Make-believe

I open the Sunday sports’ section this morning and what do I see? Why, a story about the Bears, of course. Afterall, the NFL is a twelve-month-a-year enterprise, and this is Chicago. Brad Biggs’ story in the Tribune started with an informative-enough headline, Some heavy lifting ahead for [Bears’ GM Ryan] Pace due to salary cap.” Reading on, I learned that the Saints are “mired in salary-cap hell,” so they’re unlikely to pursue Seattle’s Russell Wilson as a replacement at quarterback for the likely-retiring Drew Brees. In comparison, the Bears are in more of a salary-cap purgatory, with Pace possibly asking players to restructure their contracts as a way to get out of it. What a soap opera. I no longer say baseball operates free of a cap. There is one, both soft and real in the form of the luxury tax. The thing is, it’s a (un)healthy minority of teams that reach the threshold each year. The Cubs did it two straight seasons recently and now act like paupers looking for a handout. That’s on them. Every team in every sport should be free to spend as much money as it wants, just as all the players in all the professional sports should demand an end to salary caps. Playing under one is no different than being stuck in a soap opera. It’s just another form of make-believe.

On Further Review

As a rule, I skip over the obituaries for all the usual reasons of a person my age. But as they say, rules are made to be broken, and I do check baseballreference.com for ballplayers called to that big league in the sky. This is how I found out about the death of ex-Sox pitcher Juan Pizarro last month. Pizarro belonged to the first great starting staff I became aware of with the White Sox, along with Gary Peters and Joel Horlen. (We won’t talk about Denny McLain or Dave DeBusschere here.) He came over in a trade in the 1960 offseason. Pizarro won 75 games for the Sox from 1961-1966. The first four years, he won 14; 12; 16; and 19 games, respectively. That first year, 1961, the Sox got 24 wins out of the deal, with Cal McLish chipping in with ten. And what did all these wins cost us? Nothing more than Gene Freese. Bill Veeck, ever in rush for pop, traded Johnny Callison for Freeze in an effort to out-bash the Yankees and win back-to-back pennants in 1959-60. Not only didn’t it happen, Callison went on to have a far better career, mostly with the Phillies, than Freese. Think along the lines of 840 career RBIs vs. 432 and an outfield arm so strong it recorded as many as 26 assists in a season. Or as the kids like to say these days, we’re talking a 38.4 WAR vs. 8.7. You can see why that trade might rankle me. But no more. Not only did Freese-for-Pizarro work out, Pizarro-for-Wilbur Wood was even better. Wood had all of one major-league win over parts of five seasons with two organizations before the Sox secured him from the Pirates for Pizarro. With the Sox, Wood won another 163 games over twelve seasons, plus 57 saves. Four straight seasons, 1971-74, he won 20 or more games. Only a shattered kneecap off the bat of Ron LeFlore in 1976 kept Wood from going on and on the way really good knuckleballers do. That means it’s not really Gene Freese for Johnny Callison anymore but Callison for Juan Pizarro with Wilbur Wood waiting in the wings. Would you make that deal? Wood’s WAR alone is 50.0, and Pizarro’s is in the neighborhood of 14.4 with the Sox. (Somebody should ask baseballreference.com why they have two different WAR numbers for Pizarro.) On further review, I think I would.

Report Card

Well, the NBA has made it to the All-Star break, and, wouldn’t you know it, the Bulls qualify as a mild surprise with their 16-18 record. As much as it pains me to note this, the Tom Thibodeau-led Knicks rate as an even bigger surprise at 19-18. The Bulls won 22 games last season to the Knicks’ 21. I can tell you most of the Bulls’ roster but have no idea who Thibodeau is running out onto the court, though I’m sure the New York media is making all sorts of Willis Reed and Walt Frazier comparisons by now. Dr. Naismith would’ve invented the game in the Big Apple, if he had it to all over, no doubt. Off of what I’ve seen so far, I’ll take Billy Donovan, the current Bulls’ head coach, to ex-coach Thibodeau. Donovan can speak full sentences in the active voice; treats his players with respect, which must be hard considering he inherited nearly all of them; and has avoided playing Thibodeau-like mind games with the front office. A word to the wise, if there are any among Knicks’ fans: Your coach treats every regular-season contest like it’s a postseason game seven. That might work in February and March but May, not so much. Fingers crossed for a Chicago-New York matchup somewhere down the line.

Darkness

I can’t imagine life without sports. Baseball and softball in particular have shaped me both as a person and a parent. If only sports were truly separate from the rest of life. Now, that would be something. Last week, a coach caught up in the USA Olympic gymnastics’ scandal killed himself. Among twenty-four felony charges filed by Michigan authorities, John Geddert was accused of human trafficking and sexual assault. Is gymnastics somehow more prone to this sort of thing than the youth sports my daughter took part in? I can’t honestly say. In retrospect, there were all sorts of chances for a coach to be a pervert, though, thankfully, none of them were, at least in terms of sexual predation. Maybe we were just lucky, maybe it’s in how different sports are taught and coached that allows for predators to act. The problems I saw concerned things said. When Clare played softball in high school, one of her varsity coaches was a real bench jockey; he just couldn’t keep his mouth shut when somebody made an error or didn’t respond to his coaching. We put up with it for two years until a health issue made the problem go away. I kept my mouth shut because this coach didn’t go after my daughter. But the man said hurtful things that I could have objected to and didn’t. That’s on me. In travel, Clare had a coach who disparaged her hitting on two separate occasions, one time telling her she’d never hit in college. Him I confronted, though for something else. This coach and his partner told me my daughter wasn’t a good infielder, which was a flat-out lie. I told both of them Clare was the best second baseman on their team. By the time the one guy popped off about Clare’s hitting, we were already gone, in a way. This one coach also did a Woody Hayes on a player, shaking her head by the cage of her helmet; I had to restrain the girl’s dad. Maybe I should’ve let him go at it. There are lines that can’t be crossed, in sports or any other part of life. The consequences come when we fail to act.

Trying to Keep Up

Clare called yesterday afternoon, and I could tell she was ticked, sort of. “Why aren’t you watching the White Sox?” my one and only demanded to know in mock exasperation, at least I think it was mock. Because I’m writing about my deep and abiding affection for Steve Stone, I replied. “Did something good happen?” And I knew it had to because all such phone calls are a sign of that. The ”good” in this case was rookie Andrew Vaughn hitting a three-run homer in the first inning against the Rangers. Clare likes Vaughn, so do I. For my daughter, it’s feeling a connection to a guy serious about his craft. For me, it’s having another good hitter in the lineup. Last season, Jason Benetti was all about Edwin Encarnacion carrying an imaginary parrot on his forearm as he circled the bases on one of his occasional homeruns. I’m betting Benetti won’t bring up the parrot when Vaughn starts stinging the ball as Encarnacion’s replacement at DH. A couple of hours later, after I’d seen the homerun in question, my daughter called a second time to tell me about what pitcher Lucas Giolito just said, that he really likes throwing to possible second catcher Johnathan Lucroy. “Notice how he didn’t say anything about [Yasmani] Grandal. He could’ve said, ‘Oh, I like Yasmani, too,’ or ‘It really doesn’t matter which catcher I throw to, I like them both,’ but he didn’t.” Neither father nor daughter is a big Grandal fan, at least on defense. And she may be on to something here. The last two seasons, Giolito excelled with James McCann behind the plate. With Grandal, not so much. So, there you have it. My daughter sees stuff in baseball as quick as any sportswriter. Heaven help her son if he doesn’t grow up loving the national pastime. That definitely would not be advisable.

One More Time

At the risk of repeating myself ad nauseum, let me mention again how much the broadcasting team of Jason Benetti and Steve Stone irritates me. And let me repeat how certain broadcasters—e.g., Tom Paciorek and the late Ed Farmer—don’t. And let me add a few more names of announcers who’ve avoided being bitten by the clever bug. John Rooney did White Sox games on the radio for seventeen seasons, every one of them a joy. Rooney possessed an ability to make the game at hand interesting. So did Wayne Larrivee, another first-rate broadcaster who did the Bears before moving over to the dark side, aka Green Bay. Football, baseball, basketball: Larrivee made seamless transitions from one sport to another. From time to time, Benetti has been paired up with Chuck Swirsky, who also calls the Bulls on radio. Swirsky is a fans’ broadcaster without being so blatantly a homer like Hawk Harrelson; Swirsky feels every Bulls’ loss with the intensity of a true diehard. When he’s in the company of Swirsky (or Paciorek), Benetti improves exponentially, sounding as if he actually cares about the game of baseball. For reasons best known to himself, Len Kasper left the Cubs’ TV booth to call Sox games on the radio, and the early reports are encouraging. It should be interesting to see what happens when Kasper moves over to the TV side, as he’s supposed to do from time to time. If it’s just him and Benetti, I have no doubt the broadcasts will be first-rate. But if a certain ex-pitcher is part of the mix, all bets are off, I’m afraid. Full Disclosure: Stone has blocked Clare from his Twitter account. It seems he can’t take the criticism.

First Impressions

I’ll open with the bad news from yesterday’s Cactus League opener for the White Sox, a 7-2 loss in six innings to the Brewers. Not the score so much as the TV broadcasting duo of Jason Benetti and Steve Stone. Unfortunately, they were in midseason form. These guys aren’t nearly as clever as they think they are; the same goes for their inside jokes. If it’s too hard to do their job in March, either quit or call in sick. I don’t recall spring training ever being a bother for Ed Farmer. In his heart of hearts, I bet Stone thinks he’s twice the player and announcer Farmer ever was. In that case, show it. As for Benetti, a question—why do you sound so much better when Stone’s out of the booth? Calling Tom Paciorek, calling Tom... As for the game itself, Milwaukee’s non-roster pitchers were better than our non-roster pitchers. As for new/old Sox manager Tony La Russa, he sounded spot-on, provided you read what he said. La Russa thinks winning is a good thing, even in spring training, a habit to get into before the season starts. Who could disagree with that? Right now, La Russa works for me as long as I don’t see him; then it becomes a case of “Oh, my God! What’s wrong with him?” Plus, I have to try and forget how La Russa spent his post-Sox managerial career with his head in the sand when it came to likely PEDs’ use by his players. So, in a way, it’s spring training for me as well as La Russa. Now, onto the good news, starting with Adam Engel; he hit a two-run homer in his first at-bat. With luck, we’re talking about a really productive platoon in right field with Engel and Adam Eaton (oh, and to have three center fielders out there in the ninth inning). Then, after the game, Clare texted another bit of good news. Matt Davidson hit the Dodgers’ first homer of spring training. Who says good things don’t happen to those deserving?