OK, this is a long shot, but there would be irony in it, were it to actually happen. The Salt Lake Sox.
Everybody around Major League Baseball knows that Utah, by way of the Miller family, wants and is well prepared to bring in a big league team. Either an expansion outfit or some other city’s team that finds itself in troubled waters.
Enter the Chicago White Sox. They are in trouble. They are an MLB team that plays like they’re in the bushes. Bad for Chi-town, but … good for another city by a lake.
Majority owner Jerry Reinsdorf is said to be willing to sell the Sox, who were horrible this past season, winning all of 41 games and losing 121, finishing a dismal 51.5 games back of the Cleveland Guardians in the AL Central Division. How bad was that? They face-planted 41 games behind the next-to-worst team in the division, the Minnesota Twins.
Sox fans were … distraught? … disgusted? … disinterested? … mad as hell?
Yes.
Is this a chance for the Millers to jump the line and get the team they think they want, sooner rather than later? A shortcut to ownership that might skip over the pains of expansion, trading those for the agony of a rebuild?
(Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) Items advertising Big League Utah at the Silicon Slopes Summit at the Delta Center, Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2023.
If so, when could the team arrive and where would the team play?
It seems the group from Nashville, a frontrunner in MLB’s expansion plans, is eager to talk with Reinsdorf, if it hasn’t already. Utah, seen by more than a few folks as the next option, might want to get into talks. Why not? Big League Utah has its plans in order, the backing of business and government officials, and a boatload of money. Would it be enough to tempt Reinsdorf? Only he knows.
But here’s why irony is calling out for him to accept an offer from the Millers. He owes them.
It was his basketball team — or was it Michael Jordan’s? — that prevented the Millers’ team from winning two NBA championships, in 1997 and 1998. That second year, the Bulls quite literally stole the title away from the Jazz — Jordan infamously thieving the ball from Karl Malone in that clinching Game 6, hitting the winning shot seconds later — and now, wouldn’t it be fitting for Reinsdorf, in a bit of generous payback, to sell his Sox to the Millers? Gail Miller badly wanted an NBA championship, the only achievement that escaped her and her late husband Larry during their passionate ownership. Now, she badly wants a Major League team. A ballpark in west Salt Lake would anchor a major development project the Millers want to spearhead on that side of town. It means a whole lot to Gail, personally, and to the Larry H. Miller Co., professionally.
Larry loved baseball more than he loved basketball.
And such a sale would benefit sports fans in a city and in a state that seem hungry for top-level professional sports. Not everyone is head over heels for baseball, but many people are, just as they were hungry for hockey.
Acquiring the Sox would be expensive, but so would getting an expansion team. Here’s a fact: It’s going to cost billions, no matter what. But the experiences that would or could be built alongside, grandpas and grandmas and moms and dads and their kids passing down a love for Babe Ruth’s game to their kids and the kids thereafter in a kind of intergenerational transmission would increase the quality of life in Utah, just the way basketball and hockey and soccer, and college sports do.
Picture it: Sitting in a stadium, looking at the expanse of green, the city skyline and the Wasatch Range in view beyond that, the Yankees and the Dodgers and the Phillies and the Cubs visiting on warm summer nights in Utah. Yeah, the tickets would cost a lot, the concessions, hamburgers, brats, beer, nachos, sodas, all overpriced, too. But have you ever noticed how a simple hot dog tastes oh-so-much-better at the ballpark?
The baseball might stink for a while, just ask Chicago fans from the Southside. But … if there’s one thing fans in Utah have learned to be from their Jazz experience, it’s … patient. They’ve come to enjoy pro sports for what they are. A Larry O’Brien Trophy would be spectacular. A Stanley Cup would be amazing. A Commissioner’s Trophy after winning the World Series would likely surpass them all. The pursuit would be a gas, too.
Maybe it won’t happen. Maybe Reinsdorf is goofing around, playing the owner’s game better than his team does the ballgame, all in search of whatever he really wants — a better ballpark, more benefits, whatever. Maybe he’ll sell to another ownership group in another city.
But if the screws really come loose on the Sox, the Millers seem ready, tools in hand, to tighten up whatever needs tightening, wallet in hand, to spend whatever needs spending, in order to get what they want since they didn’t get what they wanted in ‘97 and ‘98.
Remember, Jordan pushed off, and Jerry Reinsdorf knows it.
