Jerry Reinsdorf said this about Jay Mariotti on WBBM radio on June 22: “The best thing to do is for people to bring to the public’s attention the things that he does that are inappropriate. And I think you’ll see more of that happen going forward.” Oh, and Reinsdorf, the White Sox chairman, also called him a “piece of garbage.” This was a couple days after Ozzie Guillen, the White Sox manager, called him a “fucking fag.”
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Then along came David Peterson. A political analyst of the Noam Chomsky school, Peterson can put two and two together even if he has to drag them across the dance floor to make the introduction. In a series of e-mails he told me to wake up.
Like Guillen and Reinsdorf, Peterson dismisses a lot of Mariotti’s output as “nothing more than a trashing of his subjects.” But, he adds, “this is far from true of everything that Mariotti writes. Particularly when he writes about sports as a business enterprise. . . . And it most assuredly has not been true over the years when Mariotti has written about the reigning Sports Lords from within the ranks of the various ownership regimes. None more effectively, by the way, than when he’s written about Major League Baseball’s. And Jerry Reinsdorf.”
Is Mariotti the butt of a highly sophisticated swiftboating campaign? I scratched around for an answer.
Full disclosure: the evidence that supports a collusion charge even implicates me. I share a lake house with a friend who owns a small piece of the White Sox and has written the Sun-Times to complain about Mariotti.
Reifert says the Sox also invited Mariotti by letter to either “come out and talk to our clubhouse” or sit down with Reifert in the presence of a lawyer (“He frequently leaves e-mails threatening litigation,” Reifert explains). He says Mariotti didn’t respond.
