To be fair to the White Sox owner, Payson benefited from conditions that Reinsdorf cannot control.

Beat writers gave Payson grace after Major League Baseball forced her to draft the Mets roster from a pool of unwanted players from other clubs. Many of those journalists had lost work in 1957 when the Dodgers and Giants decamped for California. “These were very accomplished for their times guys who suddenly didn’t have teams to cover,” Robert Lipsyte, then a cub reporter at The New York Times, told me in an oral history interview in 2020. Payson gave these underworked sports writers a chance to cover the big leagues again.