The Chicago White Sox season has gone more horribly than anyone could’ve imagined on opening day. The Sox are trying to avoid setting the record for losses in a single season, and team owner Jerry Reinsdorf is coming under fire for putting Chicago in this position.
White sox fans have complained for years about their ownership, with some even bringing “sell the team” signs to games, but now light has been shed on exactly how bad things are in Chicago.
The Athletic spoke to current and former White Sox employees about the organization’s problems, and a lot of the feedback was about the 88-year-old Reinsdorf and his inability to adapt with the times.
“You got a baseball fan owner who thinks he knows everything, and maybe he did in 1992,” one former employee said, “but the amount of info has skyrocketed in the last 30 years and he’s put his middle finger up at that.”
“As long as Jerry’s philosophy is the overarching one,” someone else added, “they won’t ever succeed.”
“Did we have a large analytics department when I was there? No, we didn’t,” said Kenny Williams, the White Sox former player and team vice president. “We didn’t have those kind of resources to allocate towards that.”
“They have people there with no business being in Major League Baseball,” said an executive from a different team.
It’ll be interesting to see if the 2024 White Sox going down as the worst team in the history of the MLB is enough to get Reinsdorf to change his ways.
