In sports, there are Hell Weeks. Weeks when organizations send players — plus other employees and executives, occasionally — through the torment just to see what their people are made of and if they’re fit to be a part of what’s about to come.
Then in sports, there are also Weeks From Hell. Which is what the White Sox just went through.
Not to be confused with one another, as weeks go, the latter is what all orgs try to avoid. They often are the ‘‘break’’ end of a make-or-break season and too often extend long beyond the season they destroy.
Monday evening, news broke through Crain’s Chicago Business that Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf was open to moving (or selling?) the team from the South Side once the lease expires at Guaranteed Rate Field in 2029. A few hours later, on that same field where the speculation of leaving grew, the Mariners were handing the Sox a 14-2 salt-in-the-wounding. Then the very next day, in the late afternoon, the public announcement was made that vice president Kenny Williams and general manager Rick Hahn were canceled. ‘‘Effective immediately,’’ the X message from the team’s verified account read.
Then the very next-next day, in one of the most inept, Logan Roy-esque, ‘‘Dude, read the room’’ moments a chairman can have, Reinsdorf brought former manager Tony La Russa back to chill after not firing the current in-way-over-his-head manager, Pedro Grifol, whom he replaced La Russa with.
I know: The anatomy of a sinking, dysfunctional franchise on full display. This ain’t Bishop Sycamore. Or is it? Even Cubs fans had to stop laughing.
And to top that off to end the week, during Friday’s game against the A’s, two people were mysteriously shot while sitting in the stands.
More than the timing of it all remained the sequencing. The overall overlapping of one day after the next after the next. The callousness. Maybe Reinsdorf had finally reached his ‘‘rip off the Band-Aid before the healing begins’’ point so that the city could deal with the pain all at once, knowing that the future he has planned is going to be much more painful.
What else makes sense when it seems like everything that happened last week was strategic and purposeful from the leader of an ownership group that seemed to have ‘‘exit plan’’ on their minds before the end of April?
Reinsdorf and the organizational brain trust had to know the impact of the news from the Crain’s report of a possible relocation was going to resonate hard with disbelief and dismay. So they knew releasing Williams and Hahn within 24 hours of that news breaking was not going to be a deflect — it was going to strictly be an add-on. One that had at least half of the city asking: What’s really going on?
And then to follow that up by not releasing a similar statement on Grifol and not honoring him with a similar sealed fate, only to bring La Russa back for a first-time-all-season sighting within the next 24 hours of the last bombshell drop? Owners usually only get this sloppy and uncaring when they know something we don’t. And for all of the questionable things Reinsdorf has done in this city over his tenure on both the South and the West sides, this single week could end up being — when retold — his sequel to ‘‘The Last Dance.’’
In losing Williams, we lose one of the few (and highest-ranking) Black execs in Major League Baseball. In losing Hahn, we lose a quasi-Sox lifer who has been a ride-or-die (or die-and-ride, depending on your POV) since 2002. In losing to the Mariners the way that the Sox did on Monday — only to follow that with a 6-3 loss the next day (they avoided a series sweep with a 5-4 victory on Wednesday) — was just us getting our tails handed to us. In losing the team to Arlington Heights or Nashville, Tennessee, or anywhere outside of South Side limits, Reinsdorf is turning himself into Chicago’s Art Modell — an ‘‘unwelcomed back here’’ guest that you wouldn’t wish on any city.
To watch this misery of a Sox season wrapped and bowed up into a single week was Shakespearean and Kid Cudian and could only be explained by the thoughts and beliefs that there’s more (worse) to come, that the next month or so of games can’t end quick enough. And while Sox fans deserve better than what this whole season became, we definitely don’t deserve what the last week gave us. The detached arrogance of a two-times-over billionaire who made it slow-cooled ice clear that our emotional investment and deeply rooted connection to his team means very, very, very little to him.
Which leaves us with the beginnings of a search: a possible new home for the Sox, a new counter-Cubs team for the city. A new GM, new EVP, new free agents to make a possible run at a World Series to increase the valuation of the franchise to make a move more attractive, a possible new manager to fake make us believe that was a part of the plan all along.
Sequence all of those with the now-ongoing increased speculation of what our baseball future holds in the hands of a man who just showed us the cards he’s willing to deal.
Winter is coming. And that ‘‘wait until next year’’ axiom that has been our South Side psalm was just officially replaced with, ‘‘Wait . . . until next week.’’
