Mind Games

Clare went to see her hitting coach yesterday, only this time he played guru.  As a way to get Clare to relax at the plate and not overthink, Coach said to think of a random number.  How this would help is beyond me, but, then again, I’m not a coach.  Maybe it’s best to chant “Om” and think of one hand swinging.

No, wait.  That was Sox guru Walt Hriniak.

Conditioning

With spring training finally here, players show what they’ve been up to in the offseason.  In the case of the Dodgers’ Yasiel Puig, that includes putting on 26 pounds since last October.  Nothing says “fleet outfielder” like 251 pounds on a 6’ 3” frame.  Not to pick on Puig because every team has one.  I can still remember Greg Luzinski, who looked fat even for an offensive lineman.

Clare is already tired of practice in the gym; she wants to be outside, playing.  Subconsciously or not, she takes out her frustrations by conditioning, weights and yoga in particular.  You might say my daughter has limber “guns.”  She also has wisdom, gained from training last spring with the football conditioning coach.  Oh, those bloody boxes.

The coach had her jumping on boxes, six inches or six feet high I don’t know, for coordination.  At some point, she couldn’t go any higher.  So, Clare tried again, and again, until there were eight-inch gashes on both her shins.  That’s how she started last season, looking like she’d been gored by a midget bull.  Last night, Clare Tweeted 2013/2014 pictures of her shins.  The ugly mess has healed completely, I’m happy to say.  And Robocop has steered clear of those boxes.

But she still conditions.  I wonder what’s going to happen come season’s end.  What’s the motivation to keep lifting after softball?  If the Marines were smart, they’d recruit female college athletes to form an elite attack group, the New Amazons.  I’m serious.  American women are strong.  Some are probably strong enough and fit enough to spell Yasiel Puig come Opening Day.  Or Adam Dunn.

Flashback

          

With Clare home, we ran over to Stella’s for some bp.  The second I stepped in, it was eleven years ago—boys everywhere, hibernation over, sweat mixed with determination and fear.  A scene like that stays with you.

Clare was in sixth grade that first time; she had to be the only girl in the building and definitely the only swinging a bat.  This was part of our spring training.  Someone had asked me to take over the Bronco baseball team, and my daughter was intent on sending a message to teammates.   When her turn came at 70 mph, Clare hit 12 out of 14 balls hard and fair.  “She’s got to play in high school,” said another father standing next to me.

I’ve always wondered if he meant softball or baseball.

Out of the Mouths of Babes....

       

       The schedule worked out so that Clare could spend a weekend home before the madness starts; that’s what put her on the couch last night.  Then she got an update from MLB Network she had to share—the Giants hired Barry Bonds as a spring training instructor.  “What’s he going to do,” my daughter asked, “give injection instructions?”

Look for the Union Label

Google “Northwestern University athletics” and it’s hard to miss the words “partner of CBSSports.com” that come up.  And we’re supposed to think college athletics isn’t a job?

Right now, the National Labor Relations Board is collecting testimony on the question of whether or not Northwestern football players are bona fide employees of the university.  Yesterday, a school official raised the possibility that any negotiated package between the school and a football players’ union would place the university in violation of Title IX because what boys get girls are supposed to get.  And that would be a bad thing how?

As of today, the Northwestern softball team is in the middle of five straight weekends spent playing out-of-state: Tempe; Baton Rouge; Cathedral City, CA; Fullerton; and Clearwater.  So, basically, Friday through Sunday is spent playing softball with Thursday as a travel day.  You just want to ask how the studies are going.

Money to play a college sport?  I don’t know.  But fairness demands expanded health care and educational benefits.  Play four years of football, and the school will be there down the road if and when arthritis and/or dementia sets in.  Play x years of anything, and you get those number of years in free tuition to finish your degree or attend graduate school/med school/law school.  That works to me.

This Time Next Year

Graduate school #4 requires a personal statement, something about what makes the applicant unique.  “Can I say I have a dog and a boyfriend?” Clare asked her mother.  That, and you hit long homeruns, I might add.

The High Cost of a Kids' Game

 Yesterday, the baseball/youth/softball spring catalogue arrived from that store with a name no adolescent boy can repeat without giggling (and me too, apparently).  Talk about sticker shock.

Bats topped out at $450; gloves at $500 (a literal a golden glove?); and shoes at $120.  For youth, as in Little League, it was $280; $130; and $50.  Softball bats went as high as $300; gloves $230; and shoes $60 (what, no heel?).  And to think I bought everything I needed from Ace Hardware, Sears and Sam Santo Sports.  Times, as they say, are a changin’.

Of course, there’s cheaper equipment available, but that’s the problem.  What kid wants cheaper, and what parent wants to give less than the best?  We barely got by with just Clare.  Heaven help those people with two or more athletes in the family.  I doubt if anyone wants to share a bat.

Note to Commissioner Selig: You can’t grow a game, as in the inner city, that costs too much to play.

In Winter, Think Spring and Summer

 It’s funny.  Chicago has the snow while Sochi has the warmth.  Talk about a trade to benefit both sides.  Short of that impossibility, all we can do is think of spring things.  Oh, did I mention it snowed six inches yesterday?  Over sixty for the season—eat your heart out, Shaun White.

With spring comes baseball and, by extension, softball.  I played, I watch, I remember: Walt Williams sprinting back from the dugout, Harold Baines waiting for his pitch, Clare hitting two homeruns in a game, both in high school and college.  Here’s my cure for arthritis and SAD, to remember.

What do they do in Green Bay to get away from the cold, think of the Packers?  Cold on cold, I couldn’t take it.

Sticks and Stones

Asay likes to call me “Professor” whenever we bump into one another.  I’m left both honored and teased.  With Clare, it’s just teasing when I refer to her as “Weasel.”  Don’t ask me why, it just stuck one day.  She’s never complained.  Is anyone being bullied here?

I would hope not, but at some point what we do say can, and will, hurt.  The NFL again leads by example with its release of a report on the situation with Dolphins’ offensive lineman Jonathan Martin.  The taunting from three teammates got so bad he considered suicide.  For what it’s worth, I have never witnessed softball players coming close to such behavior.  Football is in so many ways a universe unto itself.

I’m not so sure about female fans, though.  Girls will be like boys in the quest to offer that perfect environment for the home team—we’re great, you [insert expletive here]!  To me, yelling “A-Roid!” at Alex Rodriguez doesn’t constitute bullying.  But after that it becomes a slippery slope that involves parentage, race, talent, gender and sexual identity.  The difference between taunting and bullying then becomes something like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography:  “’I know it when I see it.”

What happened to Jackie Robinson is what we would now term bullying.  My father yelling at Ozzie Guillen to “Tuck your shirt in!” was Ed Bukowski being Ed Bukowski, three rows from the on-deck circle.  And if I’m asked to stop calling a certain person “weasel,” I will.

Like Old Times

We went hitting at Stella’s yesterday.  Actually, Clare hits while I pay for the tokens.  Anyway, we were each doing our part when a community college team walked in.  Their head coach wasn’t far behind.

That would be Coach Asay, or just “Asay” as Clare always called him in high school when he assisted Euks.  Coach handled fielding drills, called pitches and bubbled with enthusiasm the four years Clare played for him.  You never would’ve known Coach’s first love was football, which he played in college and coached both at the high school and community college levels.  The only time Asay gave himself away was when he’d say, “She [Clare] could start at linebacker for me.”  In truth, my daughter does have a bit of Butkus in her. 

Junior year, the Morton Mustangs were fighting for the conference title.  To rally the troops, Asay took some of the girls to the school trophy case to point out a picture of the last Morton team to win.  “You win on Tuesday, and the picture goes in next to theirs.  You come back in ten years, and it’ll still be there.  You can take your kids and see it, and then your grandkids.”  I know this because Clare repeated the speech verbatim at dinner.  

Coach also had this way of complimenting his players.  “Nicely done,” he would say after a particular hit or catch.  Asay told us on the way out we can expect to see him at Elmhurst games come April.  That, too, would be nicely done.

Apples and Oranges in the Locker Room

 I don’t like “openly” as a modifier; it always seems to go in front of “hostile” or some other in-your-face adjective.  Why can’t a person be “d.c.” gay, as in “don’t care who knows”?  College football star Michael Sam was anything but confrontational during a news conference during which he came out, this before the NFL draft in May.  A solid pass rusher, Sam projects to go in the third round, that is, if general managers aren’t scared off by someone who’s out of the closet.

There are already gay players in the NFL.  They just don’t tell anybody because they do care who knows; teammates and fans can’t be counted on to be openly supportive.  The testosterone isn’t ramped up nearly so much in baseball, but the fears and prejudices are in the same ballpark, you might say.  If there were two “d.c’” gay players on the same pro team, the locker room would be on edge.  Add a female player, and it would be chaos.

Personally, I can’t wait.

Commitment

Those Holsum bakers were at it again.  At six o’clock in the morning I lay in bed while my daughter and her teammates started an early practice.  There’s something delicious in this for me, knowing that someone who can sleep close to noon has to be up in zero-degree weather a couple of cracks before dawn.  Clare can blame that ability to sleep on me if she wants, but the athletic stuff is all her doing.

She’s also different in her refusal to cut a class; I did it way too often.  Only it was so hard for my progeny to stay awake this morning that she asked to be excused, as if she had to go to the bathroom.  Instead, Clare ran up and down the hall to get her blood moving.  As an ex-professor not fond of snoozing students (especially in the first row), I have to admit there’s something endearing in that.

Two of a Kind

Yesterday, Clare retweeted a picture of Dodger outfielder Matt Kemp taking batting practice in Arizona.  “We have the same stance,” I was informed of another front foot gone tippy-toe.  Now, if both players just stay healthy.  Then, one can be named an All-Star and the other All-Conference.

Out of the Ice Box into the Cold

 Clare and I were supposed to go hitting Thursday, but the “bees” were out, especially with the temperature hovering around 10 degrees.  When it gets that cold, the inside at Stella’s is what you might call moderate meat-locker; wrists sting with every ball hit.  But, hey, today's temperature reached the mid-20s, so hitting it was.

The first thing I noticed was the focus—you could tell the season has started.  Clare had one swinging strike in 120 pitches and maybe 12-14 fouls.  Everything else was scalded.  Dad likes it when the other guys watch this girl hit.  Let me just add here that Clare hit while standing on a floor mat because the right-handed batter’s box had a puddle from melted snow brought in on shoes and pants.

As we were driving over the tundra (most Chicago suburbs are dangerously close to running out of road salt), Clare mentioned that Oklahoma, last year’s NCAA Division I champs, was already playing.  Sunbelt and West Coast teams have all the breaks, or at least the weather.  They can practice outdoors and start their seasons early, which is why Division I plays 25-plus more games than Division III.  What they don’t do is suffer through the cold batting cages or shag fly balls outside at the end of February while dodging piles of snow or play conference games in 40 degrees, with a stiff breeze off Lake Michigan.  We’re not talking bees, but sharks.

So, Sooners, play a couple of games around here or Minnesota or Maine, and we’ll see how tough you guys are.  

Travel Daze, Contd.

Back in the day, we put down $1000 a season for Clare to belong to a travel team.  All that did was start the meter running.

Then you have to factor in all the miscellaneous costs—hitting/pitching coach; equipment that doesn’t come cheap or last long; food; gas; lodging; and time.  Most, though not all, weekend tournaments were considered “local,” usually anywhere between 20-50 miles from home.  The first year Clare was on the good team, we also went to Toledo Ohio.

Ah, Toledo in June.  Temperature in the 90s, and the humidity close behind.  That was the weekend we spent $50 at the concession stand—on BOTTLED WATER.  The drinking fountains were broken, missing or camouflaged.  The Tony Packo hot dogs just didn’t make up for the $400 we spent.  And that was separate from the $1500 it cost to finals in Kansas City.  What are finals? you ask.  Just another tournament, a week long for bragging rights and little more. 

I sold off $700 in memorabilia on eBay to help pay for the KC trip; I’m not complaining, just saying.  The next year, the coaches scheduled a tournament in Denver, and we said, No Thanks; it was a choice between that and nationals.  A word of advice here from the voice of experience—skip nationals and go to the out-of-state tournament, especially if it’s a Division I exposure tournament like Denver was.  Oh, well, you live and learn.

I’m now at the point of believing everything was ordained to happen as it did—the first travel team led to all the others that helped Clare have two great seasons in high school so she’d get noticed and have a chance to play in the CCIW.  As for all those parents who paid $2000-plus to join a travel team (and we looked into it), I hope they had good karma, too.  

Travel Daze

   

Somebody Clare played travel ball with texted her the other day that they’d be playing one other in Florida.  The girl was on one of the nice teams.  Yes, there were teams not so nice.

Travel softball dates to the late ’80s.  Part of the surge in popularity of travel sports is due to parents wanting their kids to have an edge, all the way to the pros if possible.  Another part is parents hoping their kids would be good enough to earn a college scholarship.  Michele and I belonged to another group, parents who had no idea how they’d afford it.   

Travel softball starts as early as eight and under.  Clare made her first team at the age of thirteen.  We were so clueless I didn’t even know she had made a 16u team comprised mostly of high school players.  Come spring, with softball in season for those girls, Clare was farmed out to the organization’s eighth-grade level14u team.  When the team fell apart, the 16u coach decided he wasn’t that interested in the girl with all that raw power, after all.  Welcome to the world of travel sports.

Clare found another team without too much trouble, and she thrived the next two summers.  Both the coaches liked her, with one of them spending an inordinate amount of time on her fielding.  But with their girls aged out long ago, they stepped down, to be replaced by Dumb and Dumber, minus the laughs.

This happened the summer we were trying to get Division I school coaches to come watch Clare play.  There was one tournament in particular; Clare hit five homeruns in two days.  But no coaches showed for that tournament or the next, when Clare was “rewarded” for her heroics with a lower spot in the batting order.  By the end of the summer, one of the coaches was telling my daughter she’d never play in college.  A great judge of talent, that man.

           Now, all that summer striving and worrying is over, along with counting pennies and dealing with people maneuvering to have their kid play ahead of ours.  The only thing left is to play a final slate of games—and remember the home runs.

Catching a Break

The preseason NCAA Division III softball rankings came out last week, and three Elmhurst conference-opponents made it: Augustana, 15^th; Carthage, 22^nd; and North Central, 25^th.  Throw in Tufts, and Clare plays four top-rated teams this spring.  What doesn’t kill you….

The Rookie

  

Snow and softball don’t mix, even when practice is supposed to be indoors.  Chalk one up for the elements.  Instead of fielding grounders and doing hitting stations, Clare settled in at school to watch The Rookie on ABC Family.  I did the same, different couch same movie.

The story’s based on the career of Jim Morris, a former first-round draft pick who at the age of 35 made a comeback after being away from the game for a decade due to injuries.  It’s all about getting a second chance and being a role model and reconnecting with your father.  I know why I like the movie, but what about my daughter?  I always thought we were connected fine.

Isadora Duncan with a Bat in Her Hands

When Clare was small, we’d go for a walk to the Avenue Drug Store in Oak Park.  I’d buy the paper and some Junior Mints while Clare headed for the toy aisle.  Two months short of her fourth birthday, she got me to buy a wiffle ball and bat set.  It took three swings until Clare figured out how to line the ball at my head.  Parents, beware what television you expose your children to, and thank you, Frank Thomas.

If Michele dreamed of having a daughter who danced, they pretty much ended with that first line drive.  That is, until last night, when we attended Clare’s first-ever dance recital; she and her roommate Rachel took a Middle Eastern dance-history class at school over the January break.  Middle of the order hitter, oh yeah, but I don’t know about the dancing.  A father shouldn’t be made to see his daughter with finger cymbals.    

          We sat in front of eight softball players there for moral support; they definitely made a spirited audience.  Michele, her dream more than eighteen years delayed, smiled throughout.  I just want to know if any of the moves will translate to the diamond, like football players taking ballet for balance.  We’ll see soon enough.