Muscle-bound

White Sox infielder Brett Lawrie was channeling his inner jibber the other day when he told the Sun-Times he’s working to get rid of the “little kinks” that have been bothering him as he tries to come back from a left leg injury dating back to last July.

“It’s not necessarily sore,” Lawrie reported, “it’s nothing that’s grabbing me or anything like that.  It’s just how everything is sitting and needs to be aligned, that’s all.”  You have to wonder which Lawrie family member dropped little Brett on his head.

After the Sox acquired Lawrie from the A’s, Clare showed me a video clip of him doing his best Fred Astaire imitation, defying gravity long enough to run on walls, if not quite the ceiling.  My immediate reaction was, “That’s nice, but what does it have to do with baseball?”  Pound for pound, Lawrie looks to be as strong as anyone on the Sox, and maybe that’s the problem.

Back in the Dark Ages, players shied away from touching weights for fear of becoming “muscle-bound”; I remember this label being applied to Bill “Moose” Skowron in particular.  Back in the 1950s and ’60s, the ideal was flexibility.  Then came PEDs in the 1990s, along with the explanation that the player in question “had hit the gym hard in the offseason.”  Steroids went away, but the fascination with muscle building continues.

There has to be a happy medium between a happy-go-lucky chunk like John Kruk and today’s muscle-fixated players.  You do have wonder if there comes a point when muscles aren’t flexible enough to handle the sudden movement required for fielding a bad-hop groundball or hitting the deck in order to avoid a 100-mph fastball head high and inside.  How best to stay in shape?  Ben Franklin said something about moderation, and I would agree.  Back off the weights, stay limber and avoid the DL.

That's someplace Brett Lawrie has landed seven times in his six major-league seasons.

One More Thing

I care about hitting if for no other reason than that I helped bring a hitter into the world.  Clare hit the way she did in part because her old man made her to.

So, yes, it was “see ball, hit ball” from the start, but I forgot to mention my other rule, “know the strike zone.”  If you don’t, you end up walking back to the dugout way too much.  Clare could hit from the start, and by that I mean before she turned four, but knowledge of the strike zone was something that came slowly, with a lot of what you might call “excited vocalizations” from her father.

Clare’s big weakness was sliders away.  When I threw them in batting practice, her butt went one direction and her bat went in the opposite as she tried hitting off her front foot.  The swing rarely resulted in contact, and, when it did, the ball was lucky to go a few feet.  You don’t hit .300 with a bunch of swinging bunts, that’s assuming the ball even went fair.

“And where was the ball going to go if you did hit it?” I asked closer to a thousand times than once.  All but a handful of hitters have weaknesses.  With Clare, it was that breaking ball away.  I taught her, more or less, to lay off it, even if that meant taking it for a strike.  Then, with two strikes, you go into protect-mode and foul off the outside pitch.  This my daughter learned to do.

Not that she laid off the high stuff.  Baseball or softball, Clare went after high heat.  In softball, it comes in the form of a rise ball; done right, it’s the equivalent of Nolan Ryan throwing submarine, and the pitcher can then take something off and turn the pitch into the most tantalizing change up you ever saw but never hit.

“Lay off the high stuff, Clare,” father and coaches pleaded, starting in high school, and she did, sort of.  But, truth be told, my daughter was quick enough and strong enough to hit rise balls with power.  She saw the ball, she hit the ball, and she knew the ball wasn’t going to be an outside strike.  That’s all I could ask of my hitter.            

 

Running on Empty

Last year, I thought Jimmy Rollins was done after his run with the White Sox.  At age 37, the veteran infielder didn’t look to have anything left in the tank after his June release.  A .221 batting average—including an anemic .181 for the switch hitter against righties—would seem to be a sign to call it a career at 17 seasons.  But what do I know?

Another year older, Rollins is trying to catch on with the Giants as a spare infielder.  Rollins took enough time from his quest to tell USA Today columnist Bob Nightengale, “The game’s completely changed.  When I came up, there were veterans everywhere.  Teams wanted them in their clubhouse.  But now with this sabermetric and numbers part of the game, it’s about computers.  You plug in numbers, and it spits out a player.  It’s like you’re not wanted.”

Jimmy, first check your splits; a .181 average would earn Jesus Christ his release.  Second, go back in the time machine and see how many pitchers teams were carrying when you came up.  Teams nowadays start with 11-man staffs and expand them to 12 or 13 at different points in the season.  Somebody’s got to go in this brave new world of constant matchups.  Who do you think that’s going to be?  Hint: veteran part-time players, and those with low batting averages first.

But Rollins is just doing what most players do at the end of their careers, trying to hang on.  In this he’s no different than Babe Ruth, and, given Rollins’ performance over the years, he could be joining the Babe in Cooperstown someday.  What really caught my eye, though, was Rollins’ take on playing for the Sox.  “It’s the first time I’ve ever been on a team with no direction.  It was like if we win, we keep everybody.  We lose, we’re dumping everybody.”

Hey, that could be straight out of a Talking Heads’ song, “We’re on a road to nowhere….”  

 

The Sky is Falling

Poor Brandon Moss.  He thinks rule changes will spell the end of baseball as he knows it.  “I’m just glad I will not be playing this game in ten years,” Moss told columnist Bob Nightengale of USA Today.  “It won’t be recognizable.  It’s going in a direction where it’s not the same game. Every year they keep trying to think of some stupid new rule.  It’s getting old, real old.”   

Let me tell you what got old a long time ago—hitters stepping out of the box after each pitch to adjust their batting gloves.  I wonder if Moss has ever complained about that change in the game, or when pitchers first started to take a coffee break between pitches.  Talk about old-fast.

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred wants to speed up the game, short of cutting into commercial breaks, of course; we don’t want to be cutting into revenue, no sir.  Instead, the commissioner and the players’ association have agreed to do away with the intentional walk.  So, no more Tommy Kahnle of the White Sox giving up a wild pitch in the process of throwing four  intentional wide ones.  Yippee.

I’m less interested in missing out on those times every other year or so when hitters have gotten hits off of intended intentional pitches.  What I think is going to be lost is the gamble managers take in ordering an intentional pass.  While not every pitcher pulls a Tommy Kahnle (last May in Kansas City, in case you’re wondering), many pitchers do have a hard time getting the ball over the plate in the next at-bat.  Now, that’s gone.  An unwarranted advantage goes to the defense.

Let me offer a far better way to speed up the game, by charting average nine-inning game times by umpiring crew, with bonuses attached for the quickest and all results made public.  Fans are entitled to know who the slow-poke crews are.

Under my plan, if any batter needs to adjust his batting gloves after a pitch, that would be fine, as long as he realizes he won’t get time called but will get a strike called no matter where the pitcher puts the ball during the gloves’ adjustment.  If the pitcher wants to plumb his inner depths between pitches, fine again, as long as he realizes the next pitch will be a ball no matter if it’s down the center of the plate.  Complain, and you’re tossed immediately.  Come out of the dugout to complain about your player getting tossed, and you join him, pronto.  Umpires would also be encouraged to call a consensus strike zone or face being overruled by pitch-tracker technology.  Again, bonuses would be awarded to the crews with the best records along with all findings made public. 

How about it, Commissioner?  

Peas in a Pod

I really liked longtime White Sox starter Mark Buerhle, sort of.  He worked fast, yet always seemed to go from 0-2 to 3-2 before putting a hitter away; I came to realize, slowly, that Good Mark and Bad Mark were one and the same.  He also looked like a goof but pitched with the fire you would expect of someone who recorded two no-hitters, one of them perfect.  Buehrle loves pit bulls (I prefer bassetts), and at the age of 38 could still be pitching rather than starting his second year of retirement.  Go figure.  Yesterday, the White Sox announced they’re going to retire Buehrle’s number in June.  What four-time Gold Glover spends a career wearing the number 56 on his back?

Buehrle was born in St. Charles, Missouri.  Rick Reuschel was born a little over a hundred miles away, in Quincy, Illinois.  Buehrle pitched 16 years, Reuschel 19.  Buehrle came up with the Sox at the age of 21 in 2000, Reuschel first appeared with the Cubs at the age of 23 in 1972.  They each pitched 12 years in Chicago, and they both finished with 214 career wins, though Buehrle had 31 fewer losses.  (Sox fans and Cubs’ fans can argue which player was stuck on worse teams.)  Buehrle totaled 161 wins with the Sox, Reuschel 135 with the Cubs.  Buehrle managed a .973 fielding average to Reuschel’s .972 while Reuschel had a career 1.275 WHIP to Buehrle’s 1.28.  The difference in career ERA—3.81 for Buehrle, 3.37 for Reuschel—is the result of one pitcher spending all but one year of his career in the American League, with its DH, while the other spent all but one year in the National League.

My point?  You don’t know what you got till it’s gone, and you don’t need to throw smoke to excel as a big-league pitcher.  Here’s hoping you get perfect weather on your day, Mark.

Mechanics

White Sox pitching prospect Lucas Giolito says he’s working on his mechanics, and I want to pull my hair out.  Ballplayers aren’t machines.  They’re a human variety of snowflake, every one of them different, which is what makes them so hard to coach.

A few weeks ago, I told Clare to look up John Wockenfuss and Tony Batista on YouTube.  Wockenfuss was a right-handed hitter who stood with his back foot on the back line of the batter’s box and his front foot not parallel but angled forward eight or nine inches away, toward the plate.  Batista, also right-handed, had such an extreme open stance he looked to be holding an axe instead of a bat.  Yet Wockenfuss managed 86 homeruns in a 12-year career as a part-time player while Batista hit 221 homers in 11 years.  Trust me, no hitting coach could figure out the “mechanics” of those stances.

It was really a case of “see ball, hit ball” for Wockefuss and Batista, as it is for every hitter.  This is what I preached to Clare—if you see it, hit it; if you don’t, lay off it. When I watch the likes of Avisail Garcia and Brett Lawrie, I see players swinging without seeing, with eyes closed or head turned away from the ball.  They’re “guess” hitters, bound for early retirement.

Now, back to Giolito.  Mechanics do matter more with pitchers than hitters because of the increased likelihood of injury to the arm, shoulder or knee.  That said, look at the front-toe tapper vs. the side-armer vs. the big leg kick vs. whatever in the world Luis Tiant did on the mound.  All different sorts of deliveries can work, as long as the pitcher is intent on throwing strikes.  There you have it in a nutshell, have the courage to throw strikes consistently.  The only reason to tinker with delivery or grip is to increase the percentage of strikes thrown.

As a pitching coach or organizational pitching coordinator, I’d want my pitchers throwing at least 90 percent strikes with their best pitch, and at least that with their secondary pitches; how they got there by way of a hop, skip or a jump would be up to them.  Once they’ve reached that level of proficiency, then we could experiment with taking something off a pitch or locating it a little up, down, in or out.  But the default should always be a strike down the middle of the plate.  As Robin Roberts and Fergie Jenkins knew, better to give up a whole bunch of solo shots in a season than a whole bunch of walks and base hits because you’ve fallen behind in the count.

Lucas, call me when you get a chance.     

  

In a League of His Own

The other day, I mentioned all the good things Larry Himes did as general manager of the White Sox.  He also did one very bad thing, trading for Sammy Sosa.  When he took over as GM of the Cubs in 1991, Himes compounded his mistake by trading for Sosa again.  Chicago baseball has never been the same.

One of the reasons the Sox dumped Sosa, I heard, is that he refused to get with the program of hitting coach Walt “Let the Top Hand Go Free, My Child” Hriniak.  Talk about two wrongs making a right.  How often does a team trade away a young ballplayer who goes on to hit 609 career homeruns and yet get no grief from its fans?  How often does a player hit 545 homeruns for his new team and yet leave behind next to no good memories?  How often does a player like Sosa come around?  Fingers crossed, just once.

Yesterday, Sosa gave a blog interview in which he compares himself to someone of a higher power:  “It’s like Jesus Christ when he came to Jerusalem.  Everybody thought Jesus Christ was a witch [at this point Sosa laughs, maybe because he’s using a different version of the New Testament than I do], and he was our savior.  So if they talk [crap] about Jesus Christ, what about me?”  

Sosa also refers to Wrigley Field as “my house”; brags that he hit more homers for the Cubs than Ernie Banks; and claims “I put Chicago on the map.”  Truly, we are not worthy.

Blabbin' Maddon

Cubs’ skipper Joe Maddon thinks he knows what hazing is:  “To me, hazing was back in the day at Hazleton High School [in Maddon’s hometown of Hazleton, Pa.] when they made all the sophomores jump off the wall [which was ten-feet high] at the risk of breaking a leg,” he told the Sun-Times today.  “That’s hazing.”

And baseball rookies dressed as women?  Maddon says “situations like this are purely based on fun among the group.  [Do rookies volunteer to be part of this fun?]  I don’t think there’s a player out there that would be adverse to any of that.”  So says the Sage of Wrigleyville.

I wonder, though, why do players always dress up as women?  Why not different types of men?  Everyone could be former president Barack Obama.  No, wait, there’s that blackface thing if white players did it.  Then maybe everyone could be Elton John for a day.  Imagine the hilarity of ostensibly straight players trying to dress gay.  What would Elton say?

The LGBT community probably would miss the joke, in which case we can always hope that rookie ballplayers will decide on their own to keep dressing as women.    

Fire Away

My notion of sports entails box scores, standings and something to hit, throw, kick and/or catch.  Since I don’t want to catch any bullets, hunting doesn’t qualify as a sport, for me.  There are a whole bunch of people who disagree.

Last week, the Sun-Times’ nature writer did a story on the bobcat season in Illinois.  That’s right, hunters mounted a campaign to remove a longstanding ban that protected these creatures, all 40 pounds of them, which is what a big male weighs.  The “sport” netted hunters 141 trophies.  That comes out to 69 bobcat shot; 49 trapped (someone explain to me the sport in that); 12 taken out with a bow and arrow; and my absolute favorite, 11 picked up as roadkill.  Watch as the mighty hunter pulls over to the shoulder and expertly picks up the body….

Then, in yesterday’s NYT I see this story about hunters who use a bow and arrow to go after bighorn sheep; no doubt, the sheep are terrorizing entire neighborhoods out West.  Don’t get me wrong.  My heart doesn’t bleed vegan red.  I’m a carnivore, though one willing to respect the intelligence of other mammals.  Maybe someday I’ll turn away from meat, but not today.

Some animals and people don’t mix, especially in urban and suburban environments.  I don’t get all warm and fuzzy about coyotes or deer, which may be possessed by the souls of kamikaze pilots; one actually stared me down as I came to a stop before he turned into a hood ornament on my Ford.  And reports on the return of cougars and wolves to the Midwest leave me more than a little uncomfortable.  The bigger they are, the tastier I look on my little Schwinn.

Cull them, harvest them, control the population if you must, but don’t call it sport unless the bobcats get to keep score, too.   

Building Blocks

With their season seven months off, the 3-13 Bears still managed to snare the entire back page of the Sunday Tribune sports’ section to discuss the quarterback situation.  Draft, trade or punt?  Who cares?  

Of more interest was the remark by Cubs’ chairman Tom Ricketts, of wanting to have his team recognized as “one of the great sports’ organizations in the world,” like Manchester United or Real Madrid.  Oh, whoopee, baseball taking on soccer.  Tom, nobody on the Iberian Peninsula or in the pubs of Manchester gives a yellow card how good your team is or for how long.  If they didn’t care about the Yankees, they won’t bother with the Cubs.

And of even greater interest to me was a columnist in today’s Sun-Times who referred to the area around Wrigley Field as Rickettsville.  Now, that’s what I call an astute observation, one which gets to the heart of the difference between Cubs’ and White Sox ownership.  The Cubs want to control and develop the surrounding real estate.  The Sox want parking lots, thank you very much.

How sad.  Comiskey Park always stood out from other major league parks for the lack of development around it.  In 1910, Charles Comiskey built his new park on the site of a garbage dump.   (Insert your joke here.)  Comiskey never moved to develop the rest of the property.  Just look at photos from the 1930s, and all you see is the ballpark surrounded by parking lots.  For reasons only known to himself, Jerry Reinsdorf, who made his money in real estate, never jumped at the chance to build “Jerryville” atop the old cinder lots.  Call it a stadium fixation that’s hurt the team’s perception for the last 26 years.  Cub fans go to a shrine and then hit the streets for the best of urban night life.  Sox fans go to a mall and then fight to get out of the parking lots.

Second Chances

There was a story in the paper today about longtime first baseman Mark Grace, who’s joining the Diamondbacks’ TV broadcast team.  Arizona has been the best and worst of places for Grace, who started the bottom-of-the-ninth, game-seven World-Series winning rally for the D-backs against the Yankees in 2001 and more recently served four months in a “tent city” for DUI issues.  They do things old school in Arizona, short of prison stripes and chain gangs.

I met Grace once, on the eve of the 1994 MLB strike.  A month earlier, we had taken Clare to her first professional baseball game, with the Kane County Cougars; our daughter came away fascinated by…blimps, after seeing one buzz the field that afternoon.  The not-yet four-year old probably loved baseball already from sitting on her daddy’s lap and watching TV as Frank Thomas hit.     

I happened to be part of a WGN Radio panel that included David Halberstam, who had written a book about the 1964 World Series, and a team announcer who shall not be named here; he no longer works locally but can be heard shilling for another NL Central team, so you figure it out.  During a news break, Grace walked in, shook hands and shot the breeze.  His face was flush, his eyes bloodshot, so I had an idea that he’d been drinking a good deal.  When he left, Mr. Announcer got all brave and said, “That’s what’s wrong with baseball, a $4 million singles’ hitter.”

Maybe so, but what’s right with humanity is someone making use of a second chance.  Grace is sober now and doesn’t hide from his past.  That far outweighs any lack of power from a power position.    

You Don't Say

Both sports’ sections were filled with words of wisdom today.  First is the Big Mistake, James Shields, he of the 6-19 record and 5.85 ERA last season (4-12 with 6.77 ERA after his trade from San Diego to the White Sox).  “I have nothing to prove, man,” declared the righty.  “Nothing to prove.  I think my career speaks for itself [See above.].  [But] I definitely want to prove to the Chicago White Sox fans who I really am.”  For those of us who understanding the meaning of logic, James, you already have.

And then this pearl of wisdom from Pitching Coach for Life Don Cooper:  “The roadsides in the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Mexico, Puerto Rico and the United States are strewn with the dead bodies of guys who, man, they had a really good arm.  But nobody ever told him, ‘Oh, it’s about throwing it to the glove, and it’s about throwing strikes.’”

Well said, Don.  Now, how many of those bodies can be traced back to you?    

Adversity

The other day, I ran across a comment by White Sox GM Rick Hahn, about how much he regretted that ex-Sox second baseman Gordon Beckham didn’t experience failure until he reached the major leagues.  I don’t know quite what to make of that.

Beckham was picked in the first round of the 2008 draft and called up the following June, which translates into parts of two seasons in the minors.  In 2009, he hit a combined .326 at AA and AAA.  Now, compare that apple to the beautiful orange that was—and for the Red Sox, now is—Chris Sale, signed by the White Sox on June 20, 2010, and making his major-league debut not even two months later, on August 6; Sale logged all of 10-1/3 innings in the minors before his one and so-far only call-up to the majors.  Did he have time enough to fail?

Players learn to adjust in baseball, or they learn to get on with their lives.  The advantage was with Beckham in his rookie season of 2009, when he hit .270 with 63 rbi’s and a .347 on-base percentage.  Then the league adjusted, and Beckham struggled.  He also broke the hamate bone in his left hand in 2013, which may have affected his swing.  But I doubt that career .240 batting average is the product of insufficient minor-league failures.

What I learned with my daughter is, stuff happens.  Clare had barely a year and a half of softball when she made varsity as a freshman.  She started off 17 for her first 40; then came big-time failure, a slump to the tune of 4 for 40.  Clare figured things out—and I’ve always been thankful her coach gave her the playing time to do it—and ended her freshman year hitting .286.  Two years later, she started the season in another terrible slump, to the point I thought she’d never play in college.  That was the season she hit .425.

Barring injury, we all end up who we’re meant to be, ballplayer and person alike.   

What's in a Name?

The following notes and musings are from someone who tells people having problems spelling his name not to panic, “It’s Polish for ‘Smith’”:

I see the recently retired Prince Fielder is going to have a cooking show, with the tentative title of “Fielder’s Choice.”  My wife, guilt-ridden carnivore that she is, wants to know if there will be any vegetarian segments, given that Fielder said several years ago he had gone over to the side of nuts, berries and vegetables.  Stay tuned.

Fielder no longer has to worry about spring training, and he never had to worry about catching on with a team the way pitcher Bobby LaFromboise has to.  The 30-year old right hander is hoping the Rangers will be his third major-league team.  Lefty Rob Zastryzny—I have no idea what he tells people trying to spell his name—is still pretty young at 24 and still with his first organization, the Cubs.  If Zastryzny breaks camp with the big-league club, maybe teammates will call him Z-Man.  It fits.

A little before Clare was born, I followed the progress of a Cleveland farmhand, pitcher Carl Keliipuleole; all I can say is, if you have a hard name like mine, you’re drawn to people with hard names.  Keliipuleole could’ve been the K-Man before all other k-men.

These are the things I think about when the season is even too new for hope to spring.    

            

 

From the Top Down

The White Sox come with a lot of baggage.  There were the Black Sox in 1919 followed by 40 years of general mediocrity punctuated by the misadventures of Bill Veeck in between whose two reigns there was a lot of good and bad baseball courtesy of the Allyn brothers, after which came Jerry Reinsdorf, a man who believes in his way or the highway.

Allow me an example.  In 1986, Reinsdorf fired Roland Hemond, the master of deals (Dick Allen, Greg Luzinski), and replaced him with Ken “Hawk” Harrelson.  That little fiasco didn’t last long, and by 1987 Larry Himes took Harrelson’s place.  Here are the four number-one draft picks of the Himes’ regime: Jack McDowell, Robin Ventura, Frank Thomas and Alex Fernandez.  Talk about an eye for talent, Himes had it.  But he didn’t genuflect to the boss on a regular basis, so out he went in 1990.  Then it was ten years of the conservative, OK yes-man Ron Schueler, followed by Kenny Williams, the stopped clock who gets it right twice a day, drafting a Chris Sale and signing a Jermaine Dye versus the rest of the time (Adam Dunn, Adam LaRoche, David Wells….).  Rick Hahn took over as GM at the end of the 2012 season.  That Hahn has been able to proceed with a rebuild with Williams still around as executive vice president is a testament to Hahn’s talent for office politics, I’d say.  See Larry Himes, above.

At least White Sox fans have hope.  As for the Bulls, Jerry Reinsdorf’s other team, oh boy, talk about a front-office disaster.  John Paxson used to be a good general manager, only to get weird when he got promoted to v.p. in 2009; Paxson’s replacement as GM, Gar Forman, is way weird.  Together, the duo has pretty much stopped talking to the media.

That way, they don’t have to explain recent draft picks—Doug McDermott and Bobby Portis aren’t exactly the basketball equivalents of Frank Thomas and Robin Ventura—or free-agent signings, viz., Dwayne Wade and Rajon Rondo.  What matters is that Paxson and Forman stay on good terms with the boss, which they have, as opposed to Tom Thibodeau, who took his team to the playoffs on a regular basis but still got fired.

Here’s where it gets real good, or bad, if you’re a true blue Bulls’ fan—the jobs of Paxson and Forman are reported to be safe whether or not they make the postseason.  The trouble, my friends, starts at the top and works its way down.           

The Importance of Pacing

 Some form of spring training opens this week, not games, just pitchers and catchers tossing a ball to one another.  The danger for players and fans alike is rushing things.

By all means, let the Cubs and their nation fall victim to repeat dreams, the sooner the better for it to hurt the worse when things don’t line up like in 2016; been there in 2005, done that in 2006.  But for those of us without World Series fantasies, it’s better to take things one step at a time, though Lord knows it’s hard.

Chicago is in the midst of a climate-change February, and, by that I mean it feels like mid-March outside.  If it were mid-March, I’d be baseball antsy already, wanting the season to start.  This is why softball was such a game-changer for me—it did start in mid-March, or the third week thereof, on ice-cold fields during high school and sun-drenched ones in Florida for college.  A person can get used to all sorts of extremes if a bat and ball are involved.

But now Clare and I have to move on.  My daughter has checked on the cost of airfare to Arizona and quickly discovered it’s a real wedding-budget breaker.  Me, I’ve just spent, oh, twenty minutes at baseballreference.com looking up the career stats of such immortals as Denny O’Toole, Dave Lemonds and and Ken Frailing.  If you know any or all of those onetime pitchers, you’re in the same boat as I am, and my daughter.  So, remember, pace yourself.      

Gray Lady Down

I read the New York Times for news, and laughs.  This is a newspaper that writes what Knicks’ fans believe, that basketball was perfected if not invented in venues Madison Garden.  Never mind the franchise has all of two NBA titles as opposed to seventeen for the Celtics (and six for the expansion Bulls).  Those Knicks’ teams knew how to play the game—just ask Spike Lee.

On Wednesday, former Knicks’ player Charles Oakley got into some kind of disagreement with security staff during a game and ended up in handcuffs; Knicks’ owner James Dolan has since banished Oakley from attending games at the Garden.  One story in yesterday’s Times described Oakley as a “stalwart member of outstanding Knicks teams from the 1990s.”  Then what were the Bulls, who beat Oakley and company four—count ‘em, four—times in the playoffs back then?  But those outstanding Knicks’ teams knew how to play the game, I bet you.

In an accompanying story, a writer confessed that he thought hiring Phil Jackson as team president was a good idea at the time.  He considered Jackson to be a “brilliant, iconoclastic coach and author who motivated and needled and massaged the prickliest of stars into one-for-all championship runs.”  Here’s what the brilliant author had to say on Twitter a day after the Oakley contretemps:  “I offer this [cute peace-sign emoji] our society is torn with discord.  I’m against it. Let it be.”

Oh, Phil, my guitar gently weeps.  But the rest of me is laughing big time.

What Goes Around

When he coached the Bulls, Phil Jackson always struck me as too smart by half, talking New-Age gibber while handing out road-trip reading assignments to his players.  My opinion didn’t change when Jackson went to coach the Lakers.  Oh, how he liked to bask in the glory of victory.

And now “Big Chief Triangle [Offense],” as Jeff Van Gundy nicknamed his coaching adversary, has moved on to Van Gundy’s old team at Madison Square Garden, as president of basketball operations for the Knicks.  Only Jackson doesn’t have Michael Jordan around anymore, or Kobe Bryant, and he can’t stand having Carmelo Anthony around in their place.  On top of that, Jackson hasn’t spoken with the media for months.  I wonder if it has something to do with his record.  The three full seasons he’s been in control of the Knicks, Jackson’s teams have gone 71-147.       

Who says bad things don’t happen to the right people?

Memories of Summers Past

Clare and I had a rather nostalgia-tinged phone conversation yesterday; it commenced with me telling her that ex-White Sox players Gordon Beckham and Carlos Quentin both signed minor league contracts with invitations to spring training.  Beckham will be fighting to make the Giants, Quentin the Red Sox.

Clare was always a little sweet on Beckham, with his Georgia charm and all.  But my daughter was/is at heart a hitter, and Beckham’s loopy swing led her to yell at the TV screen as much as it did her father.  With Quentin, it was more about the intensity, and that would be Clare, too.  By the time she made it to the on-deck circle, the world’s population had been reduced to her and the pitcher, and I’m not so sure about the pitcher.  But Quentin turned out to be brittle in ways my daughter never was.  I swear he could injure himself looking down at his cleats.

Beckham and Quentin were also characters in our summer travels.  After a tournament or practice, I’d have the ballgame on the radio in the car, with those two inevitably frustrating us two.  And now we have MLB offering another part of our summers past, with rookie teams employing a tie-breaker for extra innings.  Just what I always wanted, a runner dropped out of the sky at the start of every half inning to be put in scoring position at second base.

“So, in other words, baseball wants to take a bad idea from travel ball?” Clare asked in fair disbelief.  Unlike the folks in the commissioner’s office (and ex-player Mike Lowell, who said on the MLB Network that this could be a real teaching moment for young players), my daughter knows right from dumb.

For Your Reading Pleasure

The sports’ section in today’s Tribune has so much football news of interest I almost don’t know where to start.  But with my oft-stated fondness for the Bears, let’s begin there:  The Monsters of the Midway have announced a slight increase in ticket prices, which is what teams often do after a successful season.  Last year’s 3-13 record must qualify as a success in McCaskey Land.

The team CEO and vice-president of looking the other way wrote season-ticket holders to “Thank you for your support in 2016.  It was a challenging and disappointing season, one we will not repeat.”  Be careful what you say, my friend.  When he was hired to manage the Cubs in 1966, Leo Durocher said, “This is not an eighth place ball club,” and Leo the Lip was right.  The team slipped from eighth to tenth in his first year at the helm.  What do you think, 2-14, anybody?

The other story on the front page was more sad than anything, about former Northwestern and Bears’ player and local sportscaster Mike Adamle, who at the age of 67 is exhibiting signs of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy.  Adamle announced the diagnosis during an interview with a former colleague with Channel 5 sports, where he last worked eleven months ago.  An on-air blackout led Adamle to step down.

Adamle told a story about being on the special-teams’ unit with the Jets.  He and other players painted little rising sun flags on their chests, took a drink of saki, and went out “like kamikaze planes….We didn’t think anything about it.”  And neither did the NFL, which for years denied any connection between CTE or related illnesses and playing football.  The Adamle story jumped to page two, above which a savvy editor put a story on the current CTE settlement between the NFL and former players.  It’s expected to cost the league $1 billion over 65 years.  The McCaskeys could tell you that’s chicken feed.

And lastly this gem from Patriots’ coach Bill Belichick, on Boston celebrating the team’s victory in the Super Bowl:  “As great as today is, in all honesty, we’re five weeks behind in the 2017 season.”  Are the Patriots a dynasty?  No, because that implies human beings at work, and Belichick is nothing but a football automaton.  Better to call them a machine.      

Visions

I shared the couch Sunday with Clare and her fiancé, Chris.  Here was my past and my future.

Chris had the Patriots in a bet with his mother, so you could say he was very much into Super Bowl LI.  Clare is into what her fiancé is into, and vice versa.  Me, I sat looking at my past and my future.

My daughter has eclectic tastes when it comes to pop culture.  You wouldn’t expect a diehard country-and-western fan (is this proof of reincarnation, some yahoo from west Texas coming back as a Bukowski?) to also like Lady Gaga, but that’s Clare.  The girl has a master’s degree, and she’s singing along to “Poker Face,” p-ph, muh-muh.  If nothing else, it’s something to share with the grandkids, when they come along.

At the end of the Super Bowl, MLB tweeted it was ready to start 2017 season; Clare showed me.  It was my past and my future.

Break a Leg, Contd.

The Bears aren’t the only professional sports’ team seeking relief from workers’ comp costs.  The Blackhawks, Bulls, Cubs and White Sox have joined in in trying to get legislation passed in Springfield.  Given the state of affairs in our state capitol, fat chance.

The problem isn’t that ex-athletes can file until the age of 67, as I thought last week; it’s that they can get paid in some cases to that age.  This is how the Sun-Times says it works:  If an athlete files after suffering a serious or career-ending injury, he—because there can never be a she as long as a certain mindset persists—can be eligible for a special payment that comes out to $55,900 a year, to normal retirement age.  None of the above-mentioned organizations wants to be on the hook for that kind of money.  They want the retirement age for affected athletes to be dropped from 67 to 35.

Consider that our pro teams can sell seat licenses, charge God-knows-what for a beer and a brat and dole out special club memberships for the well-heeled (isn’t that right, Tom Ricketts?)  But heaven forbid they be made to pay for the cost of an employee’s injury.  Why, the Cubs are only worth $2.2 billion and the Bears a mere $2.7 billion.  We don’t want them to go bankrupt because some fool blew out an elbow or a knee, now do we?    

Death Star 36 Falcons 28 (OT)

 I now know there are things worse in life than being a fan of the Chicago White Sox.  At least I don’t root for the Atlanta Falcons, who coughed up a 25-point second half lead in the Super Bowl before losing to New England Patriots in overtime.

Then again, I could be a Patriots’ fan, which is pretty much like saying you’re for Genghis Khan or Napoleon—c’mon, we’ll spot you half a continent if you play us.  I give you Bill Belichick, the Little Corporal, give or take a few inches.  At least with the Yankees of old, there was Casey Stengel doing his shtick to take the sting out of the beatings.  Between Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady, it’s all about the business of achieving utter, total, merciless domination.  Mother Teresa, you’re not welcome here.

Speaking of saints, the presentation of the Lombardi Trophy after the game reminded me of times in church when I was growing up.  From time to time, relics passed our way.  The students of St. Gall along with their parents were encouraged to behold this (literal) piece of a saint or a scrap of their clothing, either enclosed in glass so as to be kissed.  When we venerated a relic, it was supposed to bring us closer to God.  When the victorious Patriots kissed the trophy, what did that bring them closer to?  I wonder.     

Signposts

I’ve used a variety of signposts in my life to mark the passage of winter—the Hall of Fame vote, the Auto Show, the Daytona 500, Pebble Beach.  Only recently did the Super Bowl enter into the mix.

Of course, I was always aware of the game.  Who wouldn’t be?  But it was football, the antithesis of all things warm and pleasant.  More than anything, the last, “super” game of the season reminds me of the bit George Carlin did comparing baseball and football.  The one is about running around the bases in order to get home safe, the other is about marching into enemy territory with a series of bombs and thrusts until you score.  Oh, and the commercials.

I remember one Super Bowl early on in our marriage, 1982 probably, 49ers and Bengals; my parents came over to our apartment, not to watch the game but go out to dinner; that’s how little my father cared about that kind of stuff.  But times change, and the Super Bowl is now played so late—February 5^th this year—that pitchers and catchers report to camp nine days later.  So, today I’ll celebrate the approach of another baseball season by watching the Super Bowl in the company of my daughter and her fiancé, the offensive line coach.  One, or two, of us will have our thoughts drifting elsewhere between the ads and Lady Gaga.  

Enough Already

Who was it who said there’s no such thing as bad publicity?  It had to be the McCaskeys.

I get up this morning and go to the Tribune sports section to find the 3-13 Bears still making news, with the head of the NFL Players Association blasting the team for trying to get the Illinois workers’ comp law changed so the team won’t be on the hook for claims filed by ex-players in middle age and beyond; God forbid the arthritis doesn’t kick in right away.  We thank you for your service, now get lost.

On the bottom of that story is a tickler for tomorrow.  Coming Sunday: Bears special report.  “How did the Bears go from the Super Bowl to also-ran in ten years?”  Who cares?  Or let me put it this way: the White Sox did the very same thing, from World Series champ to chump, between 2005 and 2015, yet the Tribune didn’t feel the need for a special section.  I wonder why.    

If You Blinked...

 I’m still waiting for either of the Chicago papers to carry news that the pro softball Chicago Bandits were sold, with the buyer being the village of Rosement; this would be like Tammany Hall snapping up the Yankees or the Dodgers.  The longtime owner said it was time to do something else.

Along with the Chicago Sky trade of Elena Della Donne, the mostly unnoticed sale of the Bandits (for some reason, local TV mentioned it) is a real indictment of the state of women’s pro sports in Chicago.  I have no idea how to make the WNBA more popular, but I think with softball, the game has to be given more baseball flourishes, starting with the venues.  Until you get softball played in a place like Wrigley Field or Fenway Park, it’s going to have that aluminum bleacher feel to it, which is never a good thing.

Another way to go would be a formal connection between women’s softball and MLB, but I won’t hold my breath.        


NOTE:  I stand corrected in so far as the Tribune did run a small story about the sale in its local/regional news section.  I apologize for reading the sports' section first. 

Do As I Say

The NFL announced this week that it won’t allow a commercial by General Nutrition Centers to be run during the Super Bowl.  NFL policy does not allow advertising banned supplements, as can be found in GNC products.

Never fear, though.  The NFL is OK with ads for stuff the abuse of which leads to alcoholism or obesity, while an argument can be made that the simple intake of junk food—you guys know who you are, hence the clever ads—constitutes abuse of one’s body.  Luckily, the NFL is very good at compartmentalizing things, like they do with concussions.

The Emperor's New Digs

 Stop the presses, and the moving vans while you’re at it.  The Oakland Raiders’ jump to Las Vegas has hit a snag.  Suddenly, financing has become an issue.

Raiders’ owner Mark Davis was counting on a loan from Vegas casino owner Sheldon Adelson for up to $650 million, but Davis reportedly angered Adelson by submitting a proposed lease agreement to the new stadium authority.  Stop a second to consider that sentence—the tenant is writing the lease.  This could only happen in the realm of American pro sports.  Davis apparently wanted to pay $1 a year in rent—yes, you’re reading that correctly—with the power to tell the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, who are set to be co-tenants, when they can use the facility.  Again, read that sentence a second time.

According to the San Jose Mercury News, Adelson didn’t like the terms of the lease.  He may have felt bad for UNLV, or he may have been ticked that Davis was stealing a page from his own play book.  Either way, Goldman Sachs joined Adelson in pulling support for the project, which leads to this interesting question.

Why doesn’t Davis go build the thing all on his own?  I mean, if football is so popular and all, he should be able to attract other investors.  Hey, it’s a new day in America.  Maybe Davis should ask what The Donald would do.  Then again, maybe that’s how he got into this mess in the first place.