White Sox Fans Raised Funds To Construct A Billboard Demanding Jerry Reinsdorf To Sell The Team
Over the last handful of years, I've developed a much different perspective on Major League Baseball. I'll make it clear that I will always obsess over the Chicago White Sox. That's not a choice I make. I'm psychotic about them and it's truthfully probably not all that healthy. They are basically priority numero uno in my life.
But I've also learned to root for players on an individual basis more. Before, they were all just a number to me. If you weren't on the White Sox, I didn't care about you. You were an enemy. Now... not so much. Players aren't the villains.
Owners are.
With the pandemic CBA negotiations, the 2021-22 winter CBA negotiations, and with how I've watched the FUCKING White Sox sit in a tepid pool of mediocrity for 33 of my 34 years, I've learned to truly despise ownership. That hate used to be segregated to the White Sox, but I've learned it's a league wide issue, and an issue that's gutting the sport from the inside out.
For the most part, that is. Baseball needs more Steve Cohens. It needs more owners that treat their teams like toys and are hellbent on winning at all costs. It needs less owners like Jerry Reinsdorf who run their teams like a pop up stand at a flea market. Want your baseball to be its healthiest? Let's start with having 30 teams compete for the best free agents, not the same 4-5. How are there Pirates fans? Or Reds fans? Or A's fans? Those orgs don't give a FUCK about winning championships, and it's because of their owners and ownership groups.
We'll get to Jerry in a moment. There has NEVER been more talent in the league than there is right now and we see the same small handful of teams from varying market sizes really push their chips to the middle: NYM, LAD, SD, Philly, and to a lesser extent ATL and HOU have used money - something EVERY team prints - to go HARD on the best free agents possible.
Not Reinsdorf though. After selling off every player with a pulse in 2016-17 because the organization was "mired in mediocrity" the White Sox - in the heart of their self-anointed "competitive window" just finished a year 81-81 in the worst division in baseball.
This was all after the organization promised the fanbase things would be different. Nope. Right back to where we started. They fucking lied to our faces, and we're infuriated.
I have been on the "Jerry Reinsdorf ruins the White Sox" train a LONG time. Longer than most. Not anymore though - the rest of the fanbase has caught up to my level.
A few have even surpassed me. Yesterday, White Sox fans started a Gofundme to raise funs to put up a "Sell The Team" billboard somewhere on the Dan Ryan by Sox Park:
I'll admit I didn't have a single plan of pushing this, as I like expressing my disdain for that fucking organization to bitching on Twitter. Not constructing billboards or chaining myself statues. That said, to each their own. Not saying this is a bad thing. It's just not for me.
Two notes on the fundraiser though:
1. Apparently it's only $2100 to post a billboard? I would have guessed WAY more than that, but that's what the organizer set the fundraising goal at, so I guess it's not all that expensive? Not sure, but either way, there's already almost $4,000 in like 12 hours
2. They really plan on putting it up and that will be a big time local news story, if not national. White Sox fans are fucking PISSED right now, and deservedly so. Part of my job is covering sports stories in this town, so here we are. I'm covering it even though I want nothing more than to talk about the good things the White Sox do. Not the embarrassing things, even though embarrassing things happen way too frequently with them.
In the end, fuck the owners. They are GUTTING a lot of different orgs in this league.
We had a LONG talk about this on the newest episode of Red Line Radio. That just dropped. In some weird bizarro world, I was on Cub fans' side after they let Correa go to SF.
This quote should INFURIATE Cubs fans:
Check out the episode. It's back to OG RLR roots with a ton of heavy baseball talk and debate.
PS - if I don't personally deem this offseason a success, I will put out "SELL THE TEAM" shirts. They have until 11:59pm central time the night before pitchers and catchers report to fix this fucking mess they've put themselves in. Again.
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