This episode of Willets Pen is brought to you by alabamatrucknuts.com. It’s very difficult to come up with a tagline for alabamatrucknuts.com because it’s alabamatrucknuts.com, which is already quite intriguing, so we’ll just say alabamatrucknuts.com again — that’s alabamatrucknuts.com.
One note on this show — an actual show note — is that we were wrong about Bill Veeck, who did not own the Cubs. Bill Veeck Sr. was president of the Cubs when the Veeck of Veeck as in Wreck was young, and returned to Cubs fandom after selling the White Sox… in part because Major League Baseball rejected the man who was Veeck’s first choice to own the White Sox when he sold the club to Jerry Reinsdorf in 1980.
That was Eddie DeBartolo Jr., best known these days as the former owner of the 49ers until getting caught up in a classic scandal over a Louisiana riverboat gambling license and $400,000 in dirty money, which cost him the team, and brought him back into the spotlight in 2020 when he got a pardon from Donald Trump.
Jerry Reinsdorf was the second choice in the White Sox sale, and if it hadn’t been him, the next bid was Charles Dolan, uncle of now-Guardians owner Paul Dolan, failed bidder for the Red Sox in 2002 to John Henry, and father of… still another Dolan.
We’re going to need to have a Britt episode where we ponder the DeBartolo-owned White Sox, and how they might not have avoided being an embarrassing trash fire of an organization, but they probably would’ve been a different and more fun embarrassing trash fire of an organization. That’s the Chicago way.
Of Course There's Drunk Cubs Fans Everywhere