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

Bad press has hit Jerry Reinsdorf.

As owner of the Chicago White Sox, Reinsdorf leads a franchise with essentially the most losing seasons in baseball history. The White Sox also set team records with one 21-game losing streak And Losses in 20 consecutive series. In a game, an on a regular basis pop fly went viral After two players collided, the ball rolled away and three runs were scored. In one other case, the team's second baseman was injured within the face by a ball he wasn't being attentive to the catcher's throw during warm-ups between innings.

Reporters accused Reinsdorf of 1 thing “astonishing” lack of accountability And “perverse revenge” against fans who want him to sell the team.

The negative media attention is just not surprising. When a team fails so spectacularly, sportswriters inevitably attack the owner, with one notable exception: the last team to lose 120 games, the 1962 New York Mets.

The Mets owner didn't just manage to evade blame from the press.

She became the star of town.

“Mother of the Mets”

Joan Whitney Payson got here from a decidedly elite background. She grew up in considered one of the wealthiest families on this planet, benefactors of art museums and opera houses. She collected priceless paintings by the masters – Renoir, Monet, Cézanne, Matisse. It was her grandfather Foreign Ministerand her brother was the US Ambassador to the UK

But there was one trait Payson shared with working-class Americans: a love of baseball. She grew up an avid New York Giants fan and eventually owned 10% of the team's stock. Like many New Yorkers, she was struck down in 1957 when The Giants moved to Californiaa move she desperately tried to forestall. That same 12 months, the Giants' rival, the Brooklyn Dodgers, also headed west.

In a city with three successful teams, there was just one left: the Yankees, a long-time opponent that many Giants and Dodgers fans couldn't get enthusiastic about.

Payson gave New Yorkers an alternative choice. Three years after the Giants and Dodgers left town, Payson purchased an expansion club that may play in Queens. The anticipation of the brand new team filled town with energy. But in 1962, the primary woman to purchase a sports team – a distinction that might have made her a goal for the all-male press – led to a disastrous record for the Mets: 40 wins against 120 defeats.

In some ways, the 1962 Mets were worse than the 2024 White Sox. They made a whopping 210 errors; The White Sox will finish with half as many. Lost two Mets pitchers 20 games each; No one on the White Sox will come close. The White Sox outperformed the Mets in quite a few categories, from doubles to stolen bases.

I research the history of sports mediaand a number of years ago I got down to learn the way the press was covering Payson. I assumed she will need to have been prime fodder for the hardline New York media. When I used to be growing up, the Yankees and Mets never sank as much as Payson's team, yet the press still blamed the Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and the Mets Fred Wilponwhose ownership group purchased the team from the Payson family in 1980.

I actually have spent many hours scanning newspapers on microfilm and in digital databases. I took a visit to the Yale University archives to review Payson's papers, and I also perused her file on the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

I used to be sure that reporters will need to have pinpointed a few of the 1962 Mets' many mistakes and attributed them to the owner.

But despite months of research, I discovered no negative coverage of the lady the press called that “Mother of the Mets.”

A partner of the press

It's much easier to search out negative stories about Reinsdorf. He has owned the White Sox since 1981 and is thought for it Blow off reporters. Despite the national deal with the White Sox, he hasn't spoken to reporters greater than a 12 months.

Payson, however, treated the press like partners.

The winter before her team's inaugural season, she made an unprecedented gesture: She invited sportswriters to her Manhattan duplex to assist select the name of the team they might cover. Payson desired to go together with Meadowlarksa tribute to the team's future home in Flushing Meadows. But the writers preferred the Mets, an homage to a Nineteenth-century New York team whose four-letter brevity lent itself well to headlines. In a call hard to assume Reinsdorf making, Payson admitted to the press.

Later, during that 17-game loss, she took out newspaper ads thanking reporters in “the most tolerant city in the country” for dispelling the notion “that New York is a cynical sports town that only cares.” “satisfies with a winner.”

To be fair to the White Sox owner, Payson benefited from conditions Reinsdorf cannot control.

Beat writers gave Payson clemency after Major League Baseball forced her to make the Mets' roster a pool of unwanted players from other clubs. Many of those journalists had lost their jobs in 1957 when the Dodgers and Giants moved to California. “These were very successful guys for their time who suddenly had no teams to cover,” Robert Lipsyte, then a cub reporter at The New York Times, told me in an oral history interview in 2020. Payson gave this one underemployed sports journalists a likelihood to cover the foremost leagues again.

In return, the Mets owner elicited effusive praise. In his book “Can’t anyone here play this game?” Journalist Jimmy Breslin wrote that Payson “might be the finest person to come to baseball in our time.”

No one on the Chicago Tribune or Sun-Times has the identical high standards for Reinsdorf.

Knife out?

After her team's 120-loss season, Payson entered the offseason as a media darling. The press appreciated her good manners and her accessibility to interviews, whilst the Mets faltered.

In comparison, Reinsdorf's combination of on-field futility and off-field coolness with the Chicago media has secured him a spot within the annals of infamy.

Reinsdorf is 2 and a half weeks before the top of the season make a press release He acknowledged that “this year has been very painful for everyone” and promised that he “will have more to say at the end of the season.”

At this point, what Reinsdorf says probably won't matter much. Instead of learning from Payson's approach, he made it easy for the press to portray him as a villain.