“Larry stood up and basically said that the strike was pretty dumb,” Reinsdorf recalls. Then there was the time Reinsdorf took a shot at Lucchino, who had purchased the Padres in ’94, during the strike. Helyar quotes him as saying, “Baseball is the only industry where I have to pay someone what my dumbest competitor pays.” That’s similar to a quote I remember from a Sports Illustrated profile of Reinsdorf in 1997: If he’s not the smartest person in the room, he’s the most aware of how foolish the room can be, which is its own kind of intelligence. Reinsdorf cuts a distinct figure in the second half of “Lords,” after he arrives on the scene as the new owner of the Chicago White Sox in 1981. As I made my way through John Helyar’s “Lords of the Realm” during the public, contentious negotiations between Major League Baseball and the MLBPA, I kept wondering if we’d soon see in real time the Jerry Reinsdorf captured in the book.
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