Billionaire Swap?

I have to hand it to my daughter. Despite caring for two kids, 3-1/2 and five months, Clare can still provide breaking White Sox news, as in a possible new owner for the team. Ladies and gentlemen, meet plutocrat Justin Ishbia. According to a story by Jon Greenberg in yesterday’s The Athletic, the 47-year old, Chicago-area head of a private-equity investment firm is intent on buying up shares from Sox minority investors, with the idea of then buying out owner Jerry Reinsdorf. The mind boggles, for both Twins’ and Sox fans. First off, Ishbia was negotiating with the Pohlad family to buy the Twins, and all was going well until this story broke. Why would Ishbia turn from an easy situation—the Pohlads want out, and the fans want them out, too—for one where he has to deal with Reinsdorf, a person who has to come out on top of every activity from owning things to flushing toilets? Maybe the soon-to-be 89-year old is finally ready to move on. Compared to the Twins, Ishbia would have a shorter commute to the South Side. And, if he could turn the Sox around, the payoff would be ever so much greater than in the Twin Cities. Chicago’s a bigger market, which means nice earnings, plus the Sox offer Ishbia the chance to show either Coast what the Midwest can pull off. It’s the kind of challenge to stoke a billionaire’s ego. The good news for Sox fans is that Ishbia is local-ish. On the other hand, his plans to build a mega-estate in Winnetka on the tony North Shore leave something to be desired. In true plutocrat fashion, Ishbia wanted the village park district to give him property on the lakefront in exchange for land elsewhere so he could have himself have a nice “little” compound without free of public land encroaching on it. A lawsuit settled last month put a stop to the attempted land swap. So, Ishbia is the kind of guy not afraid to push people around to get his way, a trait that Reinsdorf has always held dear. But maybe there’s more here. Maybe the devil we don’t know has virtues sorely lacking in the devil we’ve known for way too long. And maybe we’ll find out before long.