Is This Anything, Contd.

Clare stopped over for lunch yesterday, which gave us the chance to talk real estate and baseball. Our daughter is looking to start her family in a nice house; I get to give my opinion on possible choices. I was also asked about a move the Brewers made this week, promoting 27-year old Sara Goodrum to be the organization’s minor-league hitting coordinator. In a word, I’m skeptical. Yes, Theo Epstein was 28 when the Red Sox hired him as their general manager, so maybe baseball is merely giving another young person a shot. But a shot at what exactly? Consider where Goodrum was before her promotion, working in the Brewers’ “sports science and integrative sports performance lab.” Good thing the USSR isn’t around anymore, or I might think this was part of a Cold War attempt to engineer the perfect ballplayer, and we all know people can’t be engineered, right? Even the accolades for Goodrum gave me pause. Team vice president of baseball operations David Stearns told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “Sara is well equipped to oversee a comprehensive hitting curriculum. She played at a very high level collegiately [Pac 12, Oregon]. She has studied how the body works [with a master’s degree in exercise and sports science], how the swing works, and how those two elements work together.” The body? And here I thought each MLB team had 25-28 “bodies” on a roster. Tom Flanagan, Milwaukee’s vice president of minor-league operations, told NBC Sports “I think her skill set is very unique. It gives her a very different perspective in terms of different training techniques she probably [?] has a lot of experience with that she feels she can implement and help re-establish our hitting curriculum and help our hitters train better and be better throughout our system.” Here we have our second Brewers’ honcho talking about “curriculum.” And that would be what exactly? Because nobody asked, we don’t know. Lastly, a piece in The Athletic calls Goodrum a “great technician of hitters,” and I go all Bill Robinson. At the risk of repeating myself numb, Robinson believed that if a guy hits on his head, his job as hitting coach was to make that player the best head-hitter possible. Or, to paraphrase the title of Charlie Lau’s instructional book, there’s an art to hitting .300, and I fear a technician’s approach can only ruin it. My beef here isn’t with Goodrum but with the new technological approach taking over the national pastime. With hitting, it’s the return of Walt Hriniak, he of the one true swing, now backed up by all the latest gizmos. Again, you don’t engineer people, at least until we wake up one day to find Ricardo Montalban’s Kahn has gone from Star Trek character to reality. Yes, a 27-year old former softball player can implement all sorts of technology to improve a batter’s swing and approach to hitting, provided she’s working within the natural parameters that player has; put another way, by all means use cameras and whatnot to make John Wockenfuss the best possible John Wockenfuss he can be. Just don’t expect to turn Wockenfuss into Juan Pierre into Aaron Judge. That won’t happen. Oh, and on the Brewers’ curriculum, I’d be interested in knowing what it says about opposite-field and two-strike hitting. Nothing? Then I’d suggest they need to go back to the drawing board and figure it out. Not only is the devil in the details, but in details dating to the very beginning of the sport. You can imagine my daughter sitting on the couch listening to her old man prattle on. (I should note her I bought her both Ted Williams’ The Science of Hitting and Lau’s The Art of Hitting .300 to see what approach, or combination of approaches, most appealed to her.) Clare obviously wants a contemporary to succeed. She wonders, though, how Goodrum got the job. “I looked for baseball jobs for what, two-three years? And they never posted anything like this on the MLB bulletin board. I mean, how do women get hired to all these great jobs in baseball?” I think it has something to do with an old-boys’ network, except the connections wrought from experience have been replaced with ones based more on school and analytic connections. I also think some day in the not-too-distant future, there’s going to be a great reckoning and a restoration of a more traditional approach to the game. Then it’s going to be a matter of last-hired, first-fired. Watch your back, kid.

How It Came to Be

My, how the anniversaries just keep piling up. Thursday marked the 120th birthday of major league baseball as we know it with the advent of the American League. A story in yesterday’s Tribune noted that Charles Comiskey laid the groundwork for getting his St. Paul Minnesota-based team big league status in 1899. Comiskey and the Cubs negotiated an agreement that allowed him to relocate his team to Chicago with the proviso these future White Sox would not play north of 35th Street in Chicago; at the time, the Cubs were based on the West Side. They moved north to the corner of Addison and Clare, taking over the home of the failed Chicago Whales of the Federal League, in 1916. Thus began the North Side-South divide in Chicago baseball that continues to this day. A few miscellaneous notes here, if I may. When the Sox opened Comiskey Park in July of 1910, the surrounding area was more industrial than residential; it was easier to walk to the park than live by it. An aerial photo, taken some time after the outfield was double-decked in 1927 and before lights were installed in 1939, shows ample parking east and west of the ballpark with a city park just to the north. There were Black-occupied homes across 35th Street that, for people in need of an excuse, long fueled talk about Comiskey Park being located in a “bad” neighborhood. But African-Americans tended to be Sox fans, if only because of the relative closeness of Black neighborhoods to the park vs. faraway Wrigley, and they also watched the Chicago American Giants play Negro Leagues’ games there. In other words, the ballpark was one of the few public spaces in Chicago shared by both races. All that parking from early-on made it doubly easy to get to Comiskey. Things changed in the 1960s because of white flight, but not around the park. The neighborhoods of Bridgeport and Armour Square stayed white, but places fans drove from or took the streetcar (and, later, the bus) from didn’t. Once those fans moved, it was a challenge to get them back to watch the Sox, no matter how much parking there was. Now, for Wrigley Field—day baseball may have saved it from the eventual fate of Comiskey Park. Anyone who’s been to a game on the North Side knows there’s little to no parking adjacent to the park or walking distance from it; better to take public transportation. Had P.K. Wrigley followed through on his plans just before the start of WW II to install lights, he likely would have set into motion his ballpark’s demise. After 1945, the demographics around Wrigley changed markedly, not so much by color but class. Those blocks and blocks of two-flats and apartments became what at the time was referred to by the euphemism of “seedy,” not exactly the environment fans wanted to traverse on their way to the bus or “L” after a game. Day baseball, though, didn’t come with the same fears. A certain somebody I know often went to Wrigley Field from her suburban home because her parents weren’t worried about their daughter getting home late, I’m pretty sure my in-laws would’ve felt differently in 1969 or ’70 about games with a 7 PM starting time. All this talk about ballparks makes me want to take my future grandchild to a game. But first I’ll have to explain why there’s only one real ballpark in town.

Happy Anniversary

Well, this one sure snuck up on me. Forty years ago today, AL owners approved the sale of the White Sox from Bill Veeck to a group headed up by Jerry Reinsdorf. That’s one World Series title in the four decades since, in case anyone is wondering. Phil Rosenthal of the Tribune took readers on a stroll down memory lane this morning. Did you know Reinsdorf told Trib columnist David Condon in 1980, “I’ve always looked at the ownership of a baseball franchise as a public trust, maybe even a charitable thing. I’m serious about that . I never did forgive Walter O’Malley for moving the Dodgers from Brooklyn [where Reinsdorf was born and raised] to Los Angeles.” I’m sure I read that quote 40+ years ago and remembered it when Reinsdorf threatened to move the team to Florida in 1988. Maybe he was confused and meant to say owning a ballclub had something to do with the “public trough,” not “public trust.” But I shouldn’t get too mad. It is what it is, as my late sister Betty used to say. Civic Chicago wanted Reinsdorf to have his shiny new mall nearly as much as he did; call it muscle-flexing for all the other cities to see. And, truth be told, I’m not sure there’s a scenario where Comiskey Park survives much beyond 1990, if even that long. Bill Veeck wasn’t the type to ask someone else to build him a stadium, nor was Veeck the type to hang around for long; Veeck owned the Sox only from 1959-61 and again from 1976-1980. Something that’s always bothered me about Veeck is why he didn’t seek out more investors after the 1977 season, the year of the “South Side Hitmen.” The Sox drew close to 1.7 million fans, fifth best out of fourteen AL teams. That should’ve drummed up interest, unless Veeck always planned on being a short-term owner who didn’t want to have to pay off a lot of partners when he sold the team. More than Veeck or Reinsdorf, my two nominees for greatest White Sox owners ever are the Allyn brothers, Arthur and John, together or separately, they owned the Sox from 1961-1975. These were the best of times and mostly not. Both Allyns received offers to sell the team so it could be moved, but they never did. My point? I recently saw a news photo on eBay from 1967 of Arthur Allyn posing in front of a sketch for a proposed sports’ complex on the lakefront. I can’t remember if the caption mentioned who’d be funding it, but I suspect Allyn would’ve wanted some sort of public funding at the least. And he definitely wanted out of 35th and Shields. I also realize that Veeck may have inadvertently added years to Comiskey Park’s existence when he traded away all that young talent—Battery, Callison, Cash, Mincher, Romano—after the 1959 season. Call me a hopeless optimist, but that hitting combined with the pitching coming up through the organization—Horlen, Locker, Peters plus John and Wilhelm from trades—should have been good for a pennant or two by 1965. You think Mayor Richard J. Daley wouldn’t have then been tempted to build his beloved baseball team a perfectly symmetrical, if dreadful, new stadium? Jerry Reinsdorf was the owner who tore down Comiskey Park, but I doubt anyone in his place would’ve done differently. Sometimes you just don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. Happy anniversary.

Hall of Fame Observations, Part II

Since November, Joe Posnanski of The Athletic has been doing a series on 100 players who should be in the Hall of Fame. Posnanski ended Tuesday with his number-one choice, a fellow by the name of Minnie Minoso. Posnanski wrote, “Every day that he [Minoso] is not in the Hall of Fame is a day that the Hall of Fame itself is diminished.” Amen to that. So, what’s kept Minoso out of Cooperstown all these years? Let’s start with a reason Posnanski can barely allude to: Chicago ain’t New York. Minoso had a great rookie year in 1951, batting .326 with 112 runs scored and 76 RBIs; he also led the AL in triples and stolen bases. Pretty good but not good enough to win Rookie of the Year honors. Those went to Yankees’ infielder Gil McDougald, who hit .306 with 72 runs scored and 63 RBIs. This is what Posnanski writes: “It remains unclear how Minoso lost the Rookie of the Year award to Gil McDougald in 1951.” It remains unclear only to those blind to the obvious, Joe. Posnanski also mentions that Bill Veeck giving Minoso a handful of at-bats in 1976 at the age of 50 and again in 1980 amounted to a “stunt,” which sounds about right. But there has to be something more to explain it, and this is where WAR comes in, yet again. Posnanski mentions all the intangibles that equations fail to capture. Minoso was both the first Black MLB ballplayer in Chicago and the first Black Latin major leaguer. Consider that Minoso had to deal with everything Black American ballplayers confronted in the 1940s and ’50s plus the added burden of being seen as “foreign,” or Black and foreign. Not all fans loved Minoso the way South Siders did. (I saw Minoso at a Sox fan convention ca. 2011, and he was treated with what might be best called enthusiastic reverence. He also cut a fine figure in his three-piece suit.) I suspect that held for players and coaches, even those who shared a dugout with him. Also consider that Minoso didn’t debut until age 25 (or 28, it’s unclear), which makes those 1963 career hits, 1136 runs scored and 1023 RBIs all the more impressive. Another 79 hits from his Negro Leagues’ stint would give Minoso a .2987 BA. We round up, yes? Baseballreference.com gives Minoso a 50.2 WAR. That feels more than a tad low, I’d say. But what do I know compared to all those analytic types out there?

Hall of Fame Observations, Part I

Clare was having a good day yesterday pregnancy-wise, which means she called to report the Hall-of-Fame voting results, a big fat zero for this year’s candidates. My daughter was happy Curt Schilling didn’t get in based on stupid remarks he made about softball. I’m happy because I question his analytics-driven bona fides. Allow me this story first. In graduate school, we were made to believe that the future of understanding the past would come through the application of “quantitative methods,” as it was known; think sabermetrics applied to history. One of the purportedly great works to employ this approach was Time on the Cross, which concerned American slavery. The authors basically concluded that slavery worked, sort of. Southern agriculture was more efficient than its Northern, free, counterpart, and that was the result of the complex interplay between master and slave. Decades later, and I can still fall into the jargon. Consider this passage in regards whipping on a Louisiana plantation with “about 200 slaves, of whom about 120 were in the labor force [!]. The record shows that over the course of two years a total of 160 whippings were administered, an average of 0.7 whippings per hand per year. About half the hands were not whipped at all during the period.” The authors also noted that, in many ways, “whipping was as mildly applied as the corporal punishment normally practiced within families today.” The numbers in the first passage above were turned into a bar graph, as if that mitigated the horror. Long story short, historians aren’t so cavalier when crunching numbers these days. With luck, maybe a similar discretion will come to baseball analytics. Because, as the saying goes, figures don’t lie, figurers do. If I read baseballreference.com correctly, Schilling with his 216 regular-season wins and 11-2 postseason record possesses the metrics that make him HOF worthy. Plug in the numbers, and Schilling’s WAR comes out to 79.5. Tommy John, with 288 regular-season wins and a 6-3 postseason records, rates a WAR of only 61.6. So, if the numbers strip away subjectivity, or perhaps you say bias, then please explain why it took Bert Blyleven with his 94.5 WAR nineteen years to get into Cooperstown. Gosh, did it have something to do with Blyleven never playing in a major media market as opposed to Schilling, who spent the bulk of his career in media-saturated Philadelphia and Boston? If Schilling wore his bloody sock for the White Sox in 2005, I bet he wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near that 71 percent of the vote he just did. Speaking of the South Side, ex-Sox left-handed Mark Buehrle garnered 11 percent of the vote and thus stays on the ballot. Maybe character counts, after all. That, or two no-hitters, including a perfect game. I could note here that Buehrle has a 59.1 WAR and two fewer career wins than Schilling, but that would just be more figures, and we know what that leads to.

Perspective

In the last ten years of his life, my father-in-law would often tell a story, always unprompted. We could be taking him to the Czech Plaza, his favorite restaurant, down the street from us or visiting in his rec room. “Do you know what my favorite time was then?” he’d ask Michele. At first, she answered with, “No, Dad, what?” until he had asked this particular question so often she responded with, “Yes, I do.” The “when” concerned the time Bob Harris and his young family of five still lived in a two-bed apartment in Chicago’s Lincoln Square neighborhood on the North Side. And it would be Sunday. That was the day a father and his not-yet ten-year old would venture out for a walk to the drugstore; he bought tobacco of some sort and made sure his little girl had whatever Colorforms she wanted. The story grated on me because if my wife was rendered ten again, that made me all of twelve and safely out of the picture. I don’t take well to being rendered invisible. But I had to cut the man some slack. He met the love of his life when he was just eight years old, and that’s much sadder than it sounds because they first crossed paths in an orphanage, put there by mothers unable to cope with the burdens of parenting alone. Then, when Bob Harris was nineteen, the Army stuck a bullseye on his back which the Chinese and North Koreans tried their best to shoot off. They mostly failed, save for the shrapnel he caught in one hand while carrying a BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) up and down the hills of the Korean Peninsula. And now I find myself suppressing my own favorite-time story, only my little girl isn’t ten. No, she’s twenty and standing in against pitchers who’d throw her high and tight. God, could she hit, and with power that belied a compact frame no more than 5’6”. Twice her sophomore year she hit ball that would’ve gone 450 feet or more had they been baseballs. But times don’t come back however much we want them to. So, I hope my daughter and son-in-law have their own favorite-time memories to cherish the way a veteran of the Korean War and the South Sider who married into his family were blessed with.

Breaking News

The last time Clare went hitting at Stella’s, she was already pregnant. Won’t that be a story to tell the grandchild? From what I’m told, the idea was to announce the news at Thanksgiving, only that holiday was postponed due to COVID. (Be advised that turkey for Thanksgiving pushed to mid-January tastes just as good.) Our daughter couldn’t see and didn’t want to tell us over the phone. So, Christmas Eve it was. My guess is that one perspective parent is hoping for an athlete who’ll play a spring sport, the other for a jock in the fall, if you will. Me, I just want a kid healthy and someone I can watch grow up. Oh, and a White Sox fan and a follower of any NFL team but the Packers.

Henry Aaron

Hank Aaron, or Henry Aaron as he preferred to be called, died today at the age of 86. No one in baseball ever hit more homeruns without benefit of performance-enhancing drugs. I can’t say that I ever saw Aaron play in person. My initial encounter with him came through Strat-O-Matic baseball. Once I became addicted to the board game in eighth grade, I did what any young White Sox fan would, seek out and play a team with honest-to-goodness power. In 1965 (or the spring of 1966, as Strat-O-Matic was always a year behind), that meant the Milwaukee Braves. What a team for me to manage, with a lineup featuring Aaron in addition to Felipe Alou, Rico Carty, Mack Jones, Eddie Mathews and Joe Torre. All these years later, and I can still name those players without needing to check with baseballreference.com. The Braves moved to Atlanta the next year, and for that an ex-owner of the White Sox played a major role. Thomas Reynolds, a Chicago lawyer, was part of a group that bought out the Comiskey-family share of the team in 1961only to fail in securing majority control. The group sold their interest in the Sox within a year and bought controlling interest in the Braves. I shudder to think what they would’ve done had they managed to win control of the Sox. Reynolds and his buddies moved the Braves because they couldn’t get lease concessions at County Stadium. “I would have made the same decision today,” Reynolds told a Tribune reporter for a 1987 profile after being named head of the new stadium authority. Comiskey Park didn’t stand a chance, or Chicago taxpayers, for that matter. Never had a less-deserving fox been put in charge of a chicken coup. Aaron didn’t feel the love from Atlanta fans the way he seems to have in Milwaukee, at least early on when the Braves were the darlings of Wisconsin and the upper Midwest. I imagine Milwaukee must’ve been a kind of oasis. When I played Aaron and the Braves or watched them on TV against the Cubs, I had no idea what any black player went through in the minor leagues, spring training or on the road in places like Cincinnati and St. Louis. I was a kid, and dumb that way. For whatever reason(s), many of my favorite Sox players early on were Black—Don Buford, Tommy McCraw, Floyd Robinson, Walt Williams. I can only imagine what they endured in order to reach the major leagues. For that, I can only feel shame. I’m thankful, though, to have watched their careers unfold and that of Henry Aaron. What a beautiful swing.

Poor, Poor Pitiful Me

For those of you keeping track, here are the destinations for ex-Cubs’ Kyle Schwarber, Jon Lester and Jose Quintana: Washington, Washington and Anaheim, respectively. Stay tuned for possible departures by Javy Baez, Kris Bryant and/or Anthony Rizzo. As someone who thinks—or maybe, thought—Theo Epstein is (was) headed to the Hall of Fame as the executive who broke two curses, that of the Bambino and Billy Goat, I’m amazed at what Epstein left behind. Or, should I say how little? It’s as if the entire organization cut back after 2016. The Cubs treated the draft like they were channeling the White Sox at their Kenny Williams’ worst. Ditto their recent free agent and international signings. To win, a team needs incoming talent to replace outgoing talent. The North Siders seem more intent on conducting a rebuild under cover of denial. I’d go so far as to say the Cubs’ front office is pushing this notion of the NL Central as the weakest division in all of baseball. That way, they can get fans to buy into the notion they’re competing along with everyone else—Pirates excepted, they seem to be incapable of competing—for a division title. Big deal, that. But it’s an important fig leaf for the Ricketts’ family. To admit to a rebuild invites fan criticism. With the Cubs, that’s going to start with ticket costs. Why should anyone have to pay premium prices for Dollar Store goods? Excuse me, I mean a rebuilding team. Depending on the survey, the Cubs either rank as the highest in ticket costs or in the top four. Salary dumps and rebuilds are tough to swallow with sky-high prices for a chaser. Better to be competing in a weak division than to be accused of gouging the fan base during yet another rebuild. Did I mention that Ricketts’ patriarch Joe wants to start a “trustworthy source of news and information”? Guess they won’t be covering sports, then.

And the Winner Is...

Stop the presses, hold that tweet. The Toronto Blue Jays have won the offseason. That is, if reports of the Jays signing outfielders George Springer and Michael Brantley are true, and there’s no reason to think otherwise. Oh, the folks at MLB.com, Thomas Harrigan in particular, are probably happy beyond belief. The Jays actually followed Harrigan’s encouragement to go big. Shame on you for not beating Toronto to the punch, Mets’ front office. You guys still have a front office, right? Then again, New York could argue they’re the ones who won the offseason by trading for shortstop Francisco Lindor and signing free-agent catcher James McCann. The Mets might also point out that the Jays have just added some seriously veteran talent at serious cost. The 31-year old Springer reportedly signed a six-year, $150 million deal while the 33-year old Brantley may want in the neighborhood of three years at the same $16 million per he earned last season with Houston. Not my money. Hey, here’s a thought—lock the Jays and Mets in a room with free-agent starter Trevor Bauer. Whichever team signs Bauer gets declared the official winner of the offseason. Then, maybe a few weeks later, we could start an actual season where the winning officially counts.

Career WAR, -0.1

Most every day I check on eBay for White Sox photos, especially from the 1930s and ’40s. I like to imagine my father as a young man rooting for his favorite baseball team. Pictures give faces to names. Last week, I came across what looks to be a “real photo postcard,” autographed by the player shown. That would be Val Heim, who in his only major-league season of 1942 batted .200, with nine hits in 45 at-bats with 7 RBIs. The 21-year old Heim was a Wisconsin native playing in the Sox system since 1940. Maybe my father took notice of Heim, maybe not. Ed Bukowski turned 29 in August 1942; earlier that month, he’d become a father for the first time. He was also in a kind of limbo with the draft during WW II—married, not particularly young or educated (seventh grade), with a child on the way. The way he told the story, the day he went down to the draft board, they changed the eligibility rules, and he wasn’t called. So, instead of risking life and limb for his country over the next two to four years, my dad took a job with the Chicago Fire Department. He spent the next thirty-five years running in and out of burning buildings, instead. It was Heim who ended up serving; he joined the Navy following the ’42 season. According to his online obituary, early on Heim did what ballplayers often did in the service, play ball, but he also spent two years in the Pacific working with the Seabees, the Navy’s construction arm. A case of rheumatic fever in 1945 seems to have taken a toll on Heim’s baseball career; he played in the minors for another two years but never made it back to the majors. The opportunity to be a player-manager for a semi-pro team brought him to Nebraska, where he spent the rest of his life. He worked for a cement company; had a farm where he raised cattle; and lived to the age of 99 before dying in November of 2019. Heim had considerably more descendants than I do fingers and toes. The cake for his 99th birthday featured a period White Sox logo in frosting. Another obituary noted that the Sox invited Heim to spring training into his 90s. Val Heim earned himself a WAR rating of -0.1. I can only imagine what it would’ve been for Ed Bukowski, with even fewer stats that matter.

The Writing's on the Wall

The Tribune is continuing its death spiral with another round of buyouts. Among those leaving is Mark Gonzales, longtime beat writer for the Cubs. In bidding his colleague adieu yesterday, Paul Sullivan noted that, “Our current sports staff is smaller than our entire Preps Plus staff was back” in the late 1980s, when he started covering sports. Preps? It’s a word hardly seen in print (or online) these days. Basically, if you don’t play basketball or football, you won’t find reporters covering your game or meet. Clare played varsity softball her entire high school career, 2006-10. For her last two years, I “kept the book,” which entailed scoring games; computing batting and earned-run averages; rating umpires (bad Doug was forever whispering in my ear whenever I performed that task); and calling both Chicago dailies with the score and highlights when we won. Junior year, Clare hit .425; senior year, she “slipped” to .350 while doubling her homerun production to ten. All four years, her teams won regionals in the playoffs before losing in sectionals. In other words, there was a good chance of seeing my daughter’s name in print in the sports’ section back then. Early on junior year, she let it be known she didn’t want me to put her name ahead of everyone else’s on the team. My daughter was being both a good teammate and pragmatic; too much Clare in the box scores and egos might get bruised. I did as instructed, and nobody ever complained, at least to me, about what names ran in the papers. The Sun-Times had an annual feature in the spring, the best hundred Chicago softball players; Clare made the list at second base her senior year. That doesn’t exist anymore, or regular coverage for softball in either paper. Junior year, Clare had a walk-off single in extra innings to earn Morton a split against mighty New Trier; three times that year she drove in the winning or go-ahead run in extra innings. It was that kind of spring. A reporter for the Sun-Times spent the second game in our dugout. I made sure he got everyone’s name right and told him about Clare’s clutch hitting; the online story even included a quote from the hitting hero. We raised our daughter to avoid speaking in cliches. Today, we wouldn’t bother. Nobody’s around to cover the games to tell readers why it matters.

Is This Anything?

David Letterman used to do a bit on Late Night, “Is This Anything?” I wonder what he and bandleader Paul Shaffer would decide about the Marlins’ decision this week to create a new position, vice president of diversity, equality and inclusion. Team CEO Derek Jeter sure sounded impressed with what his organization had done, by “reinforcing our organizational priority to exceed expectations in the areas of diversity, equity and inclusion,” as Jeter put it in a statement released by the team. Inclusion. Does that mean women in the dugout as coaches and players? If not, in the end it won’t float and won’t mean anything.

The McCaskeys and the Bourbons

Never has a human being needed a sudden case of laryngitis as when Bears’ team president George McCaskey gave an ill-advised interview the other day on sports-talk radio. McCaskey’s performance reminded me of an old saying, that the Bourbon dynasty of France forgot little because it had learned little. That’s the McCaskeys in a nutshell. You see, the Munster in chief feels the pain of Bears’ nation. “I get it,” team-president McCaskey said while obviously not. “You deserve your Bears being winners. The decisions we’re announcing [to keep GM Ryan Pace and head coach Matt Nagy] might not be the easiest or most popular, but we believe they’re the best decisions for the Bears.” But fear not, Bears’ fans, for even a Bourbon got it right once in a while. When Louis XV said, “After me, the flood,” he sure knew what he was talking about, as Louis XVI could attest. George, I hope you know how to swim. That, or work out an escape plan for when the peasants come.

OPs

It was Eddie, our truck driver at Industrial Steel and Wire, who introduced me to the existence of OPs. “They’re the best cigarettes,” he confided in what seems a lifetime ago when I drove a forklift to help pay for graduate school. Being naïve beyond belief, I bit and asked, “What exactly are OPs?” to which Eddie answered, “‘other people’s.’” The writers for MLB.com are great at spending OPs money. On Monday, Thomas Harrigan wrote that, even after acquiring shortstop Francisco Lindor and signing free-agent catcher James McCann, the Mets “shouldn’t stop now.” No, they should make a push for free-agent outfielder George Springer. Ditto the White Sox, Braves, and Blue Jays. Nothing like a bidding war to help stoke the hot stove league in mid-January. This is par for the course. Beat writers on the site follow every free agent as though his signing will clinch a World Series for his new team. No, the signing after, or the signing after that. Whatever gets them to the necessary word count that day. Truth be told, I play the game of OPs, too, sometimes as a general manager, other times as an owner. It must be the way I was raised, or what I saw as a young Sox fan, but I’m slow to spend money or make moves that cost or affect young talent, even if it’s all make-believe. Springer to the Sox? I mean, why? Springer, 31, became a free agent after turning down the Astros’ qualifying offer of $18.9 million. Do you think he’s going to take a mere $120 million over six years? How about $140 million? What about more? If the Sox were to do as Harrigan wants them to, they immediately limit their ability to make other moves down the road. They also in effect say they’re never going to develop an impact outfielder anytime soon because they already have Luis Robert and Eloy Jimenez. In that case, they want to stop drafting outfielders. And how long until Springer’s legs give out and necessitate giving him playing time at DH? And if you already have Andrew Vaughn there, what, are you going to trade Vaughn because a big free-agent contract says you have to? These kind of questions go with any of the free agents the MLB writers are touting, whether DJ LeMahieu, Trevor Bauer, Nelson Cruz or anyone in between. Only the team executives who do the actual signing have to worry about answers. Call it an OPs problem.

Collaborators

Well, the McCaskey family definitely comes from the “there is no bad publicity” school of thought. Yesterday, team chairman George McCaskey and team president Ted Phillips joined with GM Ryan Pace and head coach Matt Nagy for a Zoom version of the annual team season debriefing. Or should I say they all collaborated on presenting a united front marching into the next season where mediocracy’s the ceiling? Before I go any further, let me give a shout-out to Kevin Fishbain of The Athletic for sitting through what must’ve felt like old-school root canal. Fishbain counted a minimum of fifteen times when the benighted four uttered some form of the word “collaboration.” If you feel a need for examples or punishment, read Fishbain. Whether or not you do, know this about the clown show up at Halas Hall—none of these dolts considered darker connotation of the term, as in anyone who collaborated with the Nazis during WWII. Unless, of course, they did know and went ahead throwing the term around anyhow, in which case they’re even dolt-ier. What, “consensus” was booked all day?

Step on a Crack

Call me superstitious, whatever. But I didn’t like the comment by new White Sox closer Liam Hendriks, as reported in today’s Sun-Times. Hendriks admitted on a podcast last week, “I’m an egotistical narcissist [if one, then the other, no?] on the mound who just believes I am better than everybody.” Fans and teammates should be OK with this because “I want to win a ring. Everything else comes second.” Hendriks also wants to do so well that his stats “make sure that [his] deal looks like a bargain.” Yes, I know this is what most players say with their inside voice, but, whether or not he knows it, Hendriks is tempting fate in ways that only Sox fans can appreciate. Allow me three examples. Be warned, for some of you this may be a stroll down memory lane for masochists only. In 1967, the Sox finished a mere three games out of first place, and it wasn’t because of the pitching; the team’s 2.45 ERA led all of baseball. However, the team’s .225 BA ranked tied for second worst in all of baseball. So GM Ed Short went out and got Luis Aparicio and Russ Snyder from the O’s along with Tommie Davis from the Mets. The South Siders proceeded to lose their first ten games of the ’68 season on their way to recording twenty-two fewer wins than the year before. In 1983, the Sox won the AL West only to fall to Baltimore in the Championship Series. GM Roland Hemond [in many ways the best GM in team history] pulled off what looked to be a master stroke in the offseason by plucking Tom Seaver off the Mets. Nope, no repeat of a division title. That would have to wait another ten years to happen. Lastly, we have 2005, the year of the Championship. GM Kenny Williams borrowed a page from the Bill Veeck playbook by refusing to stand pat in the wake of a World Series appearance. Too bad Williams repeated Veeck’s mistake of trading away young talent in the process. Oh, Jim Thome hit majestic homeruns, but at the cost of Aaron Rowand and Gio Gonzalez. Javier Vavquez was OK as a starter, but not in exchange for Chris Young and his 191career homers. Now, with Hendriks popping off, it feels like déjà vu all over again. Of course, I’m just a guy typing away in the January cold of his bungalow basement. I could be entirely wrong. I hope.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Enough of the Bears. Let’s talk baseball and the White Sox, who reportedly are about to sign free-agent closer Liam Hendriks to a three-year, $54-million contract with a team option for the fourth year. The buyout and year-four salary are both for $15 million. Nice work, if you can get it. Hendriks isn’t exactly what you’d call an early bloomer. He was signed by the Twins as an 18-year old out of Perth, Australia, and made his big-league debut four years later. Between then and now, Hendriks has been waived three times and traded three times. He didn’t have what you might call a good year until age 26 and has amassed 39 of his 40 career saves in just the last two seasons, both with the As. For what it’s worth, Hendriks turns 32 next month. Looking at his so-so stats from ages 22 to 29, I’d say it’s pretty obvious that the hard-throwing right-hander crossed paths with another Ray Berres somewhere along the way to his big payday. That’s a good thing, in so far as it shows a ballplayer capable of taking stock; deciding to get serious; and listening to what his pitching coach has to say. There’s also an element of luck involved. A Ray Berres only comes around every so often. Just ask Don Cooper. Hendriks’ journey also reveals, however unintentionally, the depth of baseball’s commitment to an all-boys’ club; don’t be confused by the latest signing of a female coach who gets assigned to the low minors. Look at what the Twins did. They either sent a scout half-way around the world, literally, or they had a system in place for searching out far-flung talent. And if Hendriks had been a softball player? I doubt he would’ve had a chance to work through the injuries and mediocre results that marked the early part of his career. In sports, most of all baseball, it’s good to be a guy.

The Casualties of War, and Bears' Football

With a minute left in yesterday’s Bears-Saints’ game with New Orleans up 21-3, Bears’ quarterback Mitch Trubisky did what he does best against good teams—he led a scoring drive in garbage time. Final score: New Orleans 21 Chicago 9. The question now is, do those numbers force the McCaskeys into action? Back in the day, Pittsburgh had it “Steel Curtain” defense. With the Bears, it’s more a wall of butter, at room temperature with a ready supply of hot knives for the opposing offense. Back in the day, good Bears’ teams didn’t have much of an offense outside of a running back or two; the defense could always be counted on to score some points. The new Bears’ “Butter-D” melts before any challenge. Captain Visor gibbered on after the game about what needs to be done, including something about learning from the loss. Captain, my captain, you’ve just finished up three years at the helm. How much more time do we need to see nobody’s buying what you’re selling? Ditto GM Ryan Pace, a front-office presence for twice as long. Like Rick Renteria of the White Sox, Nagy is big on extolling team culture. With Renteria, Sox pitchers couldn’t reward their manager’s faith in them with a few scoreless innings when it counted in the playoffs against Oakland. With Nagy, Trubisky couldn’t deliver or anyone else on offense or anyone on defense. Those nine penalties showed a culture short on discipline, Coach. So, now what? People are going to get tossed overboard, for sure, but not the McCaskeys. Ownership is a blessing, especially for the incompetent.

The Fog of War, and Bears' Football

They just can’t help themselves. Members of the Chicago sports’ media are treating today’s Bears-Saints’ game like it were the Moon landing. Come to think of it, Drew Brees could in fact put up some astronomical numbers a few hours from now. I seem to remember that both the Cubs and White Sox made the playoffs way back in late September. Combined, Chicago playoff baseball didn’t generate this kind of coverage. Heck, there never would’ve been a Chicago Fire had the Bears been around in 1871. The Munsters would’ve sucked all the air out Chicago, Cook County and points beyond. Oh, sports’ people are sounding appropriately skeptical, but that skepticism gets aired and printed day after day after day. On Friday, WGN-TV ran an hour-long preview of a wildcard game. This was separate from the Bears’ coverage you could expect on the sports’ segment of WGN nightly news and the half-hour sports’ program that follows. What did Roberto Duran say, No Mas? Anything less than a win, and the McCaskeys should clean house. My prediction? The Saints keep marching into the end zone to the tune of a 41-17 win. I’ll be happy to be proven wrong.

What I Kept

For reasons to be discussed at a later date, I decided to do some before-spring cleaning today. Anyone interested in Baseball Digests and Who’s Who in Baseball dating to the early 1970s are welcome to do some recycling-cart diving if they want. The annual baseball magazines go that far back, too, and you can take them if you can reach them. I’d advise against trying to sell anything on eBay, though. That would pretty much be a waste of time and energy. Value is in the eyes of the beholder, and if I’m tossing this stuff… What got dumped allowed me quicker access to stuff I kept, like the 1964 White Sox program, which lists my friends Jeoff Long and Ray Berres. The handwriting on the scorecard isn’t mine, so I must’ve bought this at a memorabilia shop or sale. But I definitely remember buying the March 1969 Baseball Digest “special edition” of “Here Come 363 Rookies.” Randy Bobb and Bob Fenwick, anybody? I also know my sister Betty bought me the Oilers-Browns’ program for the game on December 7, 1970. I was a college freshman on Christmas break; the flight to Houston was the first time I ever flew on a jet. Big sister wanted to impress little brother by taking him to a football game in the Astrodome, and I was suitably impressed. And when Oiler’s quarterback Charley Johnson lined up a good six feet behind his center, I learned about the shotgun formation. Final score: Cleveland 21, Houston 10. The Denver Bears’ program from 1975 dates to a summer road trip I took with my friend Dan. The Bears were affiliated with the White Sox at the time, so we went to check out the action at Mile High Stadium. The Bears had a roster that included Lamar Johnson, Chet Lemon and Tony LaRussa; the first two became favorites of mine. The Bears were going up against a Tulsa Drillers’ team that included the likes of Mike Easler, Keith Hernandez and Jerry Mumphrey. The Drillers also had Wayne Nordhagen and Mike Proly, both of whom would play for the Sox. Don’t ask me the final score, though I do remember thinking Johnson and Lemon could hit. In that I would be proven right.

Boo-hoo

Ken Rosenthal wants you to know he’s suffering, that voting for the Hall of Fame is a pain, literally. Boo-hoo, Ken, boo-hoo. Check some form of identification that lists your age. If it says you’re over twenty-one, act like it. Rosenthal wrote a piece in today’s The Athletic about how he agonized over the ten candidates he picked to send to Cooperstown. “So many of my choices were people of questionable character, [at first] I called it my hold-my-nose ballot,” he wants you to know. “But the more I think about it, the sick-to-my-stomach ballot would be a more accurate description. I voted out of obligation and ended up feeling like I did the wrong thing, not knowing what the right thing was.” So says the ten-year old trying to work out whether or not to steal that candy bar. Rosenthal’s miseries are the product of steroids (Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Gary Sheffield); domestic abuse allegations (Bonds again, Omar Vizquel, Andruw Jones ); and questionable behavior, whether involving sex (Clemens), alcohol (Todd Helton) or a toxic mouth (Curt Schilling). Woe is Ken. The rules don’t require Rosenthal to vote for ten candidates, and he’s already pointed out the problems touching seven of his choices. What he needs to do next, but what he seems incapable of doing, is to decide that character counts. Yes, Ty Cobb was a racist and a garbage can of a human being. If Rosenthal is looking for consistency, he can lead a campaign to get Cobb and his ilk out of Cooperstown or cast an addendum in bronze noting that times have changed since the Georgia Peach’s 1936 induction. Next, because Rosenthal is so committed to a “guiding philosophy” of “pick the best players,” he should erase his vote for Bonds, Clemens and Sheffield; they were all cheats. If Shoeless Joe Jackson can’t get in the Hall, neither can they. Unless, of course, Rosenthal wants to lead a campaign on Jackson’s behalf. Most important of all, Rosenthal should find someone who actually knows the game of baseball; with luck, that person could show him why Helton and Schilling don’t belong. Hint: one guy played his entire career in Colorado, where altitude is Nature’s answer to PEDs, while the other guy is a figment of WAR and the ever-overheated imagination of East Coast sports’ types. Where was Mr. Bloody Sock when the White Sox came calling to Fenway in 2005? Cheats don’t get in the Hall, period. Everyone else gets a shot at redemption. If they can show contrition and convincing proof of a change in behavior over time, they can be voted in. There’s absolutely no rush Maybe an adult can impart this more-studied approach onto Rosenthal. Heaven knows he could use some help in growing up.

Bonus Autographs

This is the time to count blessings, when the world outside is a depressing Chicago gray. A dollar if you can tell the sky from the ground, and I’ll throw in that hint of fog for free. Blessing number one is being on the other side of COVID, ditto Michele. Blessing number two is having a daughter attentive to parents in distress (more on that later). Blessing number three is reaching over to check those White Sox team signed balls for two more autographs. Yup, got ’em. That would be Ray Berres and Johnny Sain, acknowledged in some parts as among the best, if not the best, pitching coaches of their respective times. Berres followed an eleven-year big-league career, mostly as a backup catcher in the NL, with an even longer run as Sox pitching coach, from 1949 to 1966 and again in 1969. Sain, as in “Spahn and Sain, and pray for rain,” was hired—along with Chuck Tanner and Roland Hemond, which is sort of like lightning striking 35th and Shields three straight times—in late 1970 and handled the pitching staff through 1975. Berres and Sain were the kind of coach Don Cooper could only dream of being. Put another way, those two forgot more about pitching than “Coop” ever knew. As ever when discussing coaches, there’s a chicken-and-egg argument that you have to confront: Did Berres and Sain make pitchers great, or did great pitchers make the reputations of Berres and Sain? Consider Leo Mazzone, who had Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux and John Smoltz in Atlanta. Can you name me anyone else Mazzone is credited with turning into a topnotch starter or reliever? I can’t. And Mazzone’s subsequent two years in Baltimore weren’t exactly memorable. What it all comes down to is, certain coaches and players “click.” That was probably the case with Mazzone and his trio of HOFers and maybe for Sain and Wilbur Wood, who went from relieving to starting, winning 106 games while Sain served as his pitching coach. I did read, however, that Tommy John wasn’t a Sain fan. No “click” between them, if you will. Berres may be the more intriguing figure. The big name to connect to him would be Billy Pierce more than anybody. So, how’d he stay employed for so long? Berres was the master at reviving careers, for a season or two if not more. A 39-year old Early Wynn goes 22-10 for the pennant-winning Sox in 1959 while Bob Shaw comes out of nowhere to win a career-best eighteen games that same year. Berres had the same kind of success with the likes of Dick Donovan and Ray Herbert, claimed off the scrap heap that was Kansas City to go 20-9 for the Sox in 1962. The mid-’60s were also the time of Eddie Fisher, Joel Horlen, Gary Peters and Juan Pizarro. Oh, and Hoyt Wilhelm kept doing what he did to get into the Hall of Fame those four years Berres was his pitching coach. Today’s The Athletic has a story about how the lack of access to in-game video affected players like Christian Yelich and Javy Baez. I wonder what Ray Berres and Johnny Sain could’ve done with the technology available to new Sox pitching coach Ethan Katz. Maybe Katz should see what it would take to channel Berres and Sain. It couldn’t hurt.

Dead Bears Walking

What you saw late yesterday afternoon into early evening, ladies and gentlemen, was the Chicago Bears soiling themselves yet again against nemeses Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers to the tune of 35-16. The Munsters actually lost by fewer points up in Green Bay back in November. Remember when you all thought it couldn’t get much worse than that 41-25 debackle? Well, keep Sunday’s result in mind, and get ready for Drew Brees and the Saints on Sunday. This is all you need to know about quarterback Mitch Trubisky: He threw four absolutely perfect strikes, to members of the Green Bay secondary, though only one went for an interception. I mean on-the-numbers’ perfect. This reminds me of the old saying that defensive backs are just wide receivers with bad hands. Anyway, you’re not going to win with a quarterback who throws four interception-worthy passes every game, which is pretty much what Trubisky does. You want to know the difference between our quarterback and their quarterback? The Bears were just two seconds short of controlling the ball eleven minutes longer than the Packers had it. Some bad guys don’t need to show their badges. Aaron Rodgers doesn’t need much time to show how bad he can make the Bears look. Captain Visor was already talking in today’s Sun-Times about how he thinks the Munsters’ defense is “going to be excited to be able to get an opportunity to play the Saints again.” Oh, give me a break. If Khalil Mack and company are excited, what does that make Drew Brees, over the moon? By the way, that vaunted Bears’ defense managed to sack Rodgers once. Yeah, I’d say “over the moon” is pretty much how the Saints are feeling right about now. I say let everyone keep their jobs, provided the Munsters upset the Saints and the team that would be next. Yup, Green Bay. Anything short of two more wins, and it’s time for the McCaskeys to clean house, if they know how. Maybe Brees can drop 40-plus points on their legacy franchise. That might motivate the clan to roll up their collective sleeves and get to serious work, for a change. Or not.

Christmas Gifts

Christmas Gifts I never got into baseball cards, probably a combination of not liking chewing gum and being cheap. Lately, though, I’ve taken to collecting White Sox team autographed baseballs. Not exactly cheap, but so be it. I bought the first ball, from 1966, a year before Clare was born, actually. I probably would’ve bought more, but babies have a way of soaking up your free time and spare cash. In other words, adieu, memorabilia shows. But in the last year or two, I’ve been making up for lost time. My main focus is balls from 1962-1980, or Charlie Maxwell to Bob Molinaro, if you will. Or, better yet, from most of grade school to some of grad school. You could say Santa took care of sixth and seventh grade for me with balls from 1964 and 1965. One important thing to know about collecting autographed balls is to check for signatures first; a ball could be the right year and still not have the player(s) you want. Maybe he didn’t feel like signing that day, or—and this is really worth keeping in mind—maybe he wasn’t on the team yet. So, Santa did his due diligence before buying both baseballs. The one name I wanted on the ’64 baseball belonged Jeoff Long, a 22-year old first baseman/outfielder purchased by the Sox from the Cardinals on July 7. I think I read in a program that Long was some kind of golfer, and that’s always stayed with me. In December of ’64, Long and pitcher Ray Herbert were traded to the Phillies for left fielder Danny Cater and infielder Lee Elia (yes, that Lee Elia, the Cubs’ manager who called out Cubs’ fans in a rant that has taken on a life of its own). One of the signatures I wanted on the ’65 ball was Cater, a good hitter we just couldn’t seem to find a spot for, who was then traded to the A’s on May 27, 1966, for infielder Wayne Causey. That means the 1966 ball I have, signed by both Causey and Elia, dates to sometime after May 27th. Along with Cater, the other name I wanted on the ’65 ball belonged to pitcher Greg Bollo. I admit to being intrigued by Bollo because of his name; something about the letter B, I guess. Anyway, the Sox signed Bollo in 1964 out Western Michigan University and put him on the big-league roster for all of 1965, during which he pitched just 22.2 innings. In all likelihood, that means the Sox were afraid of losing Bollo in the first-year players’ draft, as had happened with Denny McLain. For what it’s worth, that draft is long gone. Over the years, I’d wondered what happened to Bollo, until I ran across an interview Tommy John did with CNN Money in 2007. John pitched for the Sox from 1965-1971 and called Bollo someone “who could really throw the ball,” until the removal of bone chips ended his effectiveness. Now, to have the ball to go with the explanation of what happened to one of the players who signed it, that’s what I call a perfect Christmas present.

Big News, Kind of

San Antonio Spurs’ assistant coach Becky Hammon made history Wednesday night when she became the first women to coach an NBA game. Hammon got her chance after head coach Greg Popovich was ejected in the second quarter of a 121-107 loss to the Lakers. Big news? Yes. Sort of. According to my research, Hammon is one of six female assistant coaches in the NBA this year. So, I guess that theoretically, should six head coaches get ejected, six female assistants could, again theoretically, take over. From as far as I can tell, the NFL has four female assistant coaches. The only thing here is that the next NFL head coach to be ejected will be the first. As for baseball, there’s one female coach, Alyssa Nakken of the Giants. She might get to manage if the manager, bench coach and third base coach all got tossed, though I’m not even sure Nakken is in the dugout for all games. Regardless, we’re either talking accidents or hypotheticals here. The question is, how long before women serve as head coaches or managers, and for that I won’t hold my breath.