STAFF WRITER
Ring. Ring. Reince rang Rahm. Sneed has learned White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, whose future in the tumultuous Trump White House has been in limbo, called up Mayor Rahm Emanuel at City Hall on Thursday morning. Here’s the drill. “Reince wanted to thank Rahm, who had once been President Obama’s chief of staff,” a City Hall source said.
◆ Translation: Priebus, a softspoken Wisconsin native who was just included in Time magazine’s annual list of the world’s 100 Most Influential People, called our outspoken, spitball of energy mayor for his comments about him in the Time 100 article.
◆ Quoth Rahm to Time: “Reince Priebus and I don’t share much beyond our Midwestern roots and unique names — and, of course, a love of politics.
“But we will always be in the small fraternity of those who answered a president’s call to serve as White House chief of staff.
“In both our cases, we assumed the role at the beginning of a new administration, after a contentious election and transfer of power. We started from scratch.
“When I had the role, I used to joke on Fridays, ‘ Lucky us, just two more workdays until Monday.’
“It’s an all- consuming, thankless job — but walking through those gates at the beginning and end of each day, no matter how early or late, brings a tingle to your spine. The day that goes away is the day it’s time to go.”
◆ The upshot: Reince and Rahm “had a nice chat this morning,” the mayoral source said.
“The mayor told Priebus [ who has had to endure the bully boy tactics of Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon] that the chief of staff job is “Thankless, until you walk out. Then you are smart again.”
◆ Added the source: “Regardless of party, philosophy or ideology — areas where the mayor and Reince don’t have much of anything in common — there’s a thread that ties together the few people who have held that post.”
The Jackson divorce . . .
Sneed hears rumbles Cook County Circuit Court Judge Carole Bellows will be asked Friday to rule on whether the divorce case involving former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. and wife Sandi will be heard in Illinois rather than Washington, D. C., where Sandi resides with the couple’s two children.
The motion was filed by Jackson Jr., who owns property in Chicago.
The couple is fighting over jurisdiction.
Here we go again!
Sports memorabilia impresario Grant DePorter, who bought and blew up the infamous Bartman Ball, is at it again!
He wasn’t going to pass this auction up!
◆ Translation: DePorter just spent $ 2,015 on the baseball embedded in the chest protector of St. Louis Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina that caused a minor brouhaha and a major haha at the Cubs game at Busch Stadium April 6. ( The Cubs won.)
◆ Upshot: The video of the ball getting stuck in Molina’s chest protector went viral, and players on both teams were quoted as saying they had never seen a ball stick to a player like that before. ◆ Cubs manager Joe Maddon told the press: “I don’t know if they’ve come out with Velcro on the protectors or it’s just a fuzzy baseball . . . It was definitely Velcro- ed to his chest.”
◆ Buckshot: Baseball rules prohibit any player from ‘‘ intentionally discolor[ ing] or damag[ ing] the ball by rubbing it with soil, rosin, paraffin, licorice, sandpaper, emery paper or other foreign substance.” The penalty could be an ejection or a 10- game suspension.
◆ For the record: Molina and Cardinals pitcher Brett Cecil denied using pine tar, Tuf- Skin spray or any other sticky substance on the ball or the chest protector. Cecil even offered Friday to let reporters look at all his gloves, according to a report by the Sun- Times’ Gordon Wittenmyer. And nobody was calling for Major League Baseball to investigate.
“I was surprised the Cardinals decided to sell the baseball, especially in a plastic cube with an official label stating: “Ball stuck to Molina’s chest protector,” said DePorter, who plans to exhibit the ball in the Chicago Sports Museum.
So when the ball arrived Tuesday afternoon, DePorter dispatched the ball to McCrone Group Inc., a company specializing in microanalysis, “to get a better look at the material attached to the ball which appeared to come from the chest protector,” DePorter said.
Late Thursday, the reports were inconclusive. “The tests showed there was a smattering of polyester urethane, a component of a lot of adhesives, on the ball, but the mystery remained inclusive without the chest protector,” DePorter said.
Oh, well.
Sneedlings . . .
I spy: Actor Jeff Garlin spotted at Gibsons on Rush Wednesday night. . . . Today’s birthdays: Queen Elizabeth II, 91; Iggy Pop, 70, and Terrence J, 35.