A Blind Eye on the Civil Rights Game

In Houston tonight, the Astros will be hosting baseball’s annual Civil Rights Game; there will be all sorts of ceremonies and honors bestowed.  Meanwhile, the NCAA Division I Women’s College World Series is being played in Oklahoma City.

Is it me, or are people failing to connect the dots here?  Why is the issue of civil rights always treated in the past tense for baseball, and what’s behind the claim softball is “just as good as” baseball?  The new Negro Leagues come with a 12-inch ball, if only critics cared to notice.  

Coming Home

The circus rolls back into town as soon as Clare unpacks her car sometime tonight.  Performances are scheduled through the end of August.

Over the years, our star performer has baked, crafted, gardened, studied and hit her way to considerable recognition; the latter two are expected to play a major role come September and graduate school.  Until then, it will seem like old times, except the child is an adult now, and we have no games to go to, at least not yet.  This next stage of parenting will take some getting used to.      

 

Full Circle

Elmhurst College had a Memorial Day treat for its graduating seniors, a Kane County Cougars game.  Clare loved everything from the bone-jarring bus ride to the walk-off homerun in the bottom of the eleventh.  Coincidence or not, this going-away gift happened at the same place we took our daughter for her first-ever ballgame.

It was the Fourth of July, 1994; Clare was four months shy of her third birthday.  She can’t remember anything about it, except maybe for the blimp, Goodyear or MetLife.  I taught my little girl how to listen for a blimp by its engines.  “When you hear it, you’ll see it,” I said.  Pretty soon, Clare was convinced that, “Daddy, I have blimp ears!”  I still tease her about that.

I have a daughter who knows how to score games and hit her cuts from right field.  Now, if we could just find a way to keep her hitting.

Maintaining Balance

Yesterday, we took Clare and her (very serious) boyfriend to the Lyric Opera for a performance of “The Sound of Music” starring Billy Zane, Kate Winslet’s bad-guy boyfriend in “Titanic.”  The Lyric likes to do Broadway musicals mixing stage and opera talent.  “Do-Re-Me” worked better than I thought it would.

Our daughter the jock has been exposed to a good deal of culture; opera worked, architecture not so much.  When Clare was twelve, we once dragged her to a Frank Lloyd Wright Usonian home (his Prairie Style updated to the 1950s) in Iowa; it was like taking a sit-down protester for a walk.  This may explain why Clare nearly took my head off when I pitched to her at The Field of Dreams on the way back.  God knows what the child would do if she didn’t like the large people singing.

Michele gets free tickets to the Lyric from work, which is a real perk; Clare was hooked from the start.  And now there she was showing her boyfriend the ex-football player the orchestra pit and whatnot.  My hope is that a little bit of culture will rub off on any possible grandchildren. 

Because the child is now an adult, she left for a party afterwards.  At ten, she called to ask “Guess who the Bandits picked up,” and I did.  It was a pitcher from DePaul she’d faced in travel ball.  We also discussed Josh Beckett’s no-hitter of the Phillies.

This morning, before she tackled the New York Times, Michele was reading about Beckett’s little gem.  “I love baseball,” my cultured wife confessed.  After all, we are a well-rounded family.

A Team with Personality

At some point, a team will acquire its defining personality—the bloodless, pinstriped Yankees, the perennially hip Lakers, the blue-collar Bears.  And my White Sox?  They’re straight out of Bernard Malamud’s The Natural.

This makes perfect sense, given that Malamud drew in part on the 1919 Black Sox scandal.  Which means Roy Hobbs could be a little Shoeless Joe Jackson and Judge Banner may have more than a bit of Charles Comiskey in him.  So, it was a long time ago, and so it shall ever be.  The White Sox have had any number of tragic heroes, players who have toiled in obscurity, their career numbers not deemed worthy of Cooperstown.  Think Minnie Minoso, Billy Pierce, Harold Baines and Tommy John.  No, they didn’t take money to throw any games the way Jackson did, but remember that Shoeless Joe always claimed he tried to do the right thing and give that cash back.  Jackson also said he tried to alert the owner of the White Sox of the scandal.

Only some people won’t listen.  Consider Comiskey successor in the owner’s suite, Jerry Reinsdorf.  At the age of 78, you might think Reinsdorf is contemplating retirement, but no.  According to a story in yesterday’s New York Times, Reinsdorf is trying to block Bud Selig’s choice for the next baseball commissioner.  Apparently, Reinsdorf wants to abolish the office for a commission—with him a member, of course—that would rule over the game.  If only Malamud were writing today, what fun he'd have.   

Konerko

Clare is feeling a bit guilty these days.  She’s upset that White Sox rookie sensation Jose Abreu landed on the 15-day disabled list with tendonitis in his left ankle but happy that the injury means more playing time for Paul Konerko, who’ll retire when the season, his 16^th with the Sox, comes to an end in September (thankfully, at home, for a proper sendoff).

Clare and Konerko have been an item for years.  When we used to get seats behind the Sox dugout, Paulie twice tossed a ball to my daughter.  He autographed one of them at the first fan fest we attended; Clare was all of nine.  Twelve years later, and the two of them are still around.

I love how baseball can be used to measure time.  Clare has cheered the same ballplayer since she was in first grade, and she graduates college next Saturday.  If Abreu proves to be as good as Konerko, that could mean she will have known just two Sox first basemen over the course of thirty or more years.

My God, how old will I be then?

The Few, The Proud, The Handful of White Sox Fans

 Because of my father, I’m a Sox fan, and because of me, so is Clare.  Judging by attendance figures, we wouldn’t be a crowd in a phone booth (or redesigned Volkswagen Beetle).

Only Cleveland draws fewer fans to home games.  What does that mean?  I can’t speak for Indians’ fans, but in Chicago part of the problem is fatigue.  Ever since Jerry Reinsdorf bought the team in 1981, it’s been one overlong soap opera: Harry Caray, fired; Tony LaRussa, fired; Ken “Hawk” Harrelson, hired and fired as a general manager, hired way too many times as an announcer; Larry Himes, hired and fired as GM; Ozzie Guillen, hired and fired as a manager; Kenny Williams, hired and retired after a career of threatening to take on the world, Guillen included; and Comiskey Park, badmouthed and razed.  Oh, and Reinsdorf also threatened to move the team to Florida.  An ownership with that track record needs to generate more than one World Series win in 34 years.

The Chicago fan base may be unique in the world of professional sports; it really is a zero-sum game, with my team taking the most hits.  In general, Sox fans stay at home unless the team is winning; Cub fans aren’t in the habit of travelling to the South Side to get drunk; Bear fans count the days down to preseason, sometimes while attending a baseball game, sometimes not; Bulls fans are pretty upscale but they can’t fill a ballpark; and Hawk fans have only recently crawled from out of the woodwork thanks to two Stanley Cup titles in four years, and a fifth looking likely.  I wonder how many of them used to spend their money at baseball games. 

Of the above, the Cubs and Bears have the most loyal fans, based on attendance.  Actually, the Bears are more of a mass cult; never has a franchise underperformed to such profit.  The team finished 8-8 last year, and they still dominate the sports’ scene, into spring and summer.  Do you want to see video of last week’s NFL draft picks working out with their new team?  We do in Chicago.

My daughter is one of the sharpest fans I know; she played the game before having to move onto another.  We talk strategy and roster moves all the time, but Clare can’t afford to go to 20 games a year the way I could at her age.  Something’s got to give, or one of Chicago’s teams is going to come close to going belly up.   

CCIW Finis

Illinois Wesleyan and North Central, the two remaining CCIW entries in the NCAA softball tournament, went down in defeat this weekend.  Clare and I are left with mixed feelings, except for Wesleyan.

They’re the Yankees of the conference, lacking the pinstripes but certainly not the arrogance.  The school has its own set of Steinbrenners, people who have contributed generously to the athletic program.  The result is a very nice stadium and teams that win year after year.  Tow out of Clare’s four years, Wesleyan won the conference title and took the CCIW tournament.  Oh, and they went to the NCAA tournament three times in four years.  That’s reason enough to relish Clare’s homerun last month off their number-one starter.

North Central is another CCIW powerhouse, with three NCAA softball appearances since 2011.  It’s also personal.  Clare’s high school had two stars, Clare and V.  Clare chose Elmhurst while her teammate opted to pitch for North Central.  The girl is lightning fast and as much of an offensive threat as she is a reliable pitcher.  V’s coach called her “one of the top players in the history of this program.”  It would’ve been nice if they had played together another four years.  Of course, my daughter hit more career home runs.    

Injury Update

Clare had an interesting take on softball injuries—with pitchers, it could be the hip more than the arm.  She may be onto something.  Softball pitchers have a hard, even violent, stride towards the batter, and that could come back to hurt them in middle age.

Ironically, the NYT just did a story comparing Yankee rookie pitcher Masahiro Tanaka to Tom Seaver.  Like Seaver, Tanaka employs a “drop and drive” delivery that ends with the back knee literally touching the ground; it’s a delivery that requires strength to generate power.  I wonder how Tom Terrific’s hip and knee are doing these days.

Injuries and the Questions They Raise

 According to a story in the NYT last week, in the last six months 33 minor and major league pitchers have had Tommy John reconstructive surgery on their elbows.  The latest casualty is Jose Fernandez, rookie of the year in the NL last season; I should also note that White Sox fans are holding their collective breath on ace Chris Sales, who’s been out of action for a month due to issues with his left arm.  So, what’s up?

For openers, I’d say read the data correctly.  Again, sabermetricians, do something useful for a change and chart pitcher injuries decade by decade.  This would allow us to see if such injuries are on rise or if they were mislabeled by teams that weren’t in the know.  Put another way, this is like autism, which may or may not be increasing given how much better we’ve become in the last five years at diagnosing the condition.

For argument’s sake, say elbow injuries are on the rise.  Why?  Some observers think it’s because so many pitchers throw hard.  (I also just read a piece in SI lamenting the explosion in strikeouts—they tend to get boring after a while.)  Or it could be that they’ve been throwing so hard for so long, since Little League and travel ball.  Again, maybe, but some hard data would be nice to bolster such arguments.

Consider when people start waxing nostalgic about “the good old days” before pitch counts; you know who you are, Fergie Jenkins.  How many elbow injuries were there in 1956 or 1967?  If there were fewer injuries back then, were pitchers throwing differently, more change ups and palm balls, or is it something else?  And if the rate of injury was just as great, then aren’t we talking about a chronic problem peculiar to the sport?  Any time you want to get started, Bill James.

Or people will talk about how great it was before travel, when kids played for the love of the game, “from sunup to sundown.”  Oh, so playing 8-12 hours day after day in the summer didn’t cause injuries to young arms?  I wonder.  But maybe the past was different in one way.  Kids never specialized in one sport until the last decade or so.  I think the explosion in college tuition rates and pro contracts has caused that problem.  I’m all for rolling back both but won’t be holding my breath for it to happen anytime soon.

Now, what about women?  For them, it’s not so much the arm as the ACL.  As I’ve already said, it may be that arm injuries have been ignored because it’s “just” female athletes we’re talking about.  But let’s say there is a sizable difference in the rate of injuries for pitchers by gender.  Then what?  Well, can the windmill motion be modified for baseball? (If so, Jennie Finch should come out of retirement as a possible Jackie Robinson).  If submarine is as close as you can get to windmill, what’s the injury data on that style of pitching?  As I recall, Ted Abernathy switched to it after suffering an arm injury, and he pitched 14 seasons in the majors.  Would submarine starters be more durable than hard throwers?

Data, folks, data.

Tick-tock

With the average length of a major-league baseball game closing in on the three-hour mark, Commissioner Selig says he’s not worried.  Why?  Because attendance remains strong.  God, how I hate the man.

Ex-White Sox pitcher Mark Buehrle is known as the fastest worker in baseball today.  According to a 5-2-14 Yahoo Sports story, Buehrle takes just under 16 seconds to throw a pitch.  To give you an idea of just how rare that is, consider that of the 291 pitchers with ten or more innings pitched so far this season, only 20 have thrown a pitch in under 20 seconds. With Buehrle on the mound, the two-hour game is always a possibility.

And watching just about everyone else is torture, he says.  “I don’t like sitting on the bench for a four-hour game when I’m not pitching, I’ll tell you that much.  When you’re sitting there between your starts, looking at the scoreboard, looking at the clock, saying, ‘Holy [expletive], this is ridiculous.’  I know how fans feel.”  But, apparently, the commissioner doesn’t.  

Here’s an idea for the sabermetric crowd—figure out ideal game times.  What’s the shortest length that allows MLB to turn a reasonable profit on commercials?  What’s the maximum length before fans at home will watch something else?  If there’s such a thing as “wins above replacement,” what about “ideal game length,” IGL?  Now, that would definitely be a stat worth having.

Sea Change?

Softball strategy may be in the first stages of change regards pitching.  Consider what happened over the weekend to Augustana College, the third CCIW team playing in the NCAA tournament.  The baseball approach trumped the old-school softball philosophy.

Despite having six pitchers on the roster, Augustana went with their number-one starter throughout the conference and NCAA regional, so much so that she had five complete games in nine days.  Make that six in ten, only the last one was a loss against the University of St. Thomas.  Fatigue may have been a factor, given that Augustana took a 4-1 lead into the bottom of the sixth inning.  Six more outs, and they advance to the NCAA superregionals. 

Only St. Thomas scored two in the sixth and one in the seventh to force extra innings; they won with one out in the eighth.  But since Augustana was in the winner’s bracket, St. Thomas had to beat them a second time.  Now, if you’re Augustana, who starts that all-important game?  The coach went with her number one, again, and she couldn’t get past the third inning after giving up five runs.  St. Thomas built up a 10-2 lead and held on, 10-7.

Unlike Augustana, St. Thomas used three different pitchers in the game (and four in the two games); their number one relieved in both games.  Not to go all Tony LaRussa here, but what’s the benefit of going with one pitcher when you’ve got five others?  In any case, St. Thomas borrows a page from the baseball manual and moves on.

If I were a softball coach (an amusing if not quite frightening thought), I’d be collecting as much information as I could on pitcher fatigue and injuries.  The notion that the windmill delivery of softball pitchers avoids injury may be more myth than fact, and, even if it isn’t, there’s still fatigue to consider.  The softball pitching stride is just as hard on the legs as it is in baseball; you need extra pitching to keep your number one fresh at the end of the season.  Augustana gambled that you don’t, and lost.

Keeping Check

At the risk of contradicting the above, we do keep check of things, specifically the NCAA tournament.  Two out of the three CCIW teams will advance to the next round.  Now, get this: North Central, one of the CCIW entries, didn’t even win a game in the conference tournament last weekend, and yet they get to keep playing.

The CCIW may not win it all, but it is one competitive bunch of teams. 

Moving On

Moving On

Thursday we visited Valparaiso University, 90-minutes away in northwest Indiana, where Clare probably will go to graduate school in sports management.  Of course, we checked out the softball field.  “Valpo,” with roughly the same enrollment as Elmhurst, plays Division I.  It’s a “little engine that could” approach to sports which has been known to work; remember Valpo upset Mississippi in the 1998 NCAA men’s basketball tournament on Bryce Drew's three-pointer with no time left on the clock.  Anyway, Clare looked at the field and said, “I could’ve gone here.”

And today I checked on the D-III softball NCAA tournament results; all three CCIW entries won.  But we move on.

Behind the Drop in Numbers

 

A story in the Tribune this week suggests the end may be near for baseball and softball.  According to statistics cited, the percentage of people seven years old and up playing baseball at least twice a year during the period 2007-2012 dropped by 12.9 percent; for softball, the decline was a whopping 15.3 percent.  Apparently, some of those ex-ballplayers are now trying lacrosse.  Go figure.

Forget that I think girls should be playing baseball, with boys or not.  What, if anything, do these numbers mean?  For starters, the 125 percent increase in lacrosse basically means the four people playing are now nine.  Declining numbers may be the result of other sports poaching prospects, but I doubt it.  Football and volleyball are supposedly down, too, so maybe the real problem is kids turning into couch potatoes.  That, and the youth sports boom has gone bust just like the real estate bubble.

We were accessed in the neighborhood of $1200 every year by Clare’s travel team in high school; actual travel and equipment costs were extra.  Today, I wouldn’t be surprised if a majority of families were spending more than $4000 a summer to see if they have a budding ballplayer on their hands.  And who wants to spend that kind of money when there’s no guarantee a kid is going to start every game?  Before the Great Recession, maybe, but not anymore.

Another factor to consider is the quality of coaches, or lack thereof.  Two months after Clare hit .425 in junior year of high school, she was ready to walk away from softball, in large part because the two new travel coaches took a dislike to her.  They told me there were complaints about her fielding, and one of them told her she wouldn’t hit in college.  Talent won out in the end, but that kind of experience has a way of turning kids off of sports, as well it should.

Youth sports in 2014 is a brave new world where many are no longer called, so fewer show up.  In the end, cost and coaching will determine the health of all sports, whether softball, football or lacrosse.  I wouldn’t bet on the staying power of that last one, though.

Old School Announcing

We got this text from Clare last night:  “I’m sitting in the comfy chairs of the library thoroughly enjoying listening to the White Sox on my mlb radio app.  I just love listening to Ed Farmer do the game.”

Farmer is a South Side native and former Sox pitcher; his style can best be described as a no-excuses homer.  Ed wants the Sox to win, but he’ll always tell you why they don’t when they don’t.  He's also is a mean storyteller.

I can remember one from when Clare was in kindergarten, and we were doing Saturday volunteer work at her school for something called Market Day; my job was to deliver groceries.  I had the radio on to hear Farmer talking about his cup of coffee with the Orioles; Cal Ripken Sr. was one of the Oriole coaches.  “He’s talking to a group us with a cigarette in his mouth.  He smoked it all the way down with the ash just hanging there.  You know that Cal Ripken Sr. died of lung cancer, yes?”

Chicago radio announcers are a varied lot.  I go back to the days of Bob Elson, who spent a quarter-century doing White Sox games.  At least, I think he did them.  As a friend of mine once put it:  “With Elson, you didn’t know if the radio went dead or what.”  Indeed, “the Commander” was fond of long pauses.  Still, that didn’t keep him from receiving the Ford Frick Award from the Hall of Fame.

And then there was Ron Santo, he of the toupee that caught on fire during a broadcast from Shea Stadium.  Santo lived and died for his Cubs, which was why I loved listening to him when they were losing; never has the expression of pain been so heartfelt.  That said, I really did like Santo’s replacement, former Cub Keith Moreland.  He was sharp, like Farmer, with a country twang that harkened back to Red Barber.  I was genuinely sad to see Moreland step down after last season.

As for Harry Caray, he was the ultimate frontrunner.  If fans mourned Caray’s passing in 1998, I doubt that many former players did.  Among the many Caray took a dislike to was Cardinals’ third baseman Ken Boyer.  This is Bob Uecker doing Caray on Boyer, from David Halberstam’s October 1964:  “Well, here’s the Captain, Ken Boyer.  Boyer haaaaaaasn’t had an RBI in his last 52 games….I don’t understand why they continue to boo him here at Busch Stadium….Striiiiiiike one, he doesn’t eeeeven take the bat off his shoulder…here’s striiiiiiike two…and strike three….He nevvvvvver took the bat offffff his shoulder.  I don’t know why they’re booing him [p. 259].”  Substitute Bill Melton for Boyer, and that was Caray doing Sox games.  The Cubs were welcome to him.

And Ken “Hawk” Harrelson?  I think “he gone!” soon, and he won’t be missed at all.

Refighting Old Battles

I squared off against Harold Baines, he of the 1628 career rbi’s, in the Chicago Tribune on Sunday.  With Wrigley Field celebrating its 100^th anniversary, a Trib reporter thought it would be fun to offer a “what if” column, as in what if Comiskey Park had been renovated in the 1990s instead of being replaced by US Cellular Field, aka (very appropriately, I might add), the Cell?

I belonged to a group, Save Our Sox, that tried with all its tiny might to push the renovation option; my book, Baseball Palace of the World, recounts our struggles to be heard.  The White Sox did a very good job of controlling the issue by threatening to move (to Orlando’s Tropicana Field, of all places), if they didn’t get a new, publicly funded facility, and they employed a Chicken-Little attack strategy:  Eek! The park is falling down!  Run, because we sure as all hell will!

Baines was making pretty much the same argument a quarter-century later.  “The playing surface was fine,” Baines said Sunday, “but when I played in the outfield, bricks in right field would fall down.”  Liar, liar, pants on fire, Harold.  Why would city building inspectors risk injury to fans and players alike?  How did the White Sox manage to get liability and property insurance coverage, I mean, if the park was falling down and all?

The first time I took Clare to Wrigley Field, I told her to take it all in, how easy it was to walk in off the street to our seats, how close we were to the field and everyone else, how the park exuded personality from the outfield wells to the Deco scoreboard and clock.  This is a ballpark, I told her.

A renovated ballpark with an eye to 21^st century revenue streams is better than a ballpark turned into a parking lot, as at 35^th and Shields.  But the constant need to offer entertainment in addition to the game itself and the constant price gouging for everything from hotdogs to beer, I hate it.  Thank heaven for a daughter who played softball for so long and so well.

Games at Morton and Elmhurst were simplicity itself, and I was able to see my very own Babe Ruth.  If only I could have taken her to the ballpark my father took me….

Good New, Bad News

Today, the phone rang twice with the same news, from Clare and Euks—my daughter made All-Conference.  In fact, the whole Bluejays’ outfield did.  Really, they were that good.

The bad news is only for anyone delusional enough to think we had a chance at a bid.  This year, the NCAA took just three teams from the CCIW, which left Carthage outside looking in along with the rest of us.  My kingdom for a closer.

Keeping in Touch

Keeping in Touch

Clare and I talked on the phone a lot Friday and Saturday, following the CCIW tournament; the winner gets an automatic NCAA bid.  Because there is no justice in this world, Illinois Wesleyan won.

I say that not only because Wesleyan wins all the time.  There was a play Clare’s freshman year.  She slid into third and got a knee to the throat as part of the tag.  I can handle the swagger, but keep it clean, ladies.

Anywhere from two to four CCIW teams will get bids.  Right now, things are looking good for runner-up Augustana while Carthage and North Central are on the bubble.  Let me note here that Wesleyan went 12-2 in conference, with one of the losses from us, with Clare hitting a homer.

Just saying.

Speaking a Little Truth to Power

 Yesterday was a double-wait, one of which would end.  There’s the CCIW All-Conference and Elmhurst College Senior of the Year.  Clare was up for both.

Division I college and university presidents would love how sports are treated in Division III, where athletic directors can only dream of moving on to Division I.  Clare was nominated on the basis of her school and volunteer work as well as her softball accomplishments.  The president invited all nominees and their parents to a reception.  It just happened to be at the same time we were playing the U of C.

We all missed that, but Clare did show for the interview; a panel of several people asked her how she would get soon-to-be fellow graduates to contribute to the school.  Her answer:  “I wouldn’t.  People who have just graduated don’t have the money; they have to deal with student loans and getting a job right away.  The school should be finding ways to help them.”  She also has some strong opinions on the state of athletics at Elmhurst which she may or may not have shared.

If nothing else, she still has a shot at All-Conference.