times this week about Jerry Reinsdorf’s primary motivation being to seek revenge against White Sox fans — “a perverse revenge” as he calls it. Morrissey puts a lot of the cause on the “sell the team” movement of the last two years, and he has sources that may well tell him that was the final blow to Reinsdorf’s ego.
But allow me to suggest that the chairman’s loathing of fans goes back much further.
(Disclaimer: I am not a psychologist and I don’t even play one on TV. However, I am a granddad, and claim the granddad right to pretend to know all sorts of stuff whether or not I actually do.)
Now, revenge isn’t Reinsdorf’s only motive in business or in life. The lifelong motive has really been to show that the old Ben Franklin adage that nothing is certain but death and taxes doesn’t apply to him. The ex-IRS attorney spent his whole professional life figuring out ways to pay little or no taxes, including being primarily invested in two of the biggest tax dodges in the country, major real estate and professional sports. Not only that, having once succeeded, he obviously now believes having tax money come to him is the proper way of the world.
As for death, just because Reinsdorf is 88 is no reason to believe he’ll do the fan base the favor of moving on any time in the next decade. Or century. Which is a major part of his revenge.
The rest of the revenge — what Morrissey says is all about “sticking it to people” — doesn’t seem all that recent, especially given how he sent out minions like Ken Williams to fan shame long ago. Thing is, Reinsdorf is a control freak of the first order, which is why by far the most important, and usually only, skill required to obtain a key to the executive washroom at 35th and Shields is the ability to keep one’s lips firmly affixed to Jerry’s butt. Sure, that means the Sox are a completely incompetent organization with no hope of getting better till death do us part, but as Morrissey said, that’s not something Reinsdorf cares about.
Toss around enough money and require no talent or even effort, and you’ll keep your staff pursing their lips. But — and this has to be really frustrating to the Lord of the GuRF — you can’t demand fealty from the fans. You have to earn their obeisance, which is the rub. And also tough.
If anything, fans are a feisty bunch, disinclined toward worship of owners or those who pretend to be owners even though they have a small percentage of the stock and just wrote themselves a sweetheart power deal — players, sometimes ... owners, very, very seldom.
Thus, Reinsdorf is stuck. He can only get any respect, let alone fealty, by putting an excellent team on the field (or on the court, in the case of the Bulls). But if he puts an excellent team on the field, the fans win the battle, and he really, really doesn’t like to lose battles.
So settle back for a long, dark ride, folks. As Hamlet said, “Revenge should have no bounds.” Not that that attitude did him much good.
