Snyder’s Soapbox: The record-breaking White Sox team should be more embarrassing to owner Jerry Reinsdorf than the players

Welcome to Snyder’s Soapbox! Here, I’ll discourse about matters pertaining to Major League Baseball on a weekly basis. Some topics will be important, some may seem unimportant in the broad scheme of things, and most will be somewhere in between. The nice thing about this website is that it’s free, and you’re allowed to click around. If you stay, you’ll come out smarter. It’s a money-back guarantee. Let’s get started.

Once the dust settles on the 2024 season, Major League Baseball will officially have a new and undeniably worst team ever: the 2024 Chicago White Sox.

This is an incredible amount of effort in vain that can’t possibly be the new norm for bad teams. It’s just awful. For example, the Twins and Royals both went 12-1 against the White Sox this season, which helped dramatically increase their postseason odds. The White Sox are so bad that they’re affecting the playoff race in a relatively extreme way.

The worst part is that, unlike some of the atrocities we’ve seen in recent seasons from teams like the Orioles and Tigers, the White Sox weren’t actually trying to tank. Unlike the 1962 Mets, who were the holders of the most losses in the MLB season until the next few days, the White Sox aren’t an expansion team that was put in a terrible position by the league.

No, they are very bad.

We could list a myriad of reasons for this, but let’s keep it simple and point a finger where it belongs: directly at owner Jerry Reinsdorf.

Reinsdorf problems are everywhereThis is a mix of misconduct mixed with incompetence in MLB team ownership. He’s cheap, he’s too “hands on” in baseball operations and he believes he is entitled to have everyone who cares about the White Sox bow down to him. Nearly everything wrong with the White Sox is directly related to the owner’s box.

Expenditure

This might be the most embarrassing aspect of the situation. The White Sox play in Chicago, which is a mega-market. It’s the third-largest market in MLB. Sure, it’s split with the Cubs, but ask yourself how much you’ve seen the Mets or Angels spend over the last few years. There’s no reason the White Sox couldn’t operate on a similar scale.

And yet, they are one of two teams in baseball that have never signed a player to a nine-figure deal. They haven’t even come close. Andrew Benintendi’s five-year, $75 million pact is the largest in franchise history. Only the A’s haven’t gone higher. The Pirates signed Bryan Reynolds and We’ve already dealt with the meanness of their owner,

The Marlins have surpassed $300 million. The Royals have Bobby Witt Jr. on a contract close to $300 million. The Brewers have signed Ryan Braun and Christian Yelich to terrific deals. The Reds spent over $200 million to keep Joey Votto.

These kinds of discussions shouldn’t even be happening in a sport that doesn’t have a salary cap. They certainly shouldn’t be happening about a franchise that has so many resources.

Things aren’t going to change in the near future, as the White Sox”There’s a lot of work to be done in free agency” It will happen this coming winter, according to GM Chris Getz. This is probably something that didn’t even need to be said. They never make huge moves in free agency.

And it’s not just that. Their analytics department has long been one of the smallest in baseball (it was the smallest in 2018, for example). Their international scouting operation isn’t stellar. A few weeks ago, their front office discussed expanding their footprint:

“We’re in the process of improving our academy in the Dominican Republic,” Getz said recently (via MLB.com). “We’ve done a lot of work and research on locations and we plan to focus even more on that in the coming months to find a facility that works for us.

We could go on, but the key point here is that it all comes down to the almighty dollar and Reinsdorf’s unwillingness to spend like other relevant franchises.

interference

After the 2020 season, the White Sox looked like a team on the rise. They went 35-25 in the shortened season and had a good foundation of young talent. Manager Rick Renteria was fired and replaced by 76-year-old Tony La Russa, who already had three World Series rings and who had managed the team between 1979 and 1986. The White Sox won the AL Central in 2021, but things began to fall apart in 2022 and La Russa was unable to even finish the season.

“I’m so tired of reading that it was a mistake to bring Tony La Russa back,” Reinsdorf said in 2023. “Tony La Russa comes back in 2021, and does anybody know what we did in 2021? Does anybody remember that we won 93 games? We won the division by 13 games. Was it a mistake to bring Tony La Russa back?”

Moving to La Russa was not, in and of itself, the cause of the White Sox’ current decline. However, it is an example of Reinsdorf meddling and doing whatever he pleases instead of trusting his actual baseball people appointed to run baseball operations.

And when he fired his front office leadership last season, who did he promote? Gaetz. He might prove to be a good executive over time, but he’s relatively young and inexperienced for the job. His trade-deadline moves (and non-moves) this season were among them An executive who’s in over his head,

Furthermore, if the previous front office was so bad that it needed to be fired, why was the assistant general manager – Getz – promoted to the top job?

Again, this is a team in the third-largest market in the league. A top-tier, emerging executive could have been hired to rebuild the on-field product. Instead, Reinsdorf was promoted from within. Why?

The answer is simple: Reinsdorf wanted to put Goetz in this position.

Arrogance and entitlement

earlier this year, The report indicates The White Sox were looking to build a new ballpark in Chicago. And, hey, Reinsdorf has even said he wants to put up some of his own money for it! Of course, according to Crain’s, he’s also asking for $1.2 billion in taxpayer money. Of course, rumors began to circulate that Reinsdorf would move the White Sox to Nashville if no plans were made. This isn’t the first time. There were threats of moving to St. Petersburg in 1988. The Trop was already being built for them.

You see, with Reinsdorf, White Sox fans are expected to keep lining his pockets through their ticket and concession purchases and television viewership and everything else. And he’s also entitled to taxpayer money when he feels he needs to build a new ballpark. If he doesn’t get what he wants, he’ll take his team and go! It’s a legal way of extortion.

He could really make a lot of money by selling the team, but he won’t do that. Then he would no longer be in charge of a Major League Baseball team. I think power is a big part of it, though. Any room he walks into, he holds his head up high and says “I have a baseball team.” He does the same in front of the heads of White Sox Nation.

I would laugh at this if it didn’t make me feel sorry for my fans. Reinsdorf’s recent statement“Everyone in this organization is extremely unhappy with the results of this season, that goes without saying. This year has been very painful for everyone, especially our fans.”

You, sir, have never done anything on the field that suggested you cared even a bit about White Sox fans. They won the World Series in 2005, sure, but it wasn’t because of their great ownership. It wasn’t a long stretch of excellence either. There were four seasons without a playoff berth before winning the title and two seasons without a playoff berth after that. Since then, the Sox have made the postseason only three times in 19 seasons. This is a very poorly run franchise and its downward slide starts with Reinsdorf.

Mr. Reinsdorf, you are the biggest reason fans are watching the worst season in baseball history.

It’s a matter of shame.