Thad Bosley

With Hawk gone now, and with Jason Benetti now settling in as the full-time play-by-play guy, I thought it would be interesting to see how White Sox Nation feels about both Benetti and Steve Stone on how they go about their respective duties as the PBP guy and color analyst, respectively, and how we feel they do as partners in the broadcast booth.

Yes, the idea of a six year rebuild after eight preceding years without one postseason appearance is preposterous. We are currently in the 4th longest playoff drought in baseball, with only four playoff games and one playoff win in the 13 years since the World Series in '05, so to suggest that it's somehow reasonable and ok to extend this inability to content for yet another three years is just crazy talk.

They’ve gotten a little smarter at how they try and mask their incompetence. Used to be we were told about “three year plans” as a way of explaining away current ineptitude while kicking the can down the road. Now we have a “rebuild”, which is conveniently open-ended. Why lock yourself into figuring out how to fix this mess of an organization in three years when you can just call it a rebuild and let it go on indefinitely, all the while the massive profits pile up for ownership.

Bill Veeck negotiated the Sox to be on WGN - a VHF station - for the 1981 season, which was Reinsdorf’s first year as owner. So Reinsdorf inherited the Sox with the team on WGN AND with Harry Caray in the booth. By 1982, the Sox were off WGN and on the ill-conceived SportsVision, AND they let Harry go to the Cubs. In other words, in less than one year, Reinsdorf managed to perpetrate not one, not two, but THREE franchise-crippling decisions: surrendering WGN solely to the Cubs; putting Sox games on pay TV that hardly anyone bought; and letting Harry go and make the Cubs a national phenomenon with the WGN exposure. Harry himself said the Sox would have “owned the town” in 1983 (the year BEFORE the “Sandberg game”) If they had remained on WGN and gotten the massive exposure that went along with the games being on that station (over 30 million homes got WGN). Instead, the games were literally hidden on SportsVision, with fewer than 17,000 homes being wired for pay TV at the time. So that’s what the current owner was up to back in the early days: making one sound decision after another leading to sustained success for the organization. And by that I mean he’s spent nearly 40 years, up to and including this past offseason, doing nothing of the sort. Too bad Harry and WGN didn’t qualify for the infamous “loyalty program” back in those days that we talk so much about these days.

On the night back in September 1983, when the Sox clinched the AL West Division, marking their first return to the playoffs in 24 years since the '59 World Series, when the ecstasy of winning had enveloped Comiskey Park and White Sox Nation, in the post game interviews conducted by Hawk Harrelson, Reinsdorf took a moment on live TV to literally say that he hoped Harry Caray and Jimmy Piersall were "eating their hearts out wherever they were", and that he hoped people now would "understand what SCUM they were". Those were the words from the Chairman on live TV on a night that should have been all about celebrating the rare occurrence known as White Sox playoff-bound baseball. It was those exact words that would go onto fuel Harry's outrage and disdain towards Reinsdorf ever after. It was a very classless gesture on Reinsdorf's part, and I don't blame Caray for feeling the way he did about the guy from then on out.

Oh, we'll always talk about Harry Caray. He has a very solid place in White Sox history. And he shouldn't feel "dead" to any Sox fan simply because, after nearly 40 years in the baseball broadcasting business, he was not willing to sign up for the get-rich-quick bone-headed scheme known as Sportsvision, that the then only-one-year-into-the-baseball-ownership-business Reinsdorf and Einhorn tried to get him to sign onto. That would have been career suicide for the guy, and nothing he deserved after so many outstanding years in the business.

I still wonder to this day how many fans were lost to the Cubs at the time Harry switched teams because of Harry's immense popularity AND the fact Reinsdorf/Einhorn foolishly took the Sox off of WGN and put them on the ill-conceived Sportsvision station. Apparently, according to the author of this book, there was a survey taken at the time that showed that a whopping 44% of people who identified as White Sox fans said they were open to rooting for the Cubs just because of Harry. That's how damn popular the guy was back then! So you couple the loss of Harry AND the loss of Sox on free TV and, well, you do the math.

Sadly, it does seem time to cut bait with Nate.

In other words, he was being cheap. Please don't try and put lipstick on this pig.

Why? Where is it going?

There's all kinds of wrong going on when you suggest this benevolent owner of ours will be "comfortable carrying a $125M-130M payroll...within the next few years", when the MLB median payroll last year was $140M. And this business about "Jerry's self-imposed cap" and his "relatively hard cap"? I mean, what is this rubbish! How has his fiscal policy served the on-field success of this franchise these past four decades, and in particular, this last one! You make it sound like his approach is reasonable and acceptable to you as a fan.

Another good at bat for Eloy. Hung in there nicely.

100% agree. He’s got a decent, all around skill set. It’s just been the damn injuries that have held him back.

Something promising brewing here!

The only thing that needs to die in a fire is your pitiful and unsubstantiated suggestion that the current owner “wants to win”, when there is no such evidence to back up this lame claim.

Two more things: A.). He HASN’T won recently, if you haven’t noticed. He HASN’T won in over a decade, and is presiding over the 4th longest playoff drought, and B.) If you truly believe he “wants to win”, how do you explain how every other team in the A.L. Central, which includes three small market teams, has had a total team payroll at one time greater than anything Reinsdorf has ever shelled out in a given year? You couple that fact with the disgraceful display of full-on cheapness we saw this past offseason, and you have no leg to stand on claiming this mongrel “wants to win”. As a few other posters have mentioned, “actions speak louder than words”.

Your best day of posting doesn’t even come close to comparing to the thoughtfulness and insight provided by CWS on his worst day of posting.

Talk about “soft takes”... Did either of the Astros or Cubs use the same sh*theads who were responsible for the need for their rebuilds” when they decided to “blew it up”? That’s the difference here. Both the Astros and Cubs’ success was due to subsequent and superior management folks coming in and cleaning up the mess of their inferior predecessors to build their eventual, sustainabitable products. That is what our franchise and fan base so desperately needs: new ownership, and with that, a new management team, and a complete and new fresh look as to how to take advantage of the market our White Sox play in.

Exactly.

If that’s the best you can say about the man, that he “wants to win”, well, that’s almost damning with faint praise. Every owner “wants to win”. Name us one that doesn’t. The difference is Reinsdorf either doesn’t want to win as badly as his peers, won’t expend the resources necessary to do so (see past offseason), or an unfortunate combination of both. Surely you see a disconnect between your claim he “wants to win” and his miserable record over a 38 period of doing so. Why hasn’t his wanting to win translated into far more of it? Just bad luck?

He “doesn’t know how”? The longest tenured owner in the game “doesn’t know how” to win? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? I could see saying something like this about a new ownership group like what Jeter has going down in Miami. But saying this about a guy who’s been at this for nearly 40 years now screams out “failed ownership” more than anything else that could possibly be said.

Well yes, he wants to win, but who doesn’t? Every owner in the game wants to win, so this characteristic does not differentiate Reinsdorf from his peers. What does differentiate is how he prioritizes winning among his two other top objectives: profitability and his so-called “loyalty” program. The goals around those two seemingly garner far greater attention and prioritization than putting a winning product on the field. His record supports that. Reinsdorf has made the Sox quite profitable, which is great for him and the investors. Successful there. Reinsdorf has been wildly loyal to people within the organization upon whom his favor rests, whether they’ve been good and successful at their jobs or not. He’s been successful in letting people he likes to stick around indefinitely. That’s good for Reinsdorf and his friends in the organization. It’s the objective of putting a winning ball club together, which would be GOOD FOR US, THE FANS, that he’s miserably failed to achieve. That’s the cause of the angst with the fan base, pure and simple. And all of this has pretty much defined Reinsdorf and his 38 years of ownership of the ball club.

Lol - pointing to the signing of Adam’s LaRoche and Dunn as evidence of Reinsdorf’s commitment to winning is nothing short of completely laughable. Also is the suggestion that they were “high priced” free agents. The White Sox aren’t in the business of purchasing “high priced” free agents, as I think this past offseason proved. The highest contract the Sox has ever served up is the $68M one to Abreu. That makes the Sox one of only three teams to never offer a contract higher than that one. This from an owner who is lazily described as someone who wants to win. Maybe he does. Maybe he does, but unfortunately not as much as the other owners in the game, particularly not as much as the owners of the Padres and Phillies.

And what evidence do you have that leads you to that conclusion?

How on god’s green earth did you get access to a footnote of the Sox’ audited financial statements!