Left Field Dreams, Sunday Afternoon

My father took me to the last game of the season in 1964.  It was a cloudy, sad Sunday despite the White Sox winning their 98^th game of the season maybe because the Yankees won 99.

Fifty years later, on a warm cloudless Sunday afternoon, I took my family to the last game of the season, and Paul Konerko’s career.  For a while it was easy to dream.  Marcus Semian homered; Josh Phegley had an rbi double to go with his two homers the night before; and rookie starter Chris Bassitt pitched decently.  Every time Konerko came to the plate, we stood and chanted:  Paul-ie!  Paul-ie!  It all looked like a White Sox winner until the relievers came in.

The season ended, we drove back home, and Clare left to go back to Valpo.  Next spring seems an eternity from now.  

A Few Choice Words

Too many athletes build walls around themselves with entourages, mansions and publicists.  This insures a desired isolation along with the likelihood people will forget the face and talent behind it soon enough.

Last night, Paul Konerko addressed a U.S. Cellular crowd of over 38,000 there to honor a favorite son.  Instead of addressing Sox “fans,” Konerko spoke to “all my friends in this building right now.”  Those eight simple, elegant words will keep #14 from being forgotten on the great South Side of Chicago.

More Brian on Derrick

Poor Brian Williams just couldn’t help himself.  Yesterday, Williams gushed over Derrick Jeter’s walk-off hit against the Orioles Thursday night, and, again, according to the NBC anchor, rooting for the Yankees was not necessary to see the full measure of Jeter’s greatness.  I wonder, do Yankee fans ever feel that way?  After all, they’re very good at opposing players what they think of them.  Maybe a few will write letters to the editor on how moved they were by Paul Konerko’s last game or ex-Yankee Bobby Abreu announcing his retirement.  But I won’t hold my breath.   

New York, New York

Brian Williams devoted a part of the nightly new to soon-to-be ex-Yankee Derek Jeter saying, with a New Yorker’s certainty, “you don’t have to be a Yankee fan to appreciate a guy who has played it right.”  Meanwhile, one of the commentators on MLB Network called Jeter’s retirement “a story that transcends baseball.”  Well, I’m not a Yankee fan, and there was nothing transcendent for me in Jeter’s last-ever home game, walk-off single or not.

I happen to live west of the Hudson, in flyover America; we play baseball here, too.  Chicago has even sent a few shortstops to Cooperstown.  Maybe you’ve heard of Appling, Banks or Aparicio.  On Sunday, White Sox fans say goodbye to their own guy played it right.  His name is Paul Konerko.

It’s a name Brian Williams isn’t likely to mention.  His loss.

Time Flies

Last night, the Blue Jays beat the Mariners 1-0 in 1 hour and 59 minutes.  A game that fast can only mean one thing—Mark Buehrle pitched, picking up career win number 199 along the way.

Buehrle spent the first twelve years of his career with the White Sox.  A 38^th (!) round draft choice, he worked fast and fielded his position with a Gold Glove (four so far).  Buehrle pitched two no-hitters with the Sox, one a perfect game, and he has never been on the disabled list.  He’ll start next season at age 36, after which time Jamie Moyer, another soft-tossing lefty, would go on to win 165 games.  Buehrle can make the Hall of Fame, if he wants it and stays healthy.

The only drawback, for me, is that he comes from the “there are no bad pit bulls just bad owners” school of thought.  I could live with that, though, if Mark Buehrle wanted to bring his 13-15 wins a year back to the South Side.   He’s always had sense enough to keep his dogs out of trouble.

Lingo

Clare hates it when Hawk Harrelson says a batter with a 2-0 or 3-0 count “is in the catbird seat,” courtesy of the late, great Red Barber.  Clare’s still young, so she may yet develop an appreciation of baseball language the way I have.

I love how a pitcher wants to get the ball into the batter’s kitchen but never the wheelhouse; how it’s better to hum that pea than feed your gopher (ball); and while it’s always fun to touch them all, a well-placed Baltimore chop is a thing of beauty to behold.  One of my prized possessions is the third edition of The Dickson Baseball Dictionary.  Where else could I get the definition of “anvil chorus” (loudmouth fans) or “Sunday pitch” (the best one in a pitcher’s arsenal)?

Compare this to the language of football.  Forget that they’ve stolen terms like “homerun” and “centerfield” or the whole George Carlin routine comparing terms from the respective sports.  On second thought, keep in mind the sacrifice vs. the blitz and then listen to Jon Gruden, the NFL coach-turned-commentator who did color on the Bears-Jets game Monday night.  Gruden speaks a language I’ll never understand.  It’s all double and triple zones or low stunts right or some combination thereof.  Give me a can of corn to a real ball hawk any day.     

A Taste of the Bigtime

Sunday, Clare had to set her alarm for 5:30 AM or thereabouts in order to leave with the Valpo softball team on their drive through the Indiana countryside to West Lafayette, where they played Purdue and Ball State.

Too bad Purdue didn’t have Roger Bossard or one of his kin working.  The White Sox master groundskeeper knows how to deal with rain.  Just putting a tarp on the infield won’t keep it dry; water has a way of going left and right as well as down.  In other words, the infield was muddy after they took the tarp off.  That would explain why Clare didn’t get to her apartment until well past 6:30 PM.  You live and learn.

I asked if she saw any difference between Division I and III players.  True to her D-III roots, Clare said, “Not too much,” more depth of talent than anything else.  Officially, she helped keep charts.  All sports seem to have fallen under the spell of sabermetrics; no pitch, no hit, no play is too trivial to keep track of.  Unofficially, I’ll bet my daughter imagined herself going up to bat every time a right-handed hitter stepped in.  As they say, old habits die hard.  And that may be part of the reason why Clare was exhausted come evening.

Just so long as she hit a few imaginary balls out, it was worth it.   

Scandal-fed Stereotypes

It was bound to happen in the wake of the NFL scandal.  Yesterday, a letter writer to the Tribune complained “athletes are treated like royalty beginning when they are still children.”  Well, yes and no.

I went to a Catholic boys’ high school, St. Lord-of-the-Flies, where only the strong survived.  I wasn’t Piggy, but I knew some kids who were, and things didn’t go well for them.  Football players in particular tended to be a brutish lot, which helps explain my lukewarm fandom for the game in later years.

But I never had a problem with Jim Dwyer, two years ahead of me.  Maybe he didn’t act like royalty because he didn’t know yet that he’d have an eighteen-year career in the major leagues that took him all the way to the age of 40.  For that matter, I never had a problem with baseball players.

Neither did Clare.  There was one kid in particular a year ahead of her in high school.  He got drafted twice and signed with the Angels.  According to my daughter, he was ok without much or any of a big head.  I think baseball is different somehow.  Maybe it’s that old adage about .300 hitters failing 70 percent of the time.  There’s a built-in humility to the game—and no cheerleaders.

It also depends on gender.  In girls’ sports it’s hard to get too full of yourself because you’ll never end up in a situation like Jim Dwyer.  The “pros” for women don’t promise the same kind of payoff.  Instead, female athletes from early on know that a post-sport life awaits them upon graduation, and that has to keep them grounded.

What struck me about having an athlete for a child was all the work she put in it.  If anyone treated her like royalty, the princess knew she could be kicked down to commoner status for lack of production.  Clare always worked hard—as in hours of extra practice—to hit better and field better.  Then she came home to schoolwork.  Did I mention she graduated seventh out of a class of 800?

Not every athlete is Marie Antoinette or Henry VIII.

Scandal and More Scandal

Well, things are going swimmingly for the NFL.  It appears that the Ravens and even the commissioner knew about the video of Ray Rice punching his fiancée in the side of the head from early on, not last week as the football establishment has been trying to say.  One Ravens’ official living in denial said the “recently” released video “looks very different than what we understood the facts to be.”  And what facts were those, that the woman mysteriously passed out in the elevator and Rice carried her out, albeit awkwardly?  Oh, and the Ravens’ owner, whose director of security had a full report of the incident within hours of it transpiring, went to his buddy Commissioner Goodell to argue on behalf of his star running back.  On another front, Vikings’ special-teams coach Mike Priefer was welcomed back to the team on Monday with a standing ovation from players.  Priefer had been suspended for a string of antigay comments.

What does all this mean?  That some players don’t care and probably a lot of fans, too.  My guess is that the more intense the fan, the less outrage there is over what a player or coach says or does.  Just win, baby.  Yes, sponsors are pressuring the NFL, but I’ll bet that’s because they’re getting grief from non-sports groups that are capable of generating sustained negative publicity.  Any number of women’s groups qualifies here.

As I’ve said, baseball tends to be different.  We have our police-blotter items, but not as many as in football.  The MLB, though, is very good at extortion in full public view.  Take my White Sox, who are spending the weekend at god-awful Tropicana Field in Tampa, one of the weakest franchises in all of baseball.  But once upon a time, Florida was held up as the Promised Land for the first team to locate there.  And the White Sox threatened to if they didn’t get a publicly funded replacement for Comiskey Park.  The team went so far as to send someone from the front-office to “advise” Tampa on its stadium-building efforts.  Look at Tropicana Field along with the Cell, and you wonder what kind of taste our robber baron Mr. Reinsdorf has in architecture. 

As long as it’s free, he doesn’t care.  

Killing Time

On Monday the Padres and Phillies played their 1-0 game in 2 hours and 9 minutes.  The Rays and Yankees also managed all of one run between them in nine innings, but it took 3 hours and 28 minutes to finish.  And then we have yesterday’s White Sox-Royals’ affair, a 7-5 Sox win in nine innings that took up 4 hours and 16 minutes.  That happens to be a record for the Royals.

When they talk about baseball not being a slave to the clock, is this what they meant?

Panic in K.C.

Nothing like watching the slap-happy Nori Aoki go 4 for 4 and set up the winning run in the bottom of the ninth against the White Sox to bring back oh-so-many unpleasant memories of Kansas City.  In the ‘70s and ‘80s Kauffman Stadium was AstroTurf hell, with the slap-happy Willie Wilson and George Brett leading the way.  Before that there was a different ballpark and a different team and a different year.

On September 27, 1967, the second-place White Sox were one game out of first, with the last five games of the season against the last-place A’s on the road and eighth-place Senators at home.  The team with 89 wins squared off in a doubleheader against the cellar dwellers with 60 wins.  Guess who swept their last two games ever in Kansas City before relocating to Oakland?  Guess which team was managed by Sox Hall-of-Famer Luke Appling?  (Hint: it wasn’t the Sox under Eddie Stanky.)  Guess which team closed out the season by losing all five of those “easy” games and then opened 1968 by dropping their first ten?  Guess who cursed God for abandoning his team in its time of need?

Those are just some of my memories of baseball in Kansas City.

Athletes Behaving Badly

This was a bad week for the NFL with TMZ’s release of a video that shows Ray Rice knocking out his fiancée with a blow to the head and the indictment of Adrian Peterson in Texas for repeatedly hitting his four-year old son with a switch.  But it would be wrong, sort of, to pile on the NFL for all their bad apples.  Think Dennis Rodman and Barry Bonds, or Mike McGwire, even.

Athletes seem to be misbehaving at an unprecedented rate.  That, or social media has been adept at providing an abundance of juicy pictures and video.  Practically no team is immune, even my White Sox.  We’ve been more inclined to employ jerks, as in Albert Belle and Carl Everett.  What bothers me is that the desire to win has blinded fans to the transgressions of the players they root for, which encourages teams to keep going after borderline criminals who have the slightest hint of talent.

Blame the Ravens for tolerating the likes of Rice, but what about their fans, especially all those women who were wearing Rice jerseys at the Ravens-Steelers game on Thursday?  What were they thinking, that domestic violence doesn’t matter; Rice was framed; his fiancée had it coming?  If this mindset is part of the cost of winning in 2014, give me the 1962 Mets any day.   

Pitching In

This will give you an idea as to how much my daughter loves softball—she volunteered to get up at 5 AM on a Saturday to help with a Valpo softball camp.  The only problem with that is Clare has the personality of a tyrannosaurs rex early in the morning.  Campers, beware.

The first part of the camp had to be indoors on account of wet weather.  Bad lights and sightlines led to Clare taking a line drive off one of her biceps during soft toss; all the dads were impressed how she didn’t flinch.  As ever, the girl had to send a picture of the bruise to her mother.  I mean, what are parents for?

With cleanup, Clare didn’t finish until 4:30, but there’s a reward for all her hard work.  Next weekend, she gets to go with the team when they play Purdue.  The education of an aspiring coach continues.

Sale's Thesaurus

At the urging of his then-teammate Adam Dunn, White Sox lefty Chris Sale has been sneaking vocabulary words into his postgame comments.  Yesterday, after throwing eight inning of two-hit shutout ball, Sale worked “quixotic” into the conversation.  Personally, I would’ve used “splendiferous.”  How better to describe a starting pitcher with an ERA of 1.99 and 192 strikeouts in a mere 163 innings?

Or “fast.”  Just like Mark Buehrle, Sale gets the ball and throws it.  Yesterday’s 1-0 win over the As took 2 hours and 18 minutes.  The Reds blanked the Cardinals by the same score in a time six minutes better.  If only this could be a trend, especially with the possible seventh game of the World Series scheduled for November.

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.