Long Distance

Six months ago, Clare thought she would be spending the summer as a day-camp coordinator, with her boyfriend a couple of suburbs away.  Then opportunity knocked.

Clare is now part of a Division I softball program at Valparaiso; that looks very good on a resume even if it means going in tomorrow to check out a new lawnmower for the softball and baseball programs.  Meanwhile, Chris, the boyfriend in question, got a call from his old Elmhurst coach, who moved on to become the offensive coordinator at Syracuse.  Chris is now a graduate assistant for offense, where he can teach the tricks of the lineman’s trade.  How many of us can say we walk the sidelines at the Carrier Dome?

One little problem, though—one half of the young power couple is in upstate New York, the other half in northwest Indiana (when she’s not in beautiful Berwyn).  How do you make that relationship work?  All I know is they’re trying, with Chris coming in by Amtrak (what’s 12 hours out of your life?) this week, so they can see each other for the first time in nearly two months; with football starting soon, Clare will be going to Syracuse in mid-July, and after that, it’ll basically be texts and video-chatting.

This is the part of sports fans don’t see.  They turn on the TV or go to the game to watch players perform and coaches not screw up; their sense of these people as human beings is sketchy at best.  You have to be the parent of an athlete with coaching aspirations to get it.  I do, and all I can say by way of advice is—it could be worse.  Clare’s grandparents were separated for close to two years, as the Chinese and North Koreans took turns shooting at a then 20-year old Gramps.  So far, college softball and football fans don’t do that at games.

Driven to Extremes

I can see why fans do it, press the numbers on their phone, make the call.  They don’t even care if it’s one of those shows where the host loves to bait callers.  When professional sports’ teams go really bad, there’s not much else the paying public can do.

Witness my White Sox. Since 2013, they have the second-worst record in baseball, second only to the Phillies (who are about to have a new front office).  The team made four major offseason acquisitions—pitchers Jeff Smardzija and David Robertson, first baseman Adam LaRoche and left fielder Melky Cabrera—with only Robertson coming anywhere close to performing to expectations.

Yesterday, Samardzija coughed up a four-run lead in the eighth to the Tigers, then spouted gibberish about having to do better; the thing was, he sounded more resigned than upset.  LaRoche is downright creepy the way he strolls back to the dugout after a strikeout, staring at the pitcher.  And Robertson must wonder why the manager didn’t bring him in at any point in the eighth or ninth, especially given that the Tigers’ closer pitched the ninth to get the win. 

Seven months ago, White Sox executive vice president Kenny Williams wanted to take a job in the Toronto front office but was denied permission.  Too bad, at least for Sox GM Rick Hahn, who is being subjected to all sorts of second-guessing by Williams, now travelling with the team to get a feel for how they’re playing.  (Kenny, all you need to do is look at the box score and watch the game on TV; Hawk Harrelson has stopped making excuses for the bad play.  In fact, Hawk goes entire stretches without saying a word, it’s gotten so wretched.)   Williams doesn’t like what he sees, outside of the manager.

And he doesn’t like the criticism of Ventura.  He wants to know why he should care about the opinions of people “who have never run baseball teams” and “it’s here-today-gone-tomorrow for them?”  You see, those people have “had no internal conversations [with team officials] to formulate” their opinions.  By that definition, only politicians can have opinions about politics.  Taxpayers and fans should shut up and be grateful for the little things.

Wait, there’s more.  Pitching coach Don Cooper took offense at a reporter asking about Robertson’s recent travails.  “I applaud all you [sports people] for always looking for the head of the man that’s [expletive deleted] causing the problem,” Cooper was quoted in today’s Tribune.  “Your pursuit of that is relentless, but he’s done a good job for us.”  And to think the Sox rank next to last in the AL for team ERA.  Good job, Coop.

No one loses their job, and fans should mind their own business.  Like I said, this is why people take to sports’ talk radio.        

An Eighth Grader at St. Gall

 I went to college with Dave Corzine, who turned into a decent, journeyman NBA center, but we didn’t have any classes together.  I went to high school with Jim Dwyer, who spent 18 years in the majors as a lefty platoon player and pinch hitter, but we didn’t have any classes together.  And I can now say I went to St. Gall grade school with Pete Mackanin, who is managing his third big-league team (after the Pirates and Reds) on an interim basis.  On Friday, Mackanin was picked to fill in as the Phillies’ skipper when Ryne Sandburg stepped down.

I never had class with Mackanin because he was an eighth grader, one year and two days older than me.  I could only watch as he hit a 16-inch softball from one end of the playground to the other.  Mackanin was drafted as a 17-year old in 1969 by the Senators, who shipped him off to the Expos five years later as part of a trade for Willie Davis.  In Montreal, Mackanin had two decent seasons at the ages of 22 and 23, totaling 20 homers and 77 rbi’s, but he could never establish himself as an everyday player.  His last major-league game was against the White Sox at the age of 30.  He took his first managing job in the Cubs’ system three years later.

Mackanin is a baseball lifer, having been a coach, scout and manager.  He stepped in to guide the Reds to a 41-39 record in 2007 only to see Dusty Baker hired on a permanent basis; five years later, he interviewed for the Cubs’ managing job that went to Dale Sveum.  And I wouldn’t bet on him getting the Phillies’ job, which would be a thankless task, anyway; the team has a major-league worst record of 26-49.  If it’s any consolation, to me he’ll forever be an eighth grader, a year older with a bat that boomed up and down the St. Gall playground on south Kedzie Avenue.   

 

Exile on Main Street

 Clare told me she got a tweet earlier in the week from Micah Johnson, who recommended a great place for a calzone in Syracuse; Johnson and his Charlotte Knights were in Syracuse to play the Chiefs.  I take this as a sign Johnson hasn’t been moping since his demotion last month..  In fact, he’s hitting .302 with 12 stolen bases.  More important are the three errors; Leury Garcia, Charlotte’s other second baseman, has 12, so either Johnson is playing better defense, or he’s booted the three balls to come his way.  I’m more of a glass-half-full kind of guy.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.  Johnson is personable, articulate and wise in the way of social media; you want him to succeed almost as much as his family must.  If he can play for the big team the way he’s playing now, a whole lot of changes could be set in motion culminating in Alexi Ramirez going bye-bye.  That would be a good thing for all parties involved.

One last thing:  Southern towns used to be hard on and for black ballplayers; Hank Aaron and Frank Robinson among far too many other black players have their horror stories of toiling away south of the Mason-Dixon Line; now, players can tweet in their spare time as they wait for a calzone along with the hoped-for call up.  But it’s still the South, as the people of Charlotte found last week.     

Dumb Luck

When Clare was eight days old, we took her to Thanksgiving dinner that had all grandparents attending.  My father didn’t see anything wrong with a newborn at the table; if anything, he wanted to turn into a kangaroo so he could carry around his only grandchild in a pouch.  My father-in-law was more from the GERMS!-GERMS! school and thought we should’ve sealed ourselves into a sterile environment.  But I’m sure both grandfathers would agree that what happened at Wrigley Field Tuesday night was downright stupid and avoidable.

A fan in the front row behind first base caught a foul ball with one hand while holding onto his seven-month old (you read that right) son with the other.  How the media loved it; one sportswriter even said he wanted a cup of beer involved next time.  Next time?  It never should’ve happened in the first place.

Three weeks ago, a Red Sox fan was seriously injured when a broken bat flew into the stands, hitting her in the head; when Tyler Flower swings, his bat lands in the seats more often than he homers.  Foul line drives and pop ups hit fans in the head so often that MLB is considering more protective netting around infield seats.  And this guy is being lionized for a great catch?  If that had been me, two elderly gentlemen would’ve have been waiting outside our front door to beat the crap out of me.  And they would’ve been right to do so.

WIthout Fear of Consequences

Like all young athletes, Clare learned early on that time on the field was tied to performance—if you want to play, you better produce.  As a girl playing baseball through seventh grade, she always felt compelled to excel; otherwise, less enlightened teammates and parents might talk.  You might say that my daughter would have done very well as one of those creatures Charles Darwin studied on his trip to the Galapagos.

Because, when you get down to it, all sports are Darwinian in nature: The strong, the smart, the sly prevail over lesser species and opponents.  That’s the way of the world, if not Chicago sports.  Here, every interception Jay Cutler throws seems to add a year to his Bears’ contract.  And my White Sox, why there are no consequences to bad play for them.  Yesterday, Chris Sale fell two strikeouts short of becoming the first pitcher ever to have twelve or more punch-outs in six straight games.  Thank you, Sox offense and defense.

The hitters, if that’s what you can call them, managed one run for their starter as the fielders, if that’s what you can call them, collected another three errors.  Center fielder Adam Eaton now has four on the season while shortstop Alexi Ramirez—with a .241 on-base percentage  to complement his .220 batting average—has nine, as does part-time third baseman Conor Gillaspie.  These are not your Go-Go White Sox of Aparicio and Fox. 

  Ramirez doesn’t field balls so much as he deflects them; Eaton merely shows a bit of the dog when it comes to catching a ball or running to first.   Last week, they let a pop fly fall between them; Eaton basically said it was no big thing.  That was before yesterday’s error led to a run and Eaton failed to run out a shot that handcuffed the shortstop, followed by a bad throw to first.  Apparently, nobody in travel ball taught Adam that you only jog on homeruns.

Our fearless leader Robin Ventura doesn’t want to do anything drastic like sit, oh, Ramirez.  “He wants to play better,” Ventura told reporters.  “We want him to play better.  But there are a lot of other guys who need to do the same thing.  We’re not going to put it on any one guy.”  So, fans, that’s nine errors at short and counting, with the nine-under White Sox playing four in Detroit.  Who said the Dodo Bird is extinct? 

A Rose by any Other Name

 ESPN has come into possession of a notebook that looks to be a smoking gun—it shows that Pete Rose the player bet on ballgames in 1986.  Not that this really changes anything.  Rose is still without a plaque at Cooperstown, and he still comes off as a liar, or forgetful.

What struck me, though, was how at least part of his image persists.  Yesterday, a sportswriter in the Sun-Times described the all-time hits’ leader as someone who “succeeded through effort more than talent.”  Oh, come on.  The man collected 4256 hits, for crying out loud.  I can think of a whole bunch of players who always tried hard (Dick Green, Phil Garner, Tony Phillips) but came up a couple thousand hits or more short.  Rose had “all-star” if not “HOFer” written all over him by the age of 21.

In 1962, his third and final season in the minors, that Rose hit .330 with a .431 on-base percentage; he also scored 136 runs.  From the start, Pete Rose was an exceptional ballplayer.  What he lacked wasn’t talent but a moral compass.  There’s a difference.

Eight Miles High

You couldn’t avoid the Blackhawks’ victory celebration last week, even if you tried.  So many people were expected in downtown Chicago Metra had to run a special train schedule.  Michele usually takes the 8:17; to accommodate Blackhawk Nation (and doesn’t a certain Native-American leader appreciate the irony of that term) last Thursday, we had to get to the stop by 7:52 AM.  Who knew people drank so early in the day?

Michele told me that evening she could hear the parade pass from 58 floors up, and some coworkers were able to point out that silvery speck as the Stanley Cup.  The most interesting part of the rally, though, was the demographics.  Hockey may or may not be getting more diverse.  But the people coming out to see the NHL’s version of the Holy Grail really do trend young.  I know Clare would’ve given anything to be in Soldier Field rather than Valparaiso.  Me, I couldn’t care less.

Did I attend the White Sox World Series rally ten years ago this autumn?  No.  There just comes a point in life where priorities change.  You realize stuff has to get done, and nobody else is going to do it.  I really, really loved Paul Konerko as a ballplayer (and Walt Williams, too, for that matter), but Paulie never pitched in around the house, no matter how many times I stayed up late to watch games from the West Coast.  I am at an age where it’s enough to cheer from the living room couch, though I suspect half the western world will come out to rally after a Cubs’ World Series win.  I can just see George F. Will and Bozo leading the parade.

Happy Father's Day

I cut White Sox infielder Gordon Beckham a lot of slack for two reasons—he plays with a golden glove and Clare has always been sweet on him.  She has a picture somewhere of the two of them I took at a fan convention several years ago.

Along with that incredible hair, I think Clare was drawn to a fellow infielder (though when Clare went to college, she was shifted to the outfield.  Go figure).  A natural shortstop, Beckham can play anywhere on the left side of the infield with equal grace.  He came close to winning a Gold Glove at second in 2012 and plays an obscenely good third.  The man is all soft hands, strong arm and one-step quickness.  Just don’t put a bat in his hands.

Beckham did fine his rookie season of 2009, batting .270 with 63 rbi’s in just 378 at-bats; nothing since has come close.  When he’s good, Beckham has a nice short swing, and he can shoot doubles into either power alley, but when he’s bad, his swing gets loopy, and he accumulates way too many popups and strikeouts.  For whatever reason, Gordon has gotten a little loopier with each passing season.  It reached the point last year the Sox traded their onetime phenom to the Angels.  Then the Halos released him in the offseason, and we signed him to a one-year deal as a utility player.

For a while, it looked like Beckham had achieved Willie Bloomquist, super-sub status, but then the loopiness returned about a month ago.  I was watching the game yesterday with my father-in-law, when he mentioned that someone had given him a Beckham tee-shirt.  “Burn it,” I advised.  “He’s all field, no hit.”  No sooner had I said that then Beckham turned a sparkling home-to-first double play in the top of the eleventh inning with the bases loaded against the Rangers.  And you know the old saying, How often does a player make a great play in the top of the inning only to lead off the bottom?

At which point, Gordon Beckham took the first pitch he saw and deposited it over the fence in left for a walk-off home run; on Mother’s Day, Beckham had a walk-off single against the Reds.  It’s enough to give one hope, and ignore a .220 batting average going into the first week of summer.

Who Do the Dew?

 Something called the Dew Tour is in Chicago this weekend.  Ordinarily, I’d dismiss it as a bunch of idiots on skateboards.  You reach this point in life after coming close to hitting too many too-cool-to-care skateboarders in the street.  But actually the whole phenomenon is way more depressing than that.

This Dew stuff dates to when I was young and we had a little downtime from hunting mastodons.  Okay, maybe not that long ago.  Let’s start in the 1960s, when some flower-power types charged that all organized sports were fascist.  To a certain mindset, balls were bad, Frisbee good.  Then came hacky sack and for those rebels without a surfboard, skateboarding; the more artistic types took to “tagging,” as in graffiti art.  Nearly fifty years later, that hippie protest has morphed into all sorts of Xtreme Games. 

Here’s the thing—what started out as rebellion is now a corporate enterprise.  Hence “Dew” and the Olympics (half-pipe, anyone?).  So, the joke’s on those clowns breaking bones in the name of doing their own thing; they’re not, not if they’re also drinking or wearing sponsor stuff.  But the joke’s on us geezers, too.

We’ve allowed generations of adolescents to treat public property as their personal playground.  Curbs and handrails shouldn’t belong to skateboarders any more than walls and subway cars to taggers.  I’m pretty sure Dew and Xtreme would have driven John Locke crawling back to the king.  That said, I also believe Dew et al is in part as a reasonable rejection of organized sports, from travel to school to pros.  We’ve turned athletes into gods while denying a human connection.  This encourages some of the more normal-sized among us to find their own games, ones that aren’t connected to a combine or madness on the calendar.  Only those games have become so popular in their own right so as to be worth co-opting.

I guess that means the joke’s on all of us, baseball fan and Dew’fus alike.

A Tree Falls....

A tree falls in the forest, and there’s no one around for miles.  Does the tree make a sound, is its passing mourned?  Chris Sale enters Hall of Fame company and could stand alone there after his next start.  Will Robin Ventura know, will anyone tell him?

Last night, Sale struck out 14 batters while shutting out the Rangers on two hits over eight innings.  He joins Pedro Martinez and Randy Johnson as the only pitchers in major-league history to have struck out 12 or more hitters in five straight starts.  If the 26-year old lefty does it again in his next start against the Twins, Martinez and Johnson will have to look up to him.

Sale threw 111 pitches and wanted to start the ninth inning, with the Rangers number-nine hitter leading off.  The Rangers most likely would have gone with a right-handed pinch hitter before left-handed leadoff batter Shin-Soo Choo stepped in.  Were the Rangers feeling lucky?  We’ll never know because Sox manager Robin Ventura brought in his closer, David Robertson, who proceeded to cough up the lead and lose the game, 2-1.  Way to go, Robin.

Think about it for a moment.  The crowd is pumped, and you have to think Sale is, too, with a chance for three more strikeouts; if he fans the side, he breaks the record for most strikeouts by a Sox pitcher that dates to 1954.  But the manager decides otherwise.  The proof’s in the pudding, as they say.  It’s time to go, Robin, I say.

The Devil Inside

Tiger Woods shot a 10-over-par 80 at the U.S. Open yesterday, and I wonder, not about the physical decline of an athlete so much as the loss of his pick-me-up.  Sex around the clock may have been the only way for Woods to achieve greatness in the first place.

Talent can be a weird thing.  Sometimes, it can be coaxed out through constant practice and competition; think Ted Williams. It was different with Woods.  Am I saying he needed to cheat on his wife in order to win?  Basically, yes.  Long story short, talent often comes attached with a big helping of crazy.

Consider Darryl Porter, a catcher whose best years with the Royals coincided with his alcohol and cocaine abuse.  Porter played another seven years after getting clean, but he wasn’t the same hitter.  The decline may have coincided with rehab, or not.  Also consider all those athletes who have lubricated themselves with liquor.  Why do something that could endanger your health?  The answer is that, for some players, a bottle makes for an excellent crutch.  You have to wonder about players like Mickey Mantle and Billy Martin even in that regard.

And how about Dock Ellis, the Pirates right hander who claimed to be on LSD when he no-hit the Padres and said he “never pitched a game in the major leagues [where] I wasn’t high”?   Yes, drug abuse could very well have kept Ellis from winning more than the 138 games he managed, but could he have stepped onto the mound sober?  We’ll never know.

What would I have done had my athlete of a child early on displayed signs of this kind of crazy?  Everything in my power to make her confront all doubts and anxieties head-on rather than turn to any of the above.  Tiger Woods may come to wish he had never found success the way he did.    

You Can't Go Home Again

 With all due respect to Thomas Wolfe, sometimes you can go home again, sometimes not.  LeBron James did this season with the Cavaliers, and it almost went from literary allusion to fairy-book ending.  Too bad for the Warriors’ Stephen Curry.

The athlete-leaving and –returning is a constant on the sports’ page.  In Chicago, Michael Jordan left once for baseball, came back and left again when he didn’t feel the love.  City, team and player are worse off for Jordan’s relocation to Charlotte.

Mike Ditka left, begged George Halas to come back and conquered the football world only to get fired by Halas’s grandson.  Ditka tried coaching in New Orleans before returning to the city where he’s revered as a cantankerous, slightly loopy grandpa.  I have yet to eat at one of his steakhouses.

Luis Aparicio was traded by the White Sox and cursed them for the affront.  When they traded to get him back, Aparicio renounced the curse, but the team still stunk (it was the late ‘60s) and they traded him away again.  Aparicio now returns to the South Side with the frequency of Halley’s Comet.

The Cubs failed to give Greg Maddux a big contract, so he walked, to Atlanta.  Maddux came back after eleven seasons, stayed a mediocre two-and-a-half, and moved on.  His hat of choice for HOF enshrinement does not bear the letter C in red.

Ron Santo was traded from the Cubs without ever leaving the city; Santo spent a year in exile on the South Side at the end of his career.  It was like he never left, and he never did.  I miss him in the broadcast booth for all the wrong reasons.

The White Sox parted ways with Robin Ventura at the age of 31, which proved to be a real mistake; good third basemen, the kind who can drive in 120 runs and play into their mid-30s, are about as rare as hens’ teeth, especially for the Sox.  But we brought Ventura back to manage, and that’s proven to be a mistake, too.  Bad managers are a dime a dozen.

Chicken Little vs. Waldo

 The Blackhawks’ third Stanley Cup in six years has sent the Chicago media into a tizzy.  Chicken Little columnists and reporters warn of impending doom because of the salary cap while everyone else with a mic and a camera is chasing after the Cup here, there and down the street before it gets packed off to points unknown.

The salary cap is merely another way for owners to say, “We have the power.”  There is no corresponding sales’ cap for when a franchise gets sold.  The Bears, Blackhawks and Bulls all have some form of salary cap (“hard” or “soft”) while the Cubs and White Sox don’t; baseball employs a luxury tax about as loose as my old sweat pants.  Now guess which sport has the cheapest tickets on average.  (Hint: It’s the game with the bat and ball.)  So, the cap has little or no bearing on ticket prices while depressing player salaries.  Workers and fans of the other sports, unite, or at least follow the lead of baseball, where a proposed cap never made it out of the 1994 lockout.

Of course, if they did get rid of the salary cap in the NHL, I might be subjected to a Stanley-Cup travelogue for the next 10-15 years.  Who cares?  It’s not the Holy Grail or the Magna Carta (Happy 800^th Birthday, by the way) or the Declaration of Independence or….Let it go, guys, and find some real news to report on, like the impending collapse of the baseball house of Reinsdorf.

A Familiar Face

With the Blackhawks poised to win their third Stanley Cup Monday night, the Tribune ran a feature on Stan Mikita, the Slovak-born center who could feed the puck to Bobby Hull with his eyes closed, and probably did.  I always enjoyed Mikita as a self-effacing (ex-)athlete with an irreverent wit.  He also bore a striking resemblance to my Uncle Art.

To the best of my knowledge, my uncle didn’t play hockey or ice skate even, but he knew how to make an impression.  Art saw this girl, my Aunt Fran, at Riverview Amusement Park and swooped in; North Side married South Side sometime later.  Then Art went off to war, serving both in France and the Pacific, if memory serves.

I have this memory of my uncle as a motorcycle cop riding down Western Avenue on his three-wheeler.  He recognized us and broke into this big, non-cop smile.  Another time, he came with candy and baseball magazines to visit me in the hospital after I broke my arm in seventh grade.  By then, I’d already picked him to be my Confirmation sponsor.  And did I mention how as a five-year old I picked up his service revolver, thinking it was a toy?  Thankfully, no lives were lost or bottoms spanked.

According to the Tribune story, Mikita has dementia; what his old team accomplishes is of little import to him.  My uncle was luckier, in a way; it was his body, not his mind, that kept betraying him.  He died before Clare was born.  She’s too young to have known either her great uncle or the athlete who advised, “Keep your feet grounded, and always remember where you came from.”  My uncle couldn’t have said it better.    

Circling the Drain

The White Sox couldn’t be bothered to score more than one run yesterday, so Chris Sale lost 2-1, despite striking out 12 in 6-2/3 innings and giving up but three hits to Tampa.  On Saturday, the White Sox couldn’t be bothered to protect a one-run lead in the bottom of the eighth as Alexi shortstop Ramirez started throwing the ball every which way but for an out.  On Friday the White Sox couldn’t be bothered because John Danks was pitching, and Danks turns everyone into Joe DiMaggio.

Manager Robin Ventura couldn’t be bothered to show up for the weekend series because he had a graduation in the family.  The general manager can’t be bothered to hold staff and roster accountable because he’s too busy drafting the owner’s grandson.  And free-agent acquisition Adam LaRoche can’t be bothered to hit, what with his ZZ Top beard to go with his boatload of strikeouts (and creepy stares back to the catcher after he’s punched out).

The entire team can’t be bothered to notice their season is circling the drain.  Maybe next year.

Full Circle

Travel baseball and softball have a certain Bataan-Death-March quality to them, what with the heat and the play-to-you-drop aspect of the losers’ bracket.  With effort, it’s an acquired taste.

We travelled for five years, from the summer after eighth grade to just before Clare started college.  There were Toledo; Kankakee; Lee’s Summit; and a whole bunch of Podunks in between.  For three years, Clare played on a team whose home field was adjacent to a quarry; the earth shook only some of the time.  Did I mention the heat?  OK, what about the uncertainty over playing?  And did I mention the heat?

You do this because of your kid.  With luck, you get some memories along the way, like seeing Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz sing the National Anthem one July at Nationals or watching your daughter park nine out of ten balls over a fence in a homerun hitting contest she (co-)won.  Did I mention the mother who nearly keeled over from the Kansas heat?

We did it so long I miss it dearly, even when I don’t, which is most of the time.  Yesterday, Clare spent over ten hours with the Valpo coach at a tournament in Indiana and got very sunburnt.  Welcome to the club, kiddo.

 

The Skinny on Sale

 With 50 career wins to his credit, White Sox string-bean lefty Chris Sale isn’t a HOFer or the best pitcher in Sox history, but he could be when it’s all over.

Sale is on a streak that has put him in good company, Sandy Koufax to be precise.  Those two are the only pitchers since 1900 to have three straight games with twelve or more strikeouts and one or no runs allowed.  Sale has struck out 10, 12, 13 and 14 batters in his last four starts (and, this being the White Sox, he’s won only three of those games).  Sale is 26, a year older than Koufax when he started to win big and the same age as Randy Johnson when he started to figure things out.  Sox fans can only wonder, pray and cross their fingers.

For a franchise going on 116 years, the Sox haven’t produced that many great pitchers.  Five are in the Hall of Fame: Ed Walsh, Ted Lyons, Red Faber, Early Wynn and Hoyt Wilhelm.  Wynn and Wilhelm don’t really count because they spent most of their careers elsewhere.  Billy Pierce should count, only the HOF is controlled by knuckleheads.  Walsh retired 98 years ago, so who knows how he pitched.  But Faber, Lyons and Pierce fall into the same category, as near-anonymous workhorses.  Faber pitched on some bad teams in the wake of the Black Sox Scandal; when the Sox won all of 59 games in 1929, Faber was good for 13 of them.  He went 254-212 on his career.

Ted Lyons managed four more career wins at 260-230 from 1925-1946, with three years off for military service in WWII.  On the Yankees, Lyons would’ve cracked 300 wins easy.  Billy Pierce would’ve come close, too.  Everyone thinks that the Sox had great pitching throughout their Go-Go years from the 1950s into the ‘60s, which they did, but that’s not the same as having great pitchers, which they didn’t outside of Pierce and Wynn, who didn’t arrive until 1958, when he was already 38-years old.  Basically, the White Sox went to war with New York behind Billy Pierce and a band of journeymen.  It wasn’t fair, but little is with baseball on the South Side of Chicago.

Billy Pierce in the Hall of Fame along with Minnie Minoso, now, Chris Sale to follow in good time.  That’s the happy thought to propel me through a weekend series in Tampa.         

Fore!

I ride by a golf course on my bike and wonder at the waste of so much lush, green space.  People on the other side of the fence look up and no doubt think, what a perfect access road for our carts if not for all those idiots on their bikes.

When I stumble on a golf match/tournament/round/whatever, it always looks the same to me—ball arcing high into the air, guys wearing clothes I wouldn’t be caught dead in.  I imagine golf fans could say the same about baseball, even if the outfits are way neater.  It all depends on what floats your boat, I guess.

As a good parent, I took Clare to the driving range when she asked, in fourth or fifth grade; we shared a bucket of balls.  Probably the best approach would’ve been for her to watch me and then do the opposite.  What happened instead was Clare made like a right-hand hitter going after a pitch low and outside, again and again.  For every ten balls she hit (we won’t count the whiffs here), two went so far and so straight you would’ve thought I had the next Annika Sorenstam on my hands.  As for the other eight times, who knew you could make a golf ball go at a right angle off the tee?

We didn’t pursue golf because someone always came home with a sore back.  Golf was blacklisted along with skiing—I didn’t want anything twisted, throbbing or broken a la Jim Lonborg.  With college over, Clare golfs occasionally with her boyfriend, Chris, who has proven a better teacher than yours truly.  Still, I can’t imagine being an old man remembering the time my kid had a double eagle on a par four at Dumbledore.      

Locally Sourced

Baseball will go to the far ends of the earth in search of talent, and language is no barrier.  In fact, it is, however much teams want to pretend otherwise.

As far as I know, there has yet to be any kind of analysis measuring the baseball knowledge of Japanese and Korean interpreters.  How do you translate nuance in word and gesture?  If I were laying out big bucks for anyone from across the Pacific, first I’d make sure the player came with an interpreter who could hold up his end of the conversation in Brooklyn, Jersey, Yazoo City or the North Shore and was a former ballplayer.  Anything less and you risk having a player stuck in a language bubble.  Just because he nods doesn’t mean he understands.

I also think teams shortchange themselves and their Latin players by not paying more attention to matters of language.  Most if not all teams make do with (kind of) bilingual players; nuance may or may not get communicated.  Consider an idea or directive as it moves from coach to player and back again, a round trip between California, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic.  The first time I was in Boston, I honestly had no idea what people were saying and they, me; we were all in Babel by the Back Bay.  By the same token, just because someone speaks “Spanish” doesn’t mean someone from another Spanish-speaking country will easily understand.

Neither Chicago team has done anything to stand out in dealing with this.  They basically sign the player and hope for the best.  As to signing someone a little closer to home, like Jim Thome or Kirby Puckett, that has never been much of a priority, either; native sons on either the North or South sides have been few and far between.  So, imagine my surprise when the White Sox drafted two area pitchers in the seventh and ninth rounds.  Blake Hickman played at Simeon High School and Iowa while Ryan Hinchley is from York H.S. in Elmhurst and the University of Illinois at Chicago. 

Hickman is particularly interesting as a lifelong Sox fan and a product of the team’s efforts to bring baseball to the inner city.  If he makes it, that could give black kids pause as they consider what sport to pick up: Hey, didn’t that Hickman guy grow up down the street?  Hope springs eternal at the start of spring training and the end of each year’s draft.

Just for Clare, the Sox even drafted a pitcher from Valpo.  They also drafted the owner’s grandson.  That must mean he doesn’t have any granddaughters, right?

Talent Be Crazy

As an athlete, Clare wasn’t too crazy.  She had her rituals and superstitions, both pretty much of the garden variety.  There was that time she poked me in the ribs with her bat after I told her to stop trying to pull everything, but that was on me.  Stick a hand in the lion’s cage, and you get what you deserve.

Most athletes are normal, which is amazing, given the circumstances: The bigger the venue, the greater the pressure.  While I never heckled—outside of umpires, of course—at a softball game, I do it to the point of embarrassment at major-league baseball games.  And loudmouth fans aren’t the only problem.  Players also have demons to contend with.

Thirty years ago, cocaine helped keep the doubts away, but no more thanks to regular drug-testing.  There’s that old standby, alcohol, and probably sex.  I doubt very many athletes seek the counsel of trained professionals or even loved one.  In sports, to admit to any kind of pain is to admit weakness, the most mortal of sins.

Michael Jordan dealt with pressure by gambling, and maybe fooling around.  LeBron James appears intent on acting like an average Joe going through the ups and downs of life as we all do.  I marveled listening to him last night give an interview no more than a minute after his Cavaliers won game three of the NBA finals against Golden State.  James was so collected, and thoughtful even, he could have been doing a sit-down for Sixty Minutes, except for the sweat pouring off his body.  But come next week, after the final game, what will he do to blow off steam?

Athletes are performers, and performers are artists, as we all know.  Dennis Rodman mutilated himself in the manner of Van Gogh.  Mickey Mantle went through most of his life not caring how long he lived; so did Edna St. Vincent Millay.  Talent can drive a person crazy.

Recruiting

Clare had an interesting start to her week yesterday when she had to shepherd a recruit and her family around campus.  My daughter was made for this sort of thing.  At Elmhurst, she was the go-to person for when Coach scheduled a recruit for a sleepover.  It’s good to know you’ve raised a kid who’ll ply somebody else’s underage kid with pizza instead of beer on a Friday night in November.

The junior coach did such a good job the recruit committed to Valpo at the end of the visit.  Now, here’s the thing”  “I’ll never see her play,” Clare told me over the phone.  Why?  Because the recruit just finished her sophomore year of high school.  Three years down the line, Clare wants to be on track to having a softball program of her own to lead.

But to have a college offer when you’re fifteen, my God.  This didn’t happen to Clare, and she thinks she knows the reason why:  “I was on the wrong travel team.”  College coaches go to certain tournaments to see certain teams that have a longstanding reputation for producing quality players.  Clare belonged to a nice team, nothing more and nothing less.  “I’m where I’m supposed to be now,” says the all-time homerun hitter for softball at Elmhurst College, and she may be right.  I only hope she doesn’t blame me for not finding her a better team back in the day.  I feel responsible enough for that as it is.

In the end, though, you can only have memories from the things that were and not what might have been, and in that I am incredibly blessed. 

On the One Hand...

 Some people read the obituaries, I prefer the “Deals” column in the sports’ section.  That’s where I found this gem: OAKLAND ATHLETICS –Selected the contract of RHP-LHP Pat Venditte from Nashville (PCL).  The A’s website referred to Venditte as a “switch-handed pitcher,” all because his father taught him starting at the age of three.

Venditte was drafted by the Yankees in the 20^th round in 2008, and it wasn’t long after that he got a rule named after him.  The switch-handed pitcher faced a switch-hitter, and around and around they went until the umpire made the hitter bat right-handed.  According to the Venditte Rule, an ambidextrous pitcher has to declare which side he intends to thrown from for each batter.  For seven-plus seasons, Venditte was a pitcher with a rule but no major-league experience until the A’s, who had signed him as a minor-league free agent in the offseason, called him up last week.  Venditte went scoreless in two appearances at Fenway.

Baseball benefits every time a team thinks outside the box; Billy Beane, the A’s GM, is doing as Branch Rickey did.  Now, if Rich Hahn would just dust off the palm ball and the knuckler, things could get really interesting.  He could even sign a female to throw the aforementioned pitches, righty or lefty, I don’t care.   

Scouting

Clare dressed up in her best junior scout uniform yesterday, appropriate Valpo windbreaker and cap in place of merit badges.  My daughter is in the enviable position of being forever carded at the age of 23.  Going to a high school playoff game, she in fact wanted to look her age.  Of course, I said, “You really do look seventeen.”  Thanks, Dad, and mumble more.

It was a sectional game pitting two teams we knew well from Clare’s high school days, Oak Park-River Forest and York in west suburban Elmhurst; I always hated playing either or both.  Clare was able to set aside any old grudges, e.g., losing to Oak Park in sectionals sophomore year in a game where she gave Morton a temporary lead with a resounding double to left, to keep her coach updated on how the Valpo prospect was doing.  Clare also made sure to show the colors, so to speak, let people in the stands know a D-I school was watching the kiddies play, never mind that two of them had already committed to Auburn and Northwestern.

The big test involved handling parents.  From what I can tell, there are maybe 1,000 rules dictating how a college coach can interact with high school players and their parents; apparently, Clare could wave to but not speak with players and talk to their parents, but not for long.  One father did come up to her, shake hands, and call my 23-going-on-17-year old “Coach.”

That little interaction made someone’s day.   

Giddyup

If American Pharoah wins the Belmont Stakes today, he will become the first Triple Crown winner in 37 years.  And there you have the sum total of my knowledge of horse racing.

I’ve been to a racetrack twice in my life, once to a dog track in Phoenix when I was seven and another time to do a newspaper feature story.  The only thing that interested me was the backstretch where all the help lived; it didn’t look like the kind of place where you’d want to raise a family.  Then again, what’s good about a racetrack?

Spectators gamble too much, the help gets miserable pay and the horses are on the clock—if they don’t win, they get canned, or did before the equine slaughterhouses were closed.  I can’t see an upside in American Pharoah winning, other than for his owner.  Winning will just encourage the competition to find the next Pharoah or Affirmed, which means more horses raised to race and more also-rans let out to pasture, if not canned or dumped on people ill-prepared to care for them.

I’m old enough to remember the junk man plying the alley with his horse-drawn wagon (yes, as late as the 1950s).  I sometimes share bike trails with a horse or two; their riders are always nervous that I’ll dart in front of them or do so something else really stupid out of a secret desire to be hoofed to death.   I feel for horses because they live in a Malthusian world where the cost of food and board determines their fate.  I respect horses for their beauty and their power.  I simply can’t get excited about them running around a track so some guy can get rich.  It’s more animal cruelty than sport.    

Time Flies, Little Changes

 For all you youngsters out there with good eyes and a knowledge of the sports pages (or any middle-aged sports fans with progressive lenses), yesterday’s tiny-type “on this date” feature tucked between the box scores noted that on June 5, 1996, 21-year old Pamela Davis pitched a scoreless inning for the AA Jacksonville Suns against the Australian men’s Olympic team. 

Go on the internet and you’ll find Davis saying, “I just want to be an inspiration to 8- and 9-year old girls that if this is their dream, they should follow it.”  Davis gave up a double to the first batter she faced before retiring the next three hitters.  The right-hander pitched for the women’s Silver Bullets baseball team in the mid-1990s.  If only Coors Beer had cared enough to keep funding the team, Davis might not be relegated to “remember when this happened then” status.   

Well Put, Joe

Cub hitters are suffering from a recent outbreak of homerun pimping.  According to Statcast, Starlin Castro took a shade over 24 seconds to circle the bases after homering Monday night (which may have had something to do with his getting hit with a pitch Wednesday night).  Yesterday, Junior Lake followed suit, staring at the ball, flipping his bat and adding this wrinkle: Lake put his finger to his lips to quiet the hometown Marlins as he passed their dugout.  For some reason, Miami players took offense and poured out onto the field.

After the game, Cub manager Joe Maddon left no doubt where he stands on stare-and-flip.  “We don’t do that here, and that will be the last time you see it,” Maddon was quoted by mlb.com.  This bit of showboating (I show my age using that term) bugs Maddon no end.  “It’s very, very much not cool.  If you’re watching the game back home in Chicago tonight, don’t do that.”  Lake hinted at a reason why in comments to the Tribune.  “I don’t want to create a bad influence with people who are following the game, especially kids.” 

Admiring homeruns goes back at least to the days of Babe Ruth.  If he wasn’t the first to stare and trot, the Babe may have been the first to be caught on film doing it.  There should be a standing rule:  If you think you can hit 714 or more homeruns, pimp all you want.  But hit thirty in your career, and it’s a $10,000 fine each time you do the pimp thing, to be collected upon retirement.  When trying to decide how to act after hitting a homerun, remember that the meek shall inherit the earth, and pitchers have long memories. 

Lower the Basket and Raise the Bar

So, here I am talking about extending softball to nine innings, and yesterday an op-ed writer in the New York Times calls for lowering the basket in the WNBA.  He figures that would add a whole lot of excitement.

Instead, what I see is female athletes playing a game with a lower basket as well as a smaller ball (28-1/2” in circumference vs. 29-1/2” for men).  Why not go for the hat trick and shrink the dimensions of the court?  That way, it could be like arena football, where you need a calculator to keep score.

I guess it’s all a matter of perspective.  Since women athletes don’t have to play with their male counterparts, they can have whatever rules and equipment they want.  But the world loves an underdog, someone who beats the favorite at his own game.  Where would we be without David over Goliath?  And don’t we need another?    

27 Outs vs. 21

 ESPN added Curt Schilling, he of the bloody sock, to the announcing crew for the Women’s College Softball World Series, and he did okay except maybe for referring to his daughter as a princess (one who’ll be playing college softball next year).  Schilling didn’t patronize (too much), knew the fundamentals of softball and made one very interesting point, that he wouldn’t use one of his 21 outs for a sacrifice bunt.  When he said that, I instantly realized something I hadn’t for all four years of my daughter’s college career—they only play seven innings in softball while college baseball plays nine.  Why the difference?

Maybe they’ll never want to play the boys’ game, but wouldn’t they want to play a game as demanding, if not more?  From where I sit, seven innings just doesn’t equal nine.

 

Boys and Girls, Bats and Balls

 Michigan plays Florida starting tonight in a best-of-three contest to determine this year’s NCAA D-I softball champs.  With Clare home over the weekend from Valpo, we watched a lot of softball.

The two of us debate strategy and batting stances, but never the level of talent.  I raised a female athlete and firmly believe women can—and will—play major league baseball.  That’s my take; Clare’s is a little different.  She’s played with and now coached enough girls to argue there isn’t the same level of interest in the national pastime as we have in the Bukowski household.  Many if not most softball players, my daughter thinks, are perfectly happy keeping baseball at arm’s length.  If so, I find that to be profoundly sad, like the old argument that each sex has its separate sphere of expertise, which always struck me as a clever way of saying “separate but equal.”  On Friday, father and daughter shared the couch watching softball.  Occasionally, Clare’s phone would go off with an update of the White Sox-Astros’ game. 

I thought this kind of thing happened in most softball families, but I may be wrong.  I’d give anything to be wrong about being wrong, and I’d give anything to have the best D-I softball team (MGOBLUE—they have 12 of 20 players from states where it snows) work out with a Chicago baseball team, North Side or South.  That might change attitudes some.