Recruiting

So, the September after her eligibility is over, Clare found herself in a Division I dugout yesterday, doing pitching stats.  What took her so long to get there, you might ask.

Basically, decisions based on a strategy.  Clare wanted to play Division I softball without having to go halfway around the world.  We made a list of four schools, but Valparaiso wasn’t on it.  The Crusaders just weren’t on our radar.  They didn’t conduct camps in our area; we didn’t know anyone who belonged to the program; and their coaches stayed away from the tournaments Clare’s travel teams played in.  The eggs in our basket consisted of Northwestern, De Paul, Loyola and UIC.

The first two got cut by junior year high school; wildcats and demons felt like too much of a stretch.  But Clare was there for everything Loyola and UIC had to offer.  A kid dives every which way during drills to draw the coach’s attention; e-mails her stats and schedule; then hopes.  UIC showed the greater interest of the two, and who knows what might have happened had they shown up for the tournament where Clare hit five homeruns in a weekend.  But they didn’t.  Instead, Elmhurst College kept track of the compact girl with oversized pop.  And the rest is history.

From what I could tell, my daughter didn’t let the past get in the way of her new job.  She pitched in for five hours’ worth of practice and saw how a D-I program worked.  Clare compared what the coach said to how she would do things.  As our old friend Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel might say, it’ll make for an interesting dialectic.  Personally, I can’t wait to see the results.

Chicken Little and the Busy Beaver

 Jay Cutler threw two interceptions, the Bears lost, and Cutler complained in post-game comments that the media was going to be all critical.  Better yet, several commentators declared the team’s playoff chances are in doubt, this after one game.  The sky is always falling during football season in Chicago.

My daughter, on the other hand, has been quietly going about her business as a graduate student at Valparaiso University.  Clare made sure to contact the softball coach before even arriving on campus.  Because of some arcane school rules, Clare can’t be an assistant coach this year, but she can help out.  That starts tomorrow, when she dons the tools of ignorance to help catch pitchers.

And so, quietly, a coach is born.

Bear Fans: Lemmings Drunk on Kool-Aid

Where are the Cubs and White Sox in today’s Sunday Tribune sports’ section, you may well ask.  Why, they’ve been exiled to page 13, which can only mean one things—the Bears are back in town.

The season’s kickoff at Soldier Field is a reminder, if anyone needs one, that Chicago is a football town.  It will always be Ditka before Banks, and I don’t really know why.  Chicago once offered work for muscle, the kind of trade a lot more common in football than baseball (think Luis Aparicio).  Chicago now resembles Silicon Valley and Wall Street more than it does the verses of a Sandburg poem, but the muscle thing has stuck over time.  New Yorkers never identified with the Giants the way we do with the Bears.

Yes, metro New York has two teams, and so did Chicago, the Arizona nee St. Louis Cardinals longtime denizens of the South Side, playing their home games at Comiskey Park.  This was my father’s team and probably would have been mine if the Bidwell family hadn’t been so incompetent.  George Halas ran them out of town after the 1959 season.  How best to describe Halas?  Think of a jerk with a little bit of smarts and an oversized ego.  Add a fedora for the complete picture.

Listen to Bear fans, and you’d think everyone should’ve stopped playing the game after Super Bowl XX.  We are the Bears, watch us shuffle…to the list of one-year wonders.  The ’69 Cubs can hold their heads high compared to these guys, starting with Da Coach.  Never has a man turned himself into a cliché for the sake of a few extra bucks the way Mike Ditka has.  

That said, I did try to become a true Bears’ fan back in high school.  I memorized the roster, listened to games on the radio (Jack Brickhouse and Ivr Kupcinet, two priceless foot-in-mouth announcers) and learned to hate the Packers, which I still do.  Then came the next season, and half those names I memorized were gone.  Jim Cadile and Rudy Kuechenberg, anyone?

Now, I pass for a social football fan, lest someone accuse me of belonging to ISIS.  It’s pretty much the same for Clare, who has to know about the game because of her boyfriend Chris.  He’s a graduate assistant for one of the top Division III programs in the nation, which basically means working 90 hours a week during the season to help coach the offensive line.  The pity is he also grew up playing baseball, with a solid catcher’s build and mentality.  If he were my kid, he would’ve stayed behind the plate.  

September Call-ups

This is the time of year when the also-ran teams call up their prospects to get a head start on next year.  September is spring training 2.0 in Chicago.

I remember the White Sox bringing up a young third baseman once.  He’s so good, I thought as a 16-year old evaluator of talent, he can’t miss.  And Bill Melton did win the AL homerun title in 1971.  Then he had to go fall off a roof in the offseason and screw up his back.

I also remember Grover “Deacon” Jones, who as a 22-year old phenom hit .409 for Dubuque in the Midwest League.  Jones slid headfirst into third during a spring training game and screwed up his shoulder.  He went on to become a pretty good major-league hitting coach.

The Cubs have most of their highly touted “core” kids up; we just have names, including Josh Phegley.  Maybe nothing will get screwed up this time. 

Oh, Those No-shows

Thank you, Cleveland, for helping prove a point (see yesterday’s entry).  On a Tuesday night with the temperature in the low 70s, the Indians drew all of 9,990 fans for their game against second-place Detroit.  Keep in mind that figure most likely represents tickets sold, not actual bodies in seats, and half of the people there were probably rooting for the Tigers.

But don’t expect Commissioner Bud to address baseball’s soft attendance.  That would be raining on a renaissance.

Empty Seats

Nobody has a lock on the American League Central Division, so you would think the first-place Royals and third-place Indians would have packed their respective ballparks on Labor Day.  Instead, just over 23,000 fans showed up for the Indians vs. the second-place Tigers while just under 22,000 made it for the Royals-Rangers’ game.  What gives?

The Indians, who drew a franchise-record 3.5 million fans in 1999, have drawn a paltry 1.2 million so far this year; the Royals may hit 1.8 million, considerably off their record of 2.5 million in 1989.  And my White Sox?  Well, they nearly broke three million in 2006, but they’ll be lucky to reach half that figure this season.  Call it fan fatigue the byproduct of hypermarketing.

The White Sox All-In ad campaign from 2011 is a perfect example.  “Are You All In?” the commercial asked.  Fans were supposed to pack U.S. Cellular to become the tenth man.  That’s what every team wants and tries for.   The only problem is, it gets to cost a lot of money after a while.

When the Indians drew their 3.5 million, fans made sacrifices to be all-in for their team; Peter was robbed to pay Paul down at the ticket office.  Only the Indians couldn’t get out of the first round of the playoffs, losing to the Red Sox in five after taking the first two games.  The fans were all in, but it didn’t matter.

You can tease a fan base for only so long before they turn on you.  Suddenly, the bills matter, and future education costs for those little Indians’ fans can’t be ignored any longer.  That’s how 3.5 million turns into 1.2 or thereabouts.  This isn’t a problem for baseball alone.  The Buffalo Bills used to be an NFL powerhouse, but losing four straight Super Bowls is never a good thing.  Now, the team is up for sale, and fans are worried it might relocate to Toronto.

Professional sports have yet to realize fans can’t be all-in if they’re all out of cash.    

 

You Couldn't Handle the Truth

 Adam Dunn was probably one of the most unpopular players on the White Sox over the last 25 years, if not more.  The numbing regularity of his strikeouts turned even the most patient of fans against him, but not the front office or his teammates.

GM Rick Hahn called Dunn “a great asset in the clubhouse the entire time he was here,” a sentiment echoed by team captain Paul Konerko.  “People on the outside can think what they want, but for me it’s simple,” said Konerko.  “He showed up to play every day.”

Wow, my father showed up to work like that, too, as a Chicago fireman who “honeymooned” driving a truck on his days off.  His schedule sometime lined up so that he worked thirteen straight days.  What would Konerko say to that?

Before free agency, ballplayers knew what it was like to be working stiff; everyone short of Mickey Mantle or Sandy Koufax had to work real jobs in the offseason.  Thanks to Marvin Miller, those days are long gone.  Now if players could just learn to think before they talk.