Sharing Sox Podcast 135 — Please to ex-plane — 2024-09-19

Sox Populi - A Chicago White Sox podcast

Duty geezer Leigh Allan and his son and west coast correspondent, Will, naturally venture onto the subject of an article in The Athletic titled “The Owner Who Thinks He Knows Everything” (guess who), but first Will has a report on attending the White Sox game in Anaheim on Wednesday night (Loss 116).

The report? How little the Sox even warm up on the field before a game compared to other teams. How unconcerned the players in the dugout seemed during the 5-0 loss (Will was four rows behind them). How awful Luis Robert Jr. looks at the plate, even against an Angels pitcher who led the American League in earned runs surrendered this season. How the Sox even made errors in trying to be fan-friendly, when both Miguel Vargas and Nicky Lopez tried to toss Will a ball after an inning and threw to an Angels fan instead.

And as for the long article in The Athletic, it was a nice consolidation of things most White Sox fans already knew, like what a jerk Jerry Reinsdorf is, what a tightwad he remains in important spending categories, how backward his ideas about baseball are, how his personnel decisions guarantee a terrible team, etc., etc., etc. But the lede in the article was new to both of us — the plane.

Seems that while 29 major league teams charter planes with enough first class-type seats for all the players and staff, Reinsdorf has the White Sox fly on a dated aircraft with a total of six first class seats, and the rest coach. Coach! For sometimes very large people whose physical condition is worth millions of dollars to you. Sure, you don’t like to fly coach but you do, and we don’t like doing it either but we do, but that’s not the same — witness the 29 teams who put out a little extra money to potentially save tens of millions in player performance.

But that’s Reinsdorf. And those are the White Sox, who grind on toward officially having the most losses in history. And who already weren’t going to have any good free agents or respected management people join the team until Reinsdorf is gone unless they overpaid by at least 100%. But now that word spread about the plane, it may be 200%.

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