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.