Friday Night Lights

I spent last night in the visitors’ grandstand as my son-in-law made his high school head-coaching debut against a school named for a scientist who worked on developing poison gas during WWI. Go figure. The field was alive with adolescent energy. Players played; cheerleaders cheered (and flipped and got tossed into the air and built pyramids); members of the marching band marched. Everyone else under the age of eighteen spent the night in perpetual motion. I wonder, if you transported a grandstand into the Sahara Desert, would these same kids keep walking up and down the steps, congregating in groups and showing off for people they want to show off to, until the heat felled them all? I think so. It was a study in youthful human interaction, and I had a front-row seat. And, at my age, it’s not like anyone could see me. Chris’s team won the second half, but not by enough to win the game. His athletic director, though, was pretty happy, because the team barely showed up last year against the same opponent. So, it was a moral victory, considerably more than the White Sox earned in losing to the visiting Diamondbacks, 7-2. Arizona center fielder Alek Thomas offered up yet another reason to fire general manager Rick Hahn. We took Nick Madrigal and Steele Walker before Arizona nabbed the pride of Mt. Carmel High School in the second round of the 2018 draft. Madrigal has since been shipped off to the Cubs, where he can do that Nicky Two Strike routine of his between stints on the IL, while Walker is on his third organization after being traded to the Rangers for Nomar Mazara (!). Back to Thomas—he made two first-rate catches in center field, the one against Jose Abreu probably saving two runs. Throw in a possible homerun-stealing catch by right fielder Daulton Varsho on Romy Gonzalez, and you would’ve thought it was the visitors who were charged up and in a pennant chase. After Adam Engel made the last out of the game, a crowd of just over 33,000 Sox fans took to booing. In his postgame news conference, “manager” Tony La Russa told reporters, “They have every right to be upset—at the team, management, whatever. They've got every right to do it.” [story on team website today] La Russa wasn’t done playing nice with the paying customers: “It's amazing fan support here, and I've got plenty of experience. But there ain't no free lunch. It's a two-way relationship. They support you and you've got to give back. So we've got to do more about giving back." This is equal parts sad and pathetic. Does La Russa think fans care that he respects them? Does he think this will save his job? He has no worries in that department, from what I can tell. Jerry Reinsdorf seems perfectly content to watch his friend finish out of the running this year, and let him do it again next year as well. I TIVO’d the game to watch when we came home. I saw better performance and coaching from the losing side in a high school football game than La Russa and his team could provide on a “professional” level. Mercy.