The 2024 White Sox might have swept the Rays over the weekend, but all that did was double their win total for the season. We’re over a month in at this point: you’re not supposed to be able to do that over the course of three games, but Chicago managed, bringing their record to 6-22 before resuming their losing ways against the Twins on Monday. Even after ever-so-slightly tipping the scales back toward the middle, the White Sox are on pace for all of 33 victories on the season. Even PECOTA, which uses a whole lot more information than just April’s small sample to project the rest of the way, had the White Sox down for 101 losses before Monday night’s defeat against Minnesota. It feels early to be forecasting that sort of thing, but Chicago has given itself quite the head start.
They aren’t a good team. They weren’t supposed to be either, and it’s no wonder, considering that in 2023 they lost 101 games while sporting the league’s worst offense by OPS+, which scored the second-fewest runs per game behind the A’s, losers of 112 contests. The White Sox knew they had a terrible offense, so what did they spend the offseason doing to fix it? They let Tim Anderson become someone else’s problem in the lineup, which hey, addition by subtraction there. Except they followed it up by signing Paul DeJong (.192/.265/.353 over the last three years, and .215/.271/.415 to start this one), Martín Maldonado (.183/.260/.333 from 2021-2023; he entered play on Monday “hitting” .083/.137/.167 in 18 games), and trading for Nicky Lopez, who even with an above-average season on his résumé is a career .247/.311/.315 hitter. Lopez has hit .211/.302/.224 to start the 2024 season.
Part of their offensive woes can be attributed to injuries, as Yoán Moncada is on the 60-day injured list, Luis Robert Jr. has appeared in just seven games due to a hip flexor strain, and Eloy Jiménez has been limited to 16 games thanks to a left adductor strain. The excuses end there, though. Andrew Benintendi has been equal parts healthy and awful. Andrew Vaughan has been worse. They entered play on Monday once again last in the league in OPS+, only this time performing 31% worse than the league average instead of 16% below: for some context, the Cardinals have the third-worst offense by OPS+ right now, and they’re just 20% worse. The White Sox are almost unfathomably feckless at the plate right now, which is why, barring a 21-run outburst on Tuesday, they’ll finish April without yet having reached 100 runs on the season: every other club, save the A’s, has already surpassed that mark, even the lowly Marlins and Rockies. The White Sox, though, are scoring fewer than three runs per game, at 2.71, nearly a full run worse than 2023’s “leader” in this category, the A’s.
Sure, it’s early, but how much better can the White Sox realistically get? They can stave off sharing the stage of history with the Cleveland Spiders, sure, like the A’s managed last summer, but what does that mean? 110 losses? 105? Are either of those a success by any measure? This is an awful roster, mostly put together by the longtime general manager who was let go and the guy who replaced him. Rick Hahn was fired as GM in late August, as was vice president Kenny Williams: Williams had been in the organization’s front office since 1994, when he was named special assistant to owner Jerry Reinsdorf. He became the GM in 2000 and was promoted to executive vice president in 2012, which let Hahn take over in that role for over a decade. Hahn was replaced by Chris Getz, who had been the director of player development and assistant GM to Hahn, meaning, the guy who played at least part of the role in the current roster even outside of his role as GM, both because of what the minors produced over the last few years and holes filled by big league acquisitions.
Getz is the GM because he’s a Reinsdorf guy. Given the length of the tenures of both Williams and Hahn, it’s not difficult to see that Reinsdorf likes to internally promote and keep his executives around in the long run. Like Williams, Getz started elsewhere in the org before being promoted to the top. He’s here because his boss likes him, which is fine, but that’s not equivalent to evidence that he knows what he’s doing. And even if he does, that doesn’t mean Reinsdorf will let him do it. Not if it costs money.
It’s 2024, and the White Sox are still without a single $100 million free agent in their history. Their most significant free agent contracts have gone to Benintendi ($75 million over five years) and Yasmani Grandal ($73 million over four). The extra $500,000 that Dallas Keuchel received is the only reason Albert Belle’s $55 million free agent deal from 1997 is no longer in the top five in franchise history. They simply do not spend like a team from Chicago could or should: by Cot’s Contracts’ count, the White Sox rank 17th in the majors since 1991 in total free agent spending. They don’t ignore free agency completely, but they completely avoid the top end. Which is why, despite a whole bunch of top-end talent on free agency this offseason, they ended up with the likes of DeJong and Maldonado, which helped them cut their payroll by around $58 million, down to $121 million for Opening Day. It’s not like they had a bunch of prospects to plug in, and the farm system doesn’t have much in the way of future help, either, which is why Baseball Prospectus ranked it 25th in the league this winter. This is a team that needs to spend to have any chance right now—in a weak division, in a league that now has six Wild Card clubs—and that’s just not happening.
Reinsdorf has only reliably spent during one stretch as owner: from 2006 through 2008, after the White Sox won their first World Series since 1917. They had a top-five payroll in each of those campaigns, but then they slid out of the top 10, into the middle, into the bottom third, to as low as 29th in 2018. They, for one season, jumped all the way to seventh in spending in 2022, but then dropped to 13th, and opened 2024 in 20th.
This is all embarrassing enough without any additional context beyond “bad team doesn’t want to pull the levers it could to be less bad, and maybe even good, in a division that is never exactly dominated by a true powerhouse.” But there’s more to give. Reinsdorf is currently and very publicly angling for the city of Chicago to write him a very large public subsidies check for a brand new ballpark to replace Guaranteed Rate Field, which opened in 1991. Famously, Reinsdorf pretended he was willing to move to St. Petersburg decades ago, which is what scared Chicago into building what would eventually be named Guaranteed Rate Field in the first place. He’s currently going through the same kind of threats now with Nashville, even making sure the press knew he had lunch with that city’s mayor this offseason. He has an incredible sweetheart deal that earns him all kinds of revenue right now with the city of Chicago, but there’s always more money he could have and not spend to consider, so, he wants a new stadium and a new stadium deal.
It’s galling, really, that Reinsdorf would put the kind of team on the field that he does—one that’s consistently bad in no small part due to his own hang-ups and lack of spending and poor executive hiring decisions—and then turn around and ask for $1 billion in public funds from Chicago for a new stadium. Galling has worked plenty for Reinsdorf before, of course, and John Fisher certainly is showing you can be truly awful and still be rewarded, but still. It’s incredible to see the White Sox being openly mocked for building a team that, projected wins or not, is going to be terrible, again, with little hope of being better anytime soon, and then turn around and ask for a massive public subsidies haul.
Reinsdorf doesn’t care about galling, though, or about lying. That should be pretty clear at this point, after decades and decades in the sport. He’s a holdover from the collusion era of the 1980s, was Bud Selig’s bestie in the league and eager to endorse his small-market-minded schemes. He’s the guy who pushed for more and more limitations on draft spending to lessen the competitive advantage other clubs had over him, an advantage that existed solely due to Reinsdorf’s choice to not spend more on amateurs. He’s the owner who, with a straight face, spoke at a conference about how he cares more about winning than about making money. As I wrote about at the time:
Reinsdorf, at least in baseball, has very little winning to point to. He has a whole lot of caring very much about money you can look at, but you can say whatever you want when you’re at a business convention as an invited speaker and are worth over a billion dollars, as Reinsdorf was. You should feel free to say that whatever winning culture Reinsdorf’s Chicago Bulls team once possessed left with Michael Jordan, as well, since they were constantly winning titles or at least in the mix back in the 80s and 90s with one of the most successful athletes ever around, and since then? Well, the Bulls have had some pretty good seasons in the past couple of decades, sure, but they’ve also been mediocre much of the time, and have a White Sox-esque run of first-round series losses behind them now, as well.
Reinsdorf did care about winning in the 90s, when he had literally Michael Jordan there to help make that easier to do. Lacking the MLB equivalent of Mike, and much of the time not even Pippen, he’s never had the same approach in baseball, though, and, like with baseball, he hasn’t exactly put the best executives together in a room to make basketball decisions over the past couple of decades, either. The idea that he cares about winning more than he cares about making money is as laughable as the idea that he needs those stadium subsidies more than Chicago’s hospitals, schools, and homeless need it, or that it would be a good investment for the city to give Reinsdorf more money than they already have. All you have to do is look at what Reinsdorf’s teams have done, and what they haven’t done, for decades now, and you know that he doesn’t measure success the same way it’s measured on the field. He’s asking for this money because it’s a great deal for him, and anything else will be accidental.
The White Sox don’t try or spend like they should, and this is a consistent issue. They’ve had a fairly static run of front office leaders for decades now, despite far less success than you’d imagine for that level of continuity. As long as they’re making Reinsdorf money, then it’s working for him. And if it wasn’t making him any money, well, he wouldn’t still be here, 35 years after buying the Sox, would he, going for yet another ballpark built by the city of Chicago.
Marc Normandin currently writes on baseball’s labor issues and more at marcnormandin.com, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon. His baseball writing has appeared at SB Nation, Defector, Global Sport Matters, Deadspin, Sports Illustrated, ESPN, Sports on Earth, The Guardian, The Nation, FAIR, and TalkPoverty, and you can read his takes on retro video games at Retro XP.
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Back when he got the subsidy to build New Comiskey, they intentionally built a ton of parking around the stadium, then fenced all that parking in, effectively creating a buffer between New Comiskey (or the Cell, or the Rate, or whatever) and the Beverly neighborhood.
His plan for Comiskey III leaves Beverly behind (the home of the Sox, more or less, since forever) for a new neighborhood further north, though technically south of Madison. A completely new neighborhood, created with shopping and restaurants and stuff like the Cubs have at Wrigley, the Braves with the Battery, and the Cardinals with Ballpark Village.
If Jerry had an investment in Beverly or the South Side, he could build it himself on the current location’s parking, a revenue stream that is less relevant. But that’s never going to happen.
Sigh. Fisher gets all the press, but Reinsdorf is just as big an ass.