Keynan Middleton gave his opinion about his time with the Chicago White Sox. He told ESPN’s Jesse Rogers that he felt the organization lacked discipline and personal accountability. His stories about players napping in the dugout and missing practice sessions were corroborated by teammates. Now a member of the New York Yankees, Middleton pitched against his former team for the first time on Wednesday, and a fan soon noticed his name was absent from the Guaranteed Rate Field scoreboard when he entered the game.
It could be an honest mistake. The White Sox claim that the problem was with the roster that they downloaded from the Yankees, whose 40-man roster has two players listed as No. 93: Middleton and outfielder Everson Pereira. Pereira is in the minors and not listed on the active roster, but the White Sox claim that the duplicate-number issue has been causing scoreboard errors this season.
What’s this? A Jerry Reinsdorf-run franchise shirking accountability? That’s believable, so maybe the White Sox simply did not want to take ownership of the mistake.
Sox GM Rick Hahn on Monday denied the accusations made by Middleton and backed up by other anonymous players. He then went a bit further, however, and took a personal shot at Middleton.
“Quite frankly, it’s a little bit ironic that Keynan’s the one saying this, because my last conversation with him face-to-face was a week ago in the clubhouse where he sought me out to apologize for his unprofessional behavior Pedro [Grifol] had called him out on,” Hahn told reporters on Monday. “At the time I figured that was a one-off.”
Forget problems with clubhouse culture — Reinsdorf’s franchise front offices have glaring problems with nastiness and accountability.
Hahn’s comments about Middleton are similar to a scathing press release from 2015 when the Chicago Bulls fired Tom Thibodeau. In that statement, Reinsdorf basically called the second-most successful coach in franchise history a pain in the ass to work with:
“While the head of each department of the organization must be free to make final decisions regarding his department, there must be free and open interdepartmental discussion and consideration of everyone’s ideas and opinions. These internal discussions must not be considered an invasion of turf, and must remain private.”
This statement was released three weeks after the Bulls came within a missed technical foul call of going up 3-1 on the Cleveland Cavaliers with LeBron James in the second round of the 2015 NBA Playoffs. Thibodeau was very much set in his ways. I think that his best players should not have regularly been leading the NBA, but I also know that he didn’t misdiagnose Luol Deng with meningitis in 2013 and almost kill him with a spinal tap. And Thibs certainly did not medically clear Ömer Aşık to play in the 2011 playoffs with a broken leg.
There was blame to go around for why that team didn’t win a championship, but the Bulls hadn’t been within a whiff of one since Michael Jordan’s last shot for the franchise in June 1998. The teams that Thibodeau coached were contenders when Derrick Rose was healthy, and Reinsdorf disrespected him on the way out the door after a successful season.
Eight years later, Reinsdorf and his executives are still playing the same game. Prior to Monday’s 5-1 win at home against the Yankees, Reinsdorf was hanging out near the Guaranteed Rate Field home dugout, smoking a cigar — absolutely against team policy at any major-league ballpark in 2023. — when the Chicago Tribune’s Paul Sullivan asked Reinsdorf if he had a second to discuss the White Sox’s nauseating landfill of a season.
Reinsdorf replied, “no,” without even looking at him, Sullivan wrote.
The White Sox are almost smack in the middle of MLB’s payroll charts after spending years tanking to build what was supposed to be a perennial contender. Two postseason appearances and one AL Central title later, the team was a seller at the 2023 trade deadline.
Maybe the White Sox were right to part ways with Carlos Rodón and José Abreu in consecutive seasons. Rodón was great for the San Francisco Giants last year, but he has been mostly an IL stint for the Yankees in 2023. Abreu has been in decline since he won MVP in the COVID shortened 2020 season.
If Reinsdorf wanted to get rid of those players, they needed to be replaced with top-tier talent. The White Sox have never inked a player to a $100 million contract. Alex Rodgriguez signed his first $200 million deal in 2000.
I understand that one of the perks of team ownership in professional sports is that they are never required to take public accountability. That job is reserved for players, coaches, and general managers. Reinsdorf can get all choked up when he gives an ode to Jerry Krause’s “organizations win championships” mantra while hugging a World Series trophy in 2005, and he never has to answer for his multi-year White Sox rebuild turning into a turd. Even though Reinsdorf laid the foundation himself in 2020 when he hired a 76-year-old Tony La Russa — who had been out of baseball for nearly a decade — to manage his young talent.
Now — three years, a boatload of injuries, and a new manager later — Reinsdorf’s GM is taking shots at a relief pitcher who said the obvious. The White Sox have institutional problems.
And Reinsdorf, a man blessed with arguably the most captivating athlete of all time early on in his Chicago spots ownership, has at best whiffed in the ensuing decades, and at worst done great harm, leaving his teams mired in mediocrity and irrelevance. Yet he has had the nerve to get an attitude about underachievement from both the Bulls and White Sox.
So yeah, maybe a technical, double-number glitch kept Middleton’s name off of the scoreboard on Wednesday night. Thibodeau would likely never speak on this event publicly, but I wonder if he buys that explanation.