I was a teenage nerd who spent way too much time playing baseball board games, looking at baseball cards and thinking about the upcoming baseball season. Part of my nerd-dom was that I couldn't go an hour without wearing the baseball cap of the team I worshipped as a kid, the Los Angeles Dodgers.
I had Dodgers T-shirts. I had Dodgers plastic batting helmets. I had Dodgers stickers, Dodgers souvenir bats and posters of Dodgers. But mostly I had the Dodgers cap, with the interlocking L and A, my proudest possession, something I had bought from a vendor outside Fenway Park on one of those days when my parents released me from bale-stacking and cow-milking responsibilities.
I wore the cap in our hay fields, in our barn and in the woods. And, of course, I wore it to school. I had it on when I came through the front door at school one day when I was 15 years old, and it caught the eye of a gentleman -- he must've been in his 40s at the time -- who was sitting in the lobby. It was the fall of 1979.
"Are you a Dodger fan?" he asked. "I grew up a Dodger fan. I
loved the Brooklyn Dodgers."
Whatever class I was supposed to attend immediately became of secondary concern to me. If you're from a town of 400 people in central Vermont, there aren't a whole lot of opportunities to talk with someone who might've seen your heroes. The man was waiting for his son to come down the hall, and he fought to keep up with my questions.
Did you see Pee Wee Reese?
Did you see Sandy Koufax pitch in Brooklyn?
Did you see Jackie Robinson?
What was Ebbets Field like?
He patiently and cheerily waded through all the questions. It was a conversation across generational lines that covered several prior generations, a conversation for which baseball is particularly well suited. In retrospect, it is clear that the man was as big a baseball geek as I when he was a boy, the kind of person who would wear his Dodgers cap everywhere he was allowed to wear it.
We must've talked about 20 to 30 minutes before I finally headed off to class. I had never met him before, I had never heard of him before, but it turned out that he was more involved in baseball than I knew.
His name was
Jerry Reinsdorf, and he's now the owner of the White Sox.
You
cannot get stronger backing than the kind that Reinsdorf has given White Sox GM
Kenny Williams and manager
Ozzie Guillen. Some people in the game like Reinsdorf while others don't like him, but all the time you hear that he is as loyal as anyone in the sport to the people who work for him.
Reinsdorf says within this Scot Gregor piece that the
White Sox are in pretty good shape, relative to the economic issues.
To continue reading this article you must be an Insider
Buster Olney
