From the Top Down

The White Sox come with a lot of baggage.  There were the Black Sox in 1919 followed by 40 years of general mediocrity punctuated by the misadventures of Bill Veeck in between whose two reigns there was a lot of good and bad baseball courtesy of the Allyn brothers, after which came Jerry Reinsdorf, a man who believes in his way or the highway.

Allow me an example.  In 1986, Reinsdorf fired Roland Hemond, the master of deals (Dick Allen, Greg Luzinski), and replaced him with Ken “Hawk” Harrelson.  That little fiasco didn’t last long, and by 1987 Larry Himes took Harrelson’s place.  Here are the four number-one draft picks of the Himes’ regime: Jack McDowell, Robin Ventura, Frank Thomas and Alex Fernandez.  Talk about an eye for talent, Himes had it.  But he didn’t genuflect to the boss on a regular basis, so out he went in 1990.  Then it was ten years of the conservative, OK yes-man Ron Schueler, followed by Kenny Williams, the stopped clock who gets it right twice a day, drafting a Chris Sale and signing a Jermaine Dye versus the rest of the time (Adam Dunn, Adam LaRoche, David Wells….).  Rick Hahn took over as GM at the end of the 2012 season.  That Hahn has been able to proceed with a rebuild with Williams still around as executive vice president is a testament to Hahn’s talent for office politics, I’d say.  See Larry Himes, above.

At least White Sox fans have hope.  As for the Bulls, Jerry Reinsdorf’s other team, oh boy, talk about a front-office disaster.  John Paxson used to be a good general manager, only to get weird when he got promoted to v.p. in 2009; Paxson’s replacement as GM, Gar Forman, is way weird.  Together, the duo has pretty much stopped talking to the media.

That way, they don’t have to explain recent draft picks—Doug McDermott and Bobby Portis aren’t exactly the basketball equivalents of Frank Thomas and Robin Ventura—or free-agent signings, viz., Dwayne Wade and Rajon Rondo.  What matters is that Paxson and Forman stay on good terms with the boss, which they have, as opposed to Tom Thibodeau, who took his team to the playoffs on a regular basis but still got fired.

Here’s where it gets real good, or bad, if you’re a true blue Bulls’ fan—the jobs of Paxson and Forman are reported to be safe whether or not they make the postseason.  The trouble, my friends, starts at the top and works its way down.