Old New Old

A few weeks ago, we had someone over to dinner we hadn’t seen in nearly fifteen years.  Stuff happens, people drift apart, and then you run into one another at the store on a Friday night.  So, you reconnect in the baking-goods’ aisle.

 

Jim is a big sports’ fan, like me, and he asked if I was excited about the White Sox.  I answered by asking him, “Do you care about the Celtics?” because he once did, very much, but not anymore.  “That’s just how I feel.”

 

Oh, we root for our respective teams, but not like we used to.  Stuff happens, and demigods become mortal even as their salaries turn them into demigods again.  The older I get, the more I want to feel about athletes the way I did when I was twelve.  Through no fault of his own, Eloy can’t do that, or Louis Robert or Lucas Giolito.  Books about Jackie Robinson and Mickey Mantle can.

 

For the life of me, their pictures never look to show a ballplayer in his twenties.  No, they’re demigods, neither young nor old, unchanged by time, forever playing that particular game or season.  I can’t help it; that’s how they seem to me.  And along comes someone like Andrew Vaughn.

 

The Sox first baseman of the future looks like he stepped out of a photo from 1966, or ’56, with that receding hairline of his.  Give him a crewcut, and Vaughn could be the second coming of Hank Bauer or Moose Skowron.  Given that Bauer stood a mere six-feet tall and Skowron an inch shorter, Vaughn, another six-footer, would fit right in.  And with Sox manager Rick Renteria praising Vaughn’s “simple” approach to hitting, the third player taken in last June’s draft is going to be labelled ”old school” before long.

Vaughn hasn’t said a word about how he’s going to spend his $7.2 million signing bonus.  That means I can pretend it doesn’t exist, and Vaughn is just another Sox rookie a la Mike Hershberger or Tommie Agee or Ken Berry.  I may yet turn into a 12-year old White Sox fan.