Ran into my friend the White Sox fan again last night, and I don't think he's stopped shaking his head since the last time we talked. When you grew up in Chicago and remember going to Comiskey as a kid to watch Luis Aparicio and Nellie Fox play, it's beyond stomach-turning to watch Jerry Reinsdorf vandalize his own team out of pure spite.
The What Sox, see, have now lost 19 straight games. Nineteen. Dead last in the AL Central (not to mention all of baseball), they're 59 games below .500, 41 1/2 games out of first in the AL Central and 26 1/2 out of next-to-last. Their 27 wins are 14 fewer than anyone else in MLB.
It's an utter abomination, and my friend thinks he has a solution.
"The ownership group should get together and force Reinsdorf to sell the team," he said.
He's dead-on right. I also think something else.
I think the What Sox are the best argument yet for relegation in baseball.
Relegation is a thing they do in British Premier League soccer, and it would give the owners of chronically awful teams some incentive to do more than just sit on their pile of revenue-sharing dough. In the Premier League, the three teams that finish at the bottom of the standings every season get booted down ("relegated") to a lower league. If they want back in, they have to win their way back in.
Baseball needs to institute this. If for no other reason than to keep the Jerry Reinsdorfs of the world from embarrassing the game.
Instead, send the What Sox and a couple of other tail-end Charlies (looking at you, John Fisher in Oakland) down to Triple A for a season or two. Shut off the MLB money tap. If they want to plead phony poverty to justify their skinflinting, give 'em a taste of actual poverty.
You might be surprised how quickly they'd get real interested in putting an actual MLB product on the field.
Or not. But it's a thought.
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