Snyder’s Soapbox: Record-breaking White Sox should be more embarrassing for owner Jerry Reinsdorf than players

Welcome to Snyder’s Soapbox! Here, I pontificate about matters related to Major League Baseball on a weekly basis. Some of the topics will be pressing matters, some might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and most will be somewhere in between. The good thing about this website is that it’s free, and you are allowed to click away. If you stay, you’ll get smarter, though. That’s a money-back guarantee. Let’s get to it.

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

It’s such an incredible effort in futility that it cannot possibly be the new norm for awful teams. It’s too terrible. For example, both the Twins and Royals went 12-1 against the White Sox this season, dramatically helping buoy their postseason odds. The White Sox are so bad that they are affecting the playoff race in relatively extreme fashion. 

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, holders of the most losses in an MLB season for another few days, the White Sox aren’t an expansion team that was put in terrible position by the league. 

No, they are just this freaking bad. 

We could point to myriad reasons for this, but let’s just keep it simple and point one finger where it belongs: Directly at owner Jerry Reinsdorf. 

The problems with Reinsdorf are all over the place. It’s a potpourri of malpractice mixed with incompetence in MLB team ownership. He’s cheap, he’s far too “hands on” in baseball operations and he believes he’s entitled to have everyone who cares about the White Sox bow down to him. Almost everything wrong with the White Sox has a direct line back to the owner’s box.

Spending

This might be the most embarrassing aspect of the situation. The White Sox play in Chicago, a mega-market. It is 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 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 to 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 than that. The Pirates went to exactly $100 million with Bryan Reynolds and we’ve already dealt with the cheapness of their owner. 

The Marlins have surpassed $300 million. The Royals have Bobby Witt Jr. on a contract that approaches $300 million. The Brewers have done monster deals with Ryan Braun and Christian Yelich. The Reds went well over $200 million to keep Joey Votto. 

In a sport without a salary cap, discussions like this shouldn’t even be happening. They definitely shouldn’t be happening around a franchise with as many resources as this one. 

Things won’t be changing any time soon, either, as the White Sox aren’t “gonna be working heavy in free agency” this coming winter, according to GM Chris Getz. It’s probably something that didn’t even need to be said. They never work heavy in free agency. 

And it isn’t just that. They have long had one of the smallest analytics departments in baseball (it was the smallest in 2018, for example). Their international scouting operation isn’t up to snuff. A few weeks ago, their front office discussed expanding their footprint: 

“We are in the process of improving our academy down in the Dominican Republic,” Getz said recently (via MLB.com). “We’ve put a lot of work and research into locations and we plan on focusing there even more in the coming months to find a facility that’s going to be advantageous for us.

We could keep going, but the bottom line here is it all comes back to the almighty dollar and Reinsdorf’s unwillingness to spend at levels that other, relevant franchises do. 

Meddling

After the 2020 season, the White Sox looked like an up-and-coming team. They were 35-25 in the shortened season and had a decent foundation of young talent. Manager Rick Renteria was fired and replaced with 76-year-old Tony La Russa, who already had three World Series rings on his mantle and had managed the team between 1979 and 1986. The White Sox won the AL Central in 2021, but things started to fall apart in 2022 and La Russa didn’t even finish the season.

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

The move to La Russa was absolutely not, in and of itself, why the White Sox have fallen to their current depths. It is, however, an example of Reinsdorf butting in and doing whatever he feels like instead of deferring to his actual baseball people hired to run baseball operations. 

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

Plus, 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-level, up-and-coming executive could have been hired to rebuild the on-field product. Instead, Reinsdorf promoted from within. Why? 

The answer is pretty easy. Reinsdorf wanted Getz in the seat.

The ego and entitlement

Earlier this year, reports indicated 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 to help pay for it! Of course, he’s also asking for $1.2 billion in taxpayer money, according to Crain’s. Sure enough, rumors started to swirl that Reinsdorf would move the White Sox to Nashville if a plan didn’t come together. It isn’t the first time. There were threats to move to St. Petersburg in 1988. The Trop was already being built for them. 

You see, with Reinsdorf, White Sox fans are expected to continue lining his pockets via their tickets and concessions purchases and television viewership and everything else. And he’s also entitled to taxpayer money when he feels like he needs to build a new ballpark. If he doesn’t get his way, he’ll take his team and move! It’s kind of a legal avenue to extortion. 

He could actually make a windfall by selling the team, but he won’t do that. Then he wouldn’t be in charge of a Major League Baseball team anymore. I do think the power is a big part of it, though. In every room he walks into, he gets to hold his head high and say “I own a baseball team.” He gets to hold that over the heads of White Sox Nation too.

If it didn’t make me sad for the fan base, I’d have laughed at 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 all, especially our fans.” 

You, sir, have never done anything with the on-field product that suggests you care one iota about the White Sox fan base. They won the World Series in 2005, sure, but that wasn’t due to great ownership. It wasn’t even an extended run of excellence. There were four seasons without playoff berths before the title and two without playoff berths after. Since then, the Sox have only made the postseason three times in 19 seasons. It’s a horribly run franchise and the rot runs downward from Reinsdorf. 

Mr. Reinsdorf, you are the biggest reason the fans are in the midst of witnessing the worst season in baseball history.

For shame.