What White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf can learn from the last team to lose 120 games

Unhealthy press has engulfed Jerry Reinsdorf.

As proprietor of the Chicago White Sox, Reinsdorf heads a franchise with basically essentially the most single-season losses in baseball historic previous. The White Sox moreover set employees info with a 21-game dropping streak and losses in 20 straight sequence. In a single sport, a secular pop fly went viral after two players collided, the ball rolled away, and three runs scored. In a single different, the employees’s second baseman was injured by a ball to the face because of he wasn’t paying consideration to the catcher’s throw all through warmups between innings.

Reporters have accused Reinsdorf of a “attractive” lack of accountability and “perverse revenge” in the direction of followers who want him to advertise the employees.

The damaging media consideration isn’t surprising. When a employees fails so spectacularly, sports activities actions writers inevitably take swings on the proprietor, with one notable exception: the ultimate employees to lose 120 video video games, the 1962 New York Mets.

The Mets proprietor didn’t merely deal with to flee blame from the press.

She turned the toast of the town.

‘Mother of the Mets’

Joan Whitney Payson had a decidedly elitist background. She grew up in one in all many world’s wealthiest households, the benefactors of art work museums and opera houses. She collected priceless work by the masters – Renoir, Monet, Cézanne, Matisse. Her grandfather had been secretary of stateand her brother was the U.S. ambassador to the U.Okay.

Nevertheless Payson did share one trait with the American working class: a love of baseball. She grew up a rabid fan of the New York Giants and finally bought right here to private 10% of stock inside the employees. Like many New Yorkers, she was crushed in 1957 when the Giants relocated to Californiaa switch she tried desperately to forestall. That exact same yr, the Giants’ rival, the Brooklyn Dodgers, moreover headed west.

A metropolis that had three thriving teams was proper all the way down to just one: the Yankees, a longtime adversary that many Giants and Dodgers followers couldn’t convey themselves to root for.

Payson gave New Yorkers one other alternative. Three years after the Giants and Dodgers left metropolis, Payson bought an enlargement membership that was set to play in Queens. Anticipation for the model new employees energized city. Nevertheless in 1962, the first lady to purchase a sports activities actions employees – a distinction that might have made her a aim of the all-male press – led the Mets to a disastrous file: 40 wins in the direction of 120 losses.

In some methods, the 1962 Mets have been worse than the 2024 White Sox. They made a whopping 210 errors; the White Sox will finish with half that many. Two Mets pitchers misplaced 20 video video games each; no one on the White Sox will come shut. The White Sox outpaced the Mets in quite a lot of lessons, from doubles to stolen bases.

I evaluation the historic previous of sports activities actions mediaand a few years previously, I set off to find out how the press lined Payson. I figured she might want to have been prime fodder for the highly effective New York media. After I used to be rising up, the Yankees and Mets not at all sank to the depths that Payson’s employees did, however the press nonetheless rebuked Yankees proprietor George Steinbrenner and the Mets’ Fred Wilponwhose possession group bought the employees from the Payson family in 1980.

I spent many hours scanning newspapers on microfilm and digital databases. I made a go to to the Yale Faculty archives to sift by way of Payson’s papers, and I combed her file on the Nationwide Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, too.

I was positive reporters might want to have zeroed in on a few of the 1962 Mets’ many failings and pinned them on the proprietor.

Nevertheless no matter months of research, I didn’t uncover any damaging safety regarding the lady the press dubbed the “Mother of the Mets.”

A affiliate of the press

It’s lots easier discovering unfavorable tales about Reinsdorf. The proprietor of the White Sox since 1981, he is recognized for blowing off reporters. Even amid the nationwide think about the White Sox, he has not spoken to journalists for larger than a yr.

Payson, within the meantime, dealt with the press like companions.

The winter sooner than her employees’s inaugural season, she made an unprecedented gesture: inviting sports activities actions writers to her Manhattan duplex to help select the title of the employees they is perhaps overlaying. Payson wished to associate with Meadowlarksa tribute to the employees’s future residence in Flushing Meadows. Nevertheless the writers most popular Mets, an homage to a Nineteenth-century New York employees whose four-letter brevity labored correctly in headlines. In a alternative that’s laborious to consider Reinsdorf making, Payson conceded to the press.

Later, all through that 17-game skid, she took out newspaper ads thanking reporters in “basically essentially the most tolerant metropolis inside the nation” for dispelling the notion “that New York is a cynical sports activities actions metropolis, settling only for a winner.”

To be truthful to the White Sox proprietor, Payson benefited from conditions that Reinsdorf can’t administration.

Beat writers gave Payson grace after Primary League Baseball compelled her to draft the Mets roster from a pool of undesirable players from completely different golf gear. Lots of these journalists had misplaced work in 1957 when the Dodgers and Giants decamped for California. “These have been very achieved for his or her events guys who all the sudden didn’t have teams to cowl,” Robert Lipsyte, then a cub reporter at The New York Events, instructed me in an oral historic previous interview in 2020. Payson gave these underworked sports activities actions writers a possibility to cowl the big leagues as soon as extra.

In return, the Mets proprietor elicited effusive reward. In his information “Can’t Anybody Proper right here Play This Recreation?” journalist Jimmy Breslin wrote that Payson “may presumably be the best particular person to return into baseball in our time.”

No person on the Chicago Tribune or Photo voltaic-Events makes the an identical lofty declare for Reinsdorf.

Knives out?

After her employees’s 120-loss advertising marketing campaign, Payson entered the offseason as a media darling. The press appreciated her good nature and accessibility for interviews even as a result of the Mets floundered.

As in contrast, Reinsdorf’s combination of on-field futility and off-field coolness to the Chicago media has assured him a spot inside the annals of infamy.

With two and a half weeks to go inside the season, Reinsdorf put out an announcement acknowledging “this yr has been very painful for all” and promising that he’ll “have further to say on the end of the season.”

At this stage, what Reinsdorf says perhaps acquired’t matter lots. Comparatively than finding out from Payson’s technique, he has made it simple for the press to stable him as a villain.