Over the course of this miserable White Sox season, this most miserable of big-league seasons, I’ve received emails from fans renouncing their allegiance to the team. I’m sure others in the media have gotten similar declarations. People have had it up to here with chairman Jerry Reinsdorf — “up to here’’ being the Willis Tower.
It’s not a surprise. When a franchise sets the modern-era record for losses in a season, which the Sox are on the verge of doing, it’s going to see fans secede from the union. Especially Sox fans, who are equal measure discerning and crusty.
But what about all the might-have-been Sox fans out there, the ones who were in the market for a team to follow? The kids who saw a club on its way to a historical embarrassment this season and said, “Yeah, I don’t think so’’? The people who took a look at a team that lost 101 games last season and decided they didn’t want to go through life with an L tattooed on their forehead? The transplants to Chicago trying to decide between the team on the South Side and the team on the North Side, the Cubs?
Assuming the Sox will be bad next season, too — call it a hunch — that will be three straight seasons of awfulness. That’s not a generation of lost fans, but it’s not a blip, either.
It’s why a rebuild, even in deft hands, is a massive risk. In clumsy hands? Ladies and gentlemen, your Chicago White Sox.
It’s why a rebuild, known among honest folks as a tank job, is a terrible business plan. It entails several years of earnest losing, and it’s not fair to fans, who deserve effort for their financial and emotional investment. It’s a strategy for creating a winner that Major League Baseball should look to rein in even more that it already has.
Reinsdorf, a traditionalist, probably didn’t like the idea of a rebuild the first time his minions told him about the idea that was sweeping baseball. He apparently came around to it, like a spider to web-making.
Slashing payroll was like a party drug to Reinsdorf, who has always balked at shelling out big bucks to build a winner. Losing games in order to create a farm system of talented, relatively cheap players, well, you can imagine Reindorf eventually asking himself why he hadn’t thought of that earlier.
Nowhere in the rebuild playbook is winning guaranteed. It’s a truth that’s rarely spoken. For a good number of years, fan bases bought into the concept of sacrifice for future rewards. They were told to avert their eyes from the losing big-league product and to pay attention to the top prospects in the minor-league system. It was a perfect strategy at a perfect time, when lots of adult men in fantasy leagues thought they were general managers.
Some major-league GMs were Ivy League geniuses who wanted to blow the dust off an antiquated way of running a baseball franchise. Fans bowed down to their intellectual betters. As it turns out, you can be a Harvard Law School grad like former Sox GM Rick Hahn was and lose like anybody else. And you can be a baseball lifer like current Sox GM Chris Getz is and lose like nobody else.
The Sox are in the middle of their second rebuild in seven years and have very little to show for it except a chase for the record for losses (120) set by the 1962 Mets, an expansion team. The short-term damage has been obvious. The Sox have the fourth-lowest home attendance in baseball (17,955). The long-term damage? The fans the Sox might have had but never will.
Reinsdorf has always had a perverse approach to the payroll: If enough fans show up to the ballpark each year, the payroll will rise. If attendance is low, the payroll will be low, too. It’s the definition of backward. Most people in sports understand that winning begets more fans, better attendance and increased profit. The Sox’ way of doing business puts the burden on fans to show up to build a winner. It’s baseball madness.
Thus, it figures that the Sox, who operate in a big city and act like a small-market franchise, would try to ride the rebuild wave and fail at it. They saw what a five-year rebuild plan had done for the Cubs and then-team president Theo Epstein, a Yale grad. The 2016 World Series title was proof that rebuilding was the way to go. It’s what all the cool kids were doing. One problem: The Sox were never the cool kid, were never going to be the cool kid. It wasn’t in them, certainly not as long as Reinsdorf owned the franchise.
In the past, teams were able to tank their way to top picks in multiple drafts. But that changed in 2022 when MLB added an anti-tanking rule. It prohibits major-market teams from having a lottery pick two years in a row. That means the Sox, who had the fifth pick in this year’s draft, can pick no higher than 10th in next year’s draft. It means they can’t win for losing.
A rebuild in good hands is tough enough. A rebuild in bad hands? You’re seeing it.