A South Side Sox piece argues Reinsdorf isn't the only shortsighted owner in baseball — and the streaming and payroll numbers say the problem runs league-wide, right into a potential 2027 lockout.

The Chicago White Sox are 54-47 and leading the AL Central by 1.5 games heading into the August 3 trade deadline. If you want to watch them make a playoff run this fall, you may need to subscribe to something first.

That's the sharpest observation in a piece published Friday by Leigh Allan at South Side Sox: Jerry Reinsdorf is the sport's most convenient villain, but the shortsightedness is structural, running — in Allan's phrase — "from Anaheim to Queens." The numbers behind the argument are worth sitting with.

Last Sunday's White Sox game was on Peacock, the NBC streaming service that, per Allan, reaches only about a third of TV households. Friday nights go to Apple TV, which has even lower market penetration. Allan puts Apple's Friday rights fee at $55 million a year, plus a commitment to buy another $30 million in advertising, and estimates the Peacock slice of NBC's broader MLB deal at no more than that. Add them up and those broadcast rights come to less than 1% of what Allan calls an "over $12 billion" MLB annual revenue figure — in exchange, as Allan argues, for systematically cutting the product off from millions of people who might casually flip over to it.

Last week's Home Run Derby made the math visible. Netflix bought exclusive rights to the event. The result, per Media Play News, was 5.3 million U.S. viewers — the lowest Derby audience since 2003, down 7.5% from 2025, in a year the league keeps citing as evidence of baseball's revival. By Allan's accounting, Netflix paid $50 million for those rights — less than half of 1% of industry income. Allan's framing is blunt: MLB traded future audience development for a rounding error on its own ledger.

The lockout is the bigger number. The current CBA expires at the end of December 2026, and Capitol News Illinois reported last August that there is "increasing tension between MLB players and owners" heading into that deadline. Allan goes further, naming Reinsdorf specifically — in her view, the "player-hating pseudo-owner" will lead the ownership side of the negotiation "just as he did in 1994." If the 2027 season gets disrupted, Chicago catches it at the worst possible moment: a White Sox fan base that has spent two rebuilding years earning its optimism back now has something real to protect.

The team's payroll has climbed to $111.6 million this season — still third-lowest in baseball, per Spotrac data compiled by South Side Showdown, sitting $132 million below the $244 million luxury tax threshold. For context on the structural problem Allan is describing: the Mets are spending $379 million; the Marlins, at the bottom of the ledger, $100.9 million. That's a real, sourced, nearly four-to-one gap between the sport's top and bottom spenders. Reinsdorf doesn't own that number alone. But he's been around long enough to have helped build it.