Seasons End

It was a cloudy Sunday afternoon in early October, perfect weather to cap one of the most frustrating seasons in White Sox history.  My father and I were among the 6,200 diehards on hand for the last regular game of the season.  Among other treats, we saw Tom McCraw circle the bases on a walk: ball four was a wild pitch followed by two throwing errors.  The Sox beat the As 6-0 for their 98^th win.  Why the frustration?  Well, a certain team from New York managed 99 wins for the American League pennant.    

Twenty-four years later, Michele and I attended the last night game ever at Comiskey Park.  There were nearly 43,000 people on hand for the nostalgia; little did they know the White Sox were about to trade in their 80-year old home for an exercise in state-of-the-art sterility.  Really, the “Cell” is a perfect nickname.

I’d spent the year keeping a journal of that final season at a real ballpark.  So, there was a silver lining to the pointless demise of yet another Chicago landmark.  Two, actually.  The journal turned into a book, and we decided to start a family.

Yesterday found us at another last night game of the season, Sox and Kansas City again (although the Royals instead of the As).  It was a night to hope—that the Sox would avoid 100 losses (they did) and the rookies would perform (they mostly did, too).  Marcus Semian, Jordan Danks and Conor Gillaspie all homered while Erik Johnson started off by throwing 4-2/3 innings of hitless ball; second-year closer Addison Reed managed not to blow the save.  The postgame fireworks’ show proved to be icing on a very modest cake.

Grownups and children together—there’s the essence of a baseball game.  Not AC/DC blaring on the sound system or the moronic shell game on the Jumbotron or the interns tossing tee-shirts into the crowd.  Father (and mother) and daughter.  Whenever rookie Leury Garcia went fishing (American Angler must be his favorite magazine), I leaned over and complained to Clare, “What’re you swinging at?”

To which she smiled.

"Tattooed," Proper Usage

            Clare called after practice Tuesday to say, “I really tattooed the ball,” with three balls over the fence during soft toss.  “They were all the rising line-drive ones I like; two of them were bombs.  The other one would’ve gone further, but it hit a tree and knocked a branch off.” 

The night before, she went to see her hitting coach and put on a display there as well.  A girl in high school went up to her later and said, “You’re really good.  You must play in college.”

            Yes, for one more spring.  

What a Good Father Does

Yesterday, Clare faced live pitching for the first time since Holland, and nothing she hit cleared the fence.  Talk about a subdued phone conversation.

This proves, yet again, that Yogi Berra was right about the game being fifty percent half-mental, especially hitting.  Bad-Clare once spent two years getting over the notion she couldn’t hit lefties.  Good-Clare thrives in the clutch, with two homeruns against the three-time CCIW pitcher of the year.  The first homerun set the single-season record at Elmhurst (6) while the second was in the post-season tournament; that ball travelled in the neighborhood of 275 feet.  That would be 400-feet plus in baseball.

So, here’s what I’m going to do, laminate a page out Ball Four, about someone taking batting practice, and give it to Clare for her mantra.  She’ll start with, “My name is Ted f*****g Williams and I’m the best hitter in baseball.”  Then, “Jesus H. Christ Himself couldn’t get me out.”  After that, “Here comes Jim Bunning, Jim f*****g Bunning and that little s**t slider of his.”  Poor Mr. Bunning.  “He doesn’t really think he’s gonna get me out with that s**t.”  Of course not, because, “I’m Ted f*****g Williams.”

           This will help my daughter remember she’s Clare f*****g Bukowski.

Rain, Rain, Go Away (Maybe)

 

Here’s one difference between NCAA divisions I and III—the Wisconsin Badgers and Oklahoma Sooners will be playing eight practice games this fall.  The Elmhurst Bluejays will scrimmage, weather permitting, until about the third week of October.  Here’s another difference: Division III doesn’t hand out athletic scholarships.

Which is not to say Division III is barely a step up from intramural sports; anything but.  Clare plays in the College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin.  Don’t be fooled by the unwieldy title.  The CCIW is home to a whole lot of intense, high-quality play.  Alumni include Kenny Anderson (Augustana/Cincinnati Bengals/starting quarterback Super Bowl XVI) and Jack Sikma (Illinois Wesleyan/Seattle SuperSonics/ starting center, 1979 NBA championship).  In addition, Wheaton College has had 12 of its players sign NFL contracts since 1979. 

And CCIW female athletes?  Maybe someday the conference and its schools will check to see if anyone’s gone pro.  What I do know from watching three years of CCIW softball is that many of its players are Division I worthy in terms of talent.  These kids know that, which may explain the chip-on-the-shoulder style of play.  That, or there really is reincarnation and Ty Cobb has come back multiple times, all at once.

But Division III is right next door to the real world.  At Elmhurst, school comes first.  In Clare’s case, the two internships she has this semester have been a challenge to balance with practice.  On Tuesday, she was mad to be missing Wednesday’s practice; then it rained.  But she was still mad because she had her other internship during Thursday’s practice.   Then it rained again.  And my daughter is very happy because she can go to practice this weekend.

As for rain, the team gets the gym all to itself Friday afternoon.

The Nature of Crowds

 

A cold spawned in Hell—I’m dead serious—kept me on the couch watching the Bears and Vikings yesterday.  From what I could see, either football fans are different, or people at football games are.

At White Sox games, a few fans may have little socks pinned to their shirts or jackets, and a guy sometimes walks around as “Sox Man,” I think, with white socks hanging from his ears, but that’s it.  I have yet to see anything resembling a cub costume on fans at Cub games.

Compare that to yesterday.  Either I was hallucinating courtesy of the cold, or there were a whole bunch of folks sitting in Soldier Field with bear heads atop their own.  And let’s not forget those venues full of Cheeseheads and Hawg snouts.  I don’t pretend to get it.

Then you have the nature of the crowds.  Chicago can be a tough baseball town, New York and Philadelphia even tougher.  Now consider the football equivalents—Bears, Giants, Jets, Eagles.  Civility takes a hike on Sunday afternoons in the fall.  It’s like everybody tailgates on raw meat to get in the mood.  Alex Rodriguez didn’t get booed as much at the Cell as the Vikings’ punter did yesterday at Soldier Field.

And then you have the numbers.  White Sox fans think Cub fans are lemmings for the way the pack Wrigley Field to watch bad baseball; Cub fans, in so far as they can think, feel Sox fans are disloyal for not supporting their team through thick and thin.  But Cub fans may as well be Sox fans when compared to Bear fans.  Bad team, bad weather, it doesn’t matter.  Who brought the raw meat?

The other question I have is overlap.  How many discerning White Sox fans are over-the-top Bear fans?  I honestly don’t know.  If other Sox fans are like me, this is a time for mourning and recriminations; I’ll take a pass on wearing the bear head.  But that could just be me.

And the nature of softball crowds?  That’s a trick question.  It’s just family and friends watching female athletes do their thing.  Someone pass the coffee thermos.

Iowa Travelogue

River City, anyone?  Michele and I just spent four days in Mason City, Iowa, the inspiration for Meredith Wilson’s “The Music Man.”  But we went to north central Iowa for a reason that had little to do with trombones and clarinets.      

Believe it or not, Mason City with its population of 28,000 is a treasure trove of Prairie Architecture.  We stayed in a restored Frank Lloyd Wright hotel and walked around a neighborhood dotted with homes designed by Wright, Walter Burley Griffin and other Prairie architects.  This is anything but “flyover country.”  

            We stayed in a room that overlooks the town square with its Civil War memorial, erected in 1884.  If memory serves me right, it was once possible to order a statue like the one we saw of a Union soldier standing at attention.  That, or there were some very busy sculptors who did thousands of these memorials across the Midwest and Northeast.  (Sorry, Confederate statues in the South don’t count for much here.)  Either way, those statues have more life and dignity to them than anything at Wrigley Field or the Cell.  These days, we let the second-rate pass for public art.  They did better in Mason City.

On a trip like this, it’s in for a penny in for a pound, which was how we ended up in Owatonna, Minnesota.  Louis Sullivan did the National Farmers’ Bank there.  Sullivan was a difficult man with a self-destructive streak fueled by alcohol.  When the big commissions dried up, he turned to designing banks in small Midwestern towns.  These works have been called his “jewel boxes.”  I’ve never been a big Sullivan fan.  To me, the Auditorium is a fussy building inside and out while Carson Pirie Scott fails to achieve any of the interior grandeur necessary for a department store.  But this bank, my god.  The art glass, the brickwork, the light fixtures and the stenciling combine to form one of the most sublime designs I’ve ever seen.  And to think I read in the paper banks are moving in the direction of maybe one teller per branch.  After that comes zero and little reason for Wells Fargo to keep the bank open to the public.   

We walked up and down Owatonna’s main street, had a great cheese and tomato omelette for breakfast (alas, we were too early for the walleye sandwich) and saw a life-size cutout of Twins’ manager Ron Gardenhire in the front window of the Ace Hardware; the Twins were a few hours away from getting pounded 18-3 by the A’s.  With performances like that, Gardenhire has a good shot of being canned before long.  That cutout could be a real collector’s item soon.

On the way home we stopped by the Field of Dreams in Dyersville.  This was my first time without Clare.  Everything was movie-set perfect: blue sky; green grass; yellow rows of corn; the Stars and Stripe waving smartly from its pole just this side of the corn in center field; a man in his seventies running the bases, complete with pretend slide into home and his wife cheering him on.  I saw a sign by the field which read in part, “have faith in simplicity.”  That may not be possible for much longer.

A Chicago-area couple bought the site late last year and plans to build a complex with as many as 24 fields for softball and baseball.  Among other things, a handout promises “Meals, Clubhouse lodging, laundry service, access to training facilities for athletes and coaches”; “Ballpark Bucks for use at the Field of Dreams Movie Site”; and “Video coverage of the All-Star Ballpark Heaven experience.”

           The first phase of construction is set to begin in time for tournaments starting next June.  According to the website, the cost will be $675 per player and coach.  I think we spent $10 for a Shoeless Joe Jackson snow globe ten years ago.  Have faith.

Bear Down, Chicago Bears...

Some people are social drinkers, I’m a social football fan.  Either way, the idea is to look normal.  It’s important to do that, in Chicago, in September.

By all rights, I should be a Cardinals’ fan.  They were, at one time, the South Side team, even playing at Comiskey Park.  But of all the underachieving franchises in the long, sorry history of Chicago sports, the Cardinals may be the worst.  They squandered their fan base here and moved to St. Louis in 1960.  Not content to break hearts just once, the team relocated to Arizona in 1988.  And in all that time, they’ve been controlled by the same family.

But the Bidwells were not meant to be, for me, unlike the Bears of George Halas, a man my father loathed for being a cheap SOB.  When the Bears played and lost, my father smiled, the way a worker does when the boss gets his comeuppance.  But the losing, especially to the Packers, usually made me feel bad.

I managed to talk myself into seeing parallels between the White Sox and Bears.  Both teams were good at keeping the opposition from scoring and bad at doing it themselves; think Hitless Wonders and Bobby Douglass.  The real problem for me was roster turnover.  Why root for Austin Denney or Mike Hull if he wasn’t going to stay around as long as Hoyt Wilhelm or Tommy McCraw did?  And football box scores left something to be desired.  Seeing that Bobby Joe Green had eight punts for a 41.3 yard average wasn’t much of a pick-me-up at breakfast on Monday of my senior year in high school.        

The one Bears’ game I attended happened to be the last one ever played at Wrigley Field, on December 13, 1970.  It was the Colosseum in longjohns, the highpoint coming when Dick Butkus literally bounced Bart Starr off the infield dirt en route to a 35-17 Bears’ win.  After that, I’ve never felt the need to attend another NFL game.

By way of karma, Clare has spent the last two years training with one of the Elmhurst football coaches and dating the starting center.  Now an assistant o-line coach/grad student at North Central College, he says he wants to pursue a career in coaching.

One more thing—his middle name is Douglas.

                                                            ***

Yesterday was the start of fall practice, complete with the requisite puking.  As I recall, Clare managed to keep her cookies down her freshman year through sheer force of will.  She’d drag herself back to her dorm room after practice, collapse on the floor and call us to say how miserable she felt.  That was three years ago.  She just ran a 5K this morning.

            Times change.

Daughter's Heaven, Father's Hell

Clare sent this text at 7:20 AM: Nobody in the weight room!  blasting my music.  Love it.   

I wonder how you Texas two-step a dead lift.

 

 

 

Crossed Signals

I wonder if this ever happened in horse-and-buggy days: we were driving back from the store Monday when Clare called Michele on her cell.  Some girls went to the field for a little workout.  “Tell Dad.  I’ll put you on speaker.”  To which I could only say, Thanks.

Call me old-fashioned, but I like driving with two hands on the wheel.  Put a phone in my hand, and I get to feeling like a lawbreaker (which will be the case in Illinois, come 1-1-14).  So, all I did for twenty seconds was offer variations on Uh-huh and OK.  The text came right after supper.  Seems like there was a problem with my phone reaction.

Gimme the phone, I said.  Sitting in the living room a world away from traffic, I talked to my daughter, who put another two balls over the fence that afternoon.  “Good,” I said, with conviction.  “Now remember, if it’s worth doing in September, it’s worth doing in March.”

Horse-and-buggy advice in a cellular age.

Hey, Ask the Right Questions

            The New York Times did a piece yesterday on the plight of professional softball players.  Things are about as grim as Clare told us.  But the story begs the asking of a few more questions.

Teams have a salary cap of $150,000, which says to me franchise costs are pretty manageable, or would be with the right investors.  In no particular order, I’d like to ask Oprah, Warren Buffett and Penny Marshall if they were interested in running a team, or two.

So far, the league has only attracted softball-related sponsors.  How odd.  Pick the beer of your choice and watch their commercials; young women everywhere.  Assuming they’re not present merely as eye-candy, couldn’t the demographic those women represent both drink a beverage and watch softball?  Couldn’t the NYT reporter have asked Coors and Miller?

The league also has to pay ESPN to show games.  Somehow, I get the feeling ESPN doesn’t put the same effort into hyping softball the way it does college football or pro baseball.  At the same time, ESPN and the MLB Network both utilize attractive young women as co-anchors on many of their programs.  Why?  If women’s sports aren’t worth the bother, why have women commenting on men’s sports? 

Apparently, the answers to these questions weren’t fit to print.    

Sound Advice

       Josephine D’Angelo, an original member of the All-American Girls Baseball League, died last month at the age of 88.  According to her obituary in the Sun-Times, she told a baseball magazine that girls should “Play with boy players early in life.”  I agree, and longer if possible.