Murray Chass takes a lot of heat among the smart set, because he's so ridiculously (and pathetically) hostile toward sabermetrics and sometimes just good common sense.
Then again, sometimes his native ill temper does serve a higher purpose, as when he skewers a baseball magnate who so obviously deserves a good skewering. Case in point, a quick recap of Jerry Reinsdorf's role in the labor war of two decades ago:
In his career-long obsession with deflating players’ salaries, the chairman of the Chicago White Sox and Bulls was a central figure in the baseball owners’ illegal collusive activities against free agents in the mid-1980s. “Collusion was a $280 million mistake,” former commissioner Fay Vincent said in a television interview this week. “And Jerry was right in the middle of that. That mistake is the sort of thing that baseball cannot really tolerate ever again.” In his ugly, mean-spirited way, Reinsdorf joined fellow owner and confidant Bud Selig in 1992 in orchestrating Vincent’s ouster from the office of commissioner. Reinsdorf and Selig wanted Vincent out because they were plotting to go to war with the players union in the 1994 labor negotiations and didn’t want Vincent getting in their way. The results of the 234-day strike they forced were disastrous.
The juiciest part of that whole saga, from Reinsdorf's perspective, is that immediately after railing against the high salaries that were destroying baseball, Reinsdorf made Albert Belle the highest-paid baseball player in the world. There would have been some lovely poetic justice, except Belle exercised an out-clause in his contract after just two seasons, so the Orioles wound up getting stuck with a white-elephant contract when Belle got hurt.
Anyway, Reinsdorf's been in the news lately because of his failed attempt to get someone into the Commissioner's Office who wasn't pre-ordained by his old partner in crime, Bud Selig.
Instead? "No controlling owner has been around as long as Reinsdorf," Chass writes. "If he ever had any usefulness, he has outlived it. If he succeeded at anything with his Werner initiative, it was in conning The New York Times into thinking that Werner actually had a chance to win."
Chass got laid off by the Times a few years ago. Some sour grapes there? Maybe. But he's right, as Tom Werner doesn't seem to have been a viable candidate. And Chass is also right about Reinsdorf, who seems to still be fighting the last, long-ago war.
