Personal Time

Every year I try to get an early start on biking in the spring, only for April to become May.  Tomorrow being June, I finally made my way to the 606 to force man ad bicycle to do 45 miles.  No one was killed, although I did yell at this guy who stood in the middle of the path so he could take a picture.  I stop for kids and dogs, not clowns.

I was reading the paper this morning and saw that on this date in 1970, Luis Aparicio and Walt Williams had five hits each in a White Sox win at Fenway; the good Sox beat the bad Sox, 22-13, with five of those runs scored by Williams.  I remember listening to the game on my way to my high school graduation.  The bicycle was a combination graduation-18^th-birthday gift.

That’s the nice thing about cycling; you can let your thoughts wander, about how you looked in that white tux (like a waiter, basically) or how much the new townhouses on your left will sell for once they’re finished ($400,000 at least).  I tried not to think about Clare too much, because she was on a plane on her way to Syracuse to collect her boyfriend.  Chris won’t be finishing his second year with the Orange football team, for a very good reason: he’s been named the new offensive line coach at Elmhurst.  It’s great getting to say goodbye to your kid at 6:30 in the morning so she can catch her flight.  Oh well, at least it wasn’t in a B-17.

There was nobody wearing White Sox gear on the 606.  This might be a good place to dump Robin Ventura.  Or Kenny Williams.  Or Jerry Reinsdorf.

A Poke in the Eye or a Jab in the Gut

 It would be impossible to exaggerate how bad travel ball was at times.  Most parents varied between surly and outright hostile, as did a majority of the coaches Clare played for.  Most of the kids were OK, which was a blessing, though there was one or two who knew they were God’s gift and/or the coach’s favorite.  Let me also note here the Bataan Death March quality of tournaments.  Teams played regardless the time, the weather or the lack of toilet paper in the restrooms.  Clare shudders at the mention of Kankakee, where the food and the toilets nearly did her in, while Michele is pretty sure she won’t be caught dead in Toledo, where we spent $50 at the concession stand on water.  It’s amazing how few drinking fountains these places have.

And yet I miss one thing about travel, how it ate up so much time.  Clare’s five years coincided with the White Sox winning the World Series in 2005.  After that, they trended steadily downward, but I was too busy to notice.  Between travel and varsity, Clare was busy with softball eleven months out of the year, and so was I, even after I taught her how to drive (with lessons in the parking lot of the high school where the travel team had Sunday morning practices).  God rested on Sunday, we had the month of August.

In college, softball took up only March through the first part of June; as I’ve noted above, the NCAA playoffs are our March Madness; that at least delayed my following a mediocre baseball team.  Now, though, it can be White Sox 24-7 if I want.  Oh, joy.

A few weeks ago, the Sox were the best team in the AL, thirteen games over .500.  As of today, they’re three over and in full free-fall.  This is how bad they are: on Saturday, a reliever threw a wild pitch issuing an intentional walk.  That same relief staff coughed up three leads over the weekend to allow a Royals’ sweep in KC.  Fourteen runs allowed from the seventh inning on—how do you spell impending disaster?

And in true Jerry Reinsdorf style, loyalty trumps accountability.  Pitching coach Don Cooper is a self-proclaimed genius.  All those runs?  It must be my imagination.  Robin Ventura?  He doesn’t call anyone out.  Heck, he doesn’t even wake up from his nap on the bench as his team implodes.  All in all, I miss travel ball.

We Pause for this Short Intermission

 My daughter has always hustled, on the base paths, in the field and elsewhere.  She spent all of yesterday supervising a youth baseball tournament at an area high school.  She interned there when she was at Elmhurst, and they liked her enough to call her back all the time to help with their sports program.  This is how connections are made in life.

The wind-burned lass came home to a dinner of pizza before taking her seat on the couch.  First was the Alabama-Washington game, then UCLA-Oregon; she was able to follow the earlier softball playoff games on an app.  Anyway, there was a half-hour gap between games, and wouldn’t you know it, the MLB Network was playing “A League of Their Own.”

Not only has Clare seen this movie often enough to recite the dialogue, she’s ready to incorporate Tom Hanks’ coaching style into her own.  Nearly two generations separate us, and yet my daughter is more “old school” than you can imagine.  Really, sometimes I don’t know if it’s her or Ty Cobb talking.  It’s a safe bet that any Clare-coached team is going to be known for pop-up slides and brush backs.

Ah, she makes the old man proud.

Family Tradition

This has been going on for years:  Clare stakes out the couch the last week of May into the first week or so of June to watch the NCAA D-I softball playoffs and world series.  She knows the schools, the players, the coaches.  She watches games while texting back and forth with friends and ex-teammates about plays.  A Georgia player hits a two-run walk-off homer to deny Florida a shot at a three-peat.  Did you see it?

I sit amazed at this display of athleticism and fandom.  What did girls such as these do 25 years ago?  What was this energy and interest funneled into instead?  Does it fade away the further young women get from playing?  Who’s the bigger loser, professional softball for not building on this foundation, or baseball for not caring less whether softball fans and players turn into baseball fans and players?

I wonder all these things every time this year.

Pitchers, but not all

 The Tribune ran a page-one story a few days ago about a rule change being considered by the Illinois High School Authority, the governing body for high-school sports in the state.  The IHSA is looking to institute some sort of pitch limit, this after some clown coach let one of his players throw 167 (!) pitches in a game this spring.  The clown coach said he asked the player how he felt, and, “He told me that he could keep going.  I trust him when he says that he has something left.”  Right, because a 17- or18-year old is mature enough to be honest with himself and the person asking.

The story pretty much blames the high incidence of teenaged athletes needing Tommy John surgery on perceived need to deliver—for the travel coach, the high school coach, the visiting college coach and the pro scout.  All any or one of those fellows has to do is raise an eyebrow, and the pitcher is going to kick it into high gear, which means throwing hard, which leads to elbow injuries.

A pitch limit would help, to an extent.  The problem will be enforcing it across all areas of play.  The IHSA can only control the actions of athletes in season; anything that happens at a travel or college showcase tournament is out of its control.  Then what?  Personally, I like Bernie Sanders’ idea of free college tuition.  That would eliminate one reason compelling teenaged pitchers to try to throw the ball through a wall.

Missing from the story was any mention of softball pitchers.  Gosh, I wonder why.  Research must show that girls never get injured.  Yeah, right.

Splitting Hairs?

Jose Reyes of the Rockies was suspended 52 games without pay for a domestic violence incident that didn’t lead to a conviction.  I have a problem with that.  The U of I cut ties with junior basketball player Kendrick Nunn after he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor battery charge stemming from, yes, a domestic incident.  And I have no problem with that.  What’s the difference?

Let’s see if I can explain it.  Reyes was not convicted in a court of law; Nunn was.  Reyes is a professional athlete; Nunn, purportedly, is an amateur.  There are different rules for each.  The amateur athlete doesn’t have the right to a scholarship in the same way a professional athlete has a roster spot based on performance.  The amateur is held to a higher standard of conduct, if you believe everything embodied in the NCAA logo.  The professional athlete should stay on the right side of the law, nothing more, nothing less.  But if the MLB players’ association agrees to abridge its members’ freedoms, so be it.

At the end of the day, I’m still a dad who doesn’t want anything to befall his only child.

Stopped

Chris Sale went for his tenth straight win last night against the Indians.  Barring divine intervention, he faced a lineup devoid of Hall of Famers and All Stars, shortstop Francisco Lindor the one possible exception.  So, what happened?  Sale couldn’t get out of the fourth inning, giving up a total of six earned runs on six hits and four walks.  I hate losing to a bunch of nobodies.

As ever, Sale blamed himself.  It would’ve been nice instead had his teammates rallied around their ace by actually hitting the ball and scoring runs, if not enough for a win then at least to get Sale off the hook for a loss.  But no, the Sox come away with but one moral victory—the atrociously slumping Jose Abreu, who’s taken to swinging at pitches six inches inside, managed his first three-hit game of the season.

Cleveland rocked, and that’s not right.

 

Doubleheaders

One way to gauge the age of baseball fans is to see how they react to the notion of a doubleheader.  There are those among us who rode to twin bills on our pet dinosaur.

Two games in a day makes more sense than not.  Rather than games in early April—yesterday’s White Sox-Indians’ split of a doubleheader was the result of an April game cancelled on account of March-ness—two games could be played on special days, like Memorial Day and the Fourth of July.  Oh, wait, that used to happen all the time.  Then again, so did twin bills throughout the season.  

According to a piece by Chris Jaffe in the online Hardball Times, over 33 percent of the NL schedule consisted of doubleheaders in the 1956 season and nearly 27 percent for the AL.  Jaffe also notes that every team in MLB played in a doubleheader on Labor Day, 1958.  So, what happened?

First, there’s something owners have always disliked about two games for the price of one.  Indeed, when twin bills are played now, they’re day-night affairs, with tickets sold for each game separately, and still they’re rare.  My guess is MLB likes to have a season that takes up seven months, with a World Series game someday taking place in month eight, aka, November.  The players’ dislike of two games in a day I can understand.  Fatigue and injury are real possibilities.

Still, you’d think a judicious use of doubleheaders makes perfect sense.  They can reduce the likelihood of early April snow dates; make the summer holidays special; and, with expanded rosters (say 28-30 players), lessen the chance for injury.  Fans would no longer freeze to death in the opening weeks of the season, and they could see how good their team’s minor league system is doing with players getting the proverbial cup of coffee.

Heck, the commissioner could still have November if he wanted.

Not about A.J.

It was ten years ago yesterday that Cubs’ catcher Michael Barrett punched A.J. Pierzynski; A.J. had brushed Barrett on the way back to the dugout after scoring on a sacrifice fly.  I heard about it on the car radio between games of Clare’s tournament that day.

Travel ball was still new to us, this dedicating weekend after weekend to our child’s athletic endeavors.  By Sunday night, Michele and I were always drained.  How did people get used to it?  We never did.

Around the same time A.J. and Barrett were going at it, I was using the men’s room when another dad from the team took the urinal next to mine.  “Good thing your daughter hit that triple,” he said, staring at the wall.  He didn’t need to add, “Because she made a couple of errors that nearly cost us the game.” 

I’ve thought about this guy in the ten years since.  His daughter was one of the coach’s favorites, and she wanted to go to school out East for a sport other than softball.  I wonder how that all worked out, whether there were other men’s room conversations in the years since.  I don’t know because we switched travel teams in the fall.  And that was a good thing. 

Silver Linings

I can say in all honesty that my daughter looks good on television.  There were a number of shots of her in the dugout during the Big 10 Network broadcast of the Michigan-Valpo regional playoff game.  And the Christians did about as well as you would expect against those pesky, hungry lions.  Final score: Wolverines 8, Crusaders 0 in five innings.

The game was 3-0 going into the bottom of the fifth, so there’s your moral victory.  As for the next five runs that crossed the plate, that’s a lesson for Clare to ponder—how exactly does an underdog keep the odds-on favorite off the scoreboard?  It could be me, but there were times Clare looked to be analyzing, trying to figure a strategy for what she would do if and when the opportunity arises.  The kid has coaching chops, says her old man.

And the plucky Crusaders’ reward for playing the #2 ranked softball team in the nation?  They get to play Notre Dame in the loser’s bracket today.  

Stopper

Stopper

My rooting interest in the White Sox stretches back to Joe Horlen down through the likes of Bart Johnson; Richard Dotson; and Jack McDowell.  At one time or another, they all looked to be that pitcher who comes along once in a generation, only to flame out.  They were the pretenders while Chris Sale may very well be the real thing.  Yes, my sentence structure there was influenced by superstition.  I don’t want anything to happen to the man.

Sale snapped a four-game losing streak for the Sox last night with a complete-game 2-1 win over the Astros to go 9-0 to start the season; it took Sale all of 107 pitches in a game that went 2:11.  Many if not most athletes go through their careers never adjusting.  They were mediocre or great as rookies, mediocre or great in their final season.  Not Sale.  He’s talked about choosing to be more efficient pitching so he could go deeper into games, e.g., last night’s complete game.  Last year’s strikeouts, each one requiring a three-pitch minimum, have given way to five- and six-pitch innings.  Sale also did strength training in the offseason, not to throw the ball harder but, again, to be more effective late into the season.  How often do you see players running on empty come September?

I cringe at talk about how “great” Sale is or isn’t.  That’s a question for when his career is winding down; fingers crossed, it’s barely started for someone who turned 27 in March.  Instead, White Sox players need to ask themselves how great they could be by making the kind of adjustments the ace of their pitching staff has.  

Don't be a Pig

 In my fantasy world of owning the White Sox, after renovating Comiskey Park—back to mechanical scoreboards, wooden seats and unpainted brick exterior—I would’ve made 35^th and Shields into a year-round destination by lining both sides of Shields Avenue with honest-to-goodness diners.  If the Sox can’t steal free agents from the East Coast, we could still haul off its greasy-spoon icons.  Of course, I would’ve improved the menu.

No neon and aluminum for the Cubs.  No, they want an outdoor plaza at Clark and Addison where fans can tank up to their hearts’ content.  And where will all that extra urine produced go? You may well ask.  Certainly not in alleys around Wrigley Field or gangways or front yards, even.  The team and neighborhood groups continue to argue over regulating the space, and it’s pretty clear the Cubs are going all libertarian here.  Hey, I just thought of a good name—Chaos Plaza, where you can drink till you drop.       

Memories

I sometimes joke that the secret of life is to keep your memories in check until the dementia can start erasing them.  And it’s true.

I walk into Clare’s room, and all I see are memories (along with piles of clothes).  A display case in the shape of home plate holds 14 softballs, each of them with a date and a few words of explanation written in magic marker.  I can remember every one of those dates and why the contents on the shelf above the case are important, too.  They’re not just medals and trophies and more softballs but mile markers in an athlete’s life.

That’s why I white-knuckle my way through March and April, the memories are so intense.  I can let go of travel ball (who’d want to keep on remembering Toledo or Joliet, anyway?) and even Clare’s baseball days.  But the high school and college stuff will be with me to the day I die.

And the White Sox, too.  Why won’t Robin Ventura ever argue an interference call?  I’ll probably be asking that question inside the casket on the way to the cemetery.    

Waiting Games

Valpo’s reward for being for being a Cinderella upstart is getting to play #4 seed Michigan in the first round of the NCAA playoffs.  It’s always been my sense that you don’t particularly want to play Michigan in any college sport, if you can avoid it.  Were the underdog to win this game, it would be the lead story on all the ESPN stations, probably for the rest of the year.

Anyhow, Clare is crazy with excitement waiting for Friday to roll around.  She called to tell me she’d been cc’d on an email with Carol Hutchins, the Michigan coach who is closing in on 1500 career wins.  With luck, some of those 32 years of coaching experience will rub off on my daughter so someday a graduate assistant will be telling her dad she was cc’d with Coach Bukowski!

I’m anxious, too, though not about the upcoming Wolverines-Crusaders tilt.  No, the White Sox are going to start playing a lot of games in their division, where in years past they’ve been more than generous—and more than feeble, if that’s possible—with the Indians and Royals.  Short of cloning Chris Sale, people are going to have put up, or you can forget about talk of a Crosstown World Series.

Pitch Counts and Hugs

 The Valpo pitcher brought out my inner Branch Rickey over the weekend.  For starters, there was her pitch count, 477 (!) over 72 hours.  Talk about the superiority of the male athlete all you want, but nobody in baseball outside of a knuckleballer could come close to matching that figure.  So, is it the underarm windmill delivery, female physiology or some mix of the two that allows for this kind of performance?  If it were up to me, I’d put away the sabermetrics long enough to find out, because the answer to that question could have a profound effect on the national pastime.

Girls pitch differently than boys, and they express emotion differently, too.  In the top of the eighth inning with two on and one out, the Valpo coach lifted her starter.  In baseball, this usually means a pat somewhere on the back or butt followed by a tip of the cap to the fans in case the performance was good enough to merit applause.  Something entirely different transpired on the UIC softball field Saturday, when the Valpo reliever and the departing starter hugged one another.  This may have been the most endearing expression of emotion I’ve ever seen in sports.

It was not to be confused with Kirk Gibson or Jose Bautista letting the world know how great they are or any football player confusing a sack with the cure for cancer.  Nor was it Tim Tebow giving thanks after a score.  That Valpo starter could have been tagged for the loss just as that reliever could’ve given up ten runs.  The hug was before the fact.

In the White Sox dugout, Carlos Sanchez has taken to cradling teammate Adam Eaton in his arms every time Eaton scores.  That’s stupid.  What I witnessed Saturday was sublime.   

Never Can Say Goodbye

Yesterday, Clare graduated from Valparaiso University with a master’s degree in sports’ administration, only we didn’t go.  For that matter, neither did she.  Instead, the three of us watched the sixth-seed Valpo Crusaders qualify for the NCAA tournament by winning their Horizon League tournament at UIC in Chicago.  Even more improbable, the Crusaders did it in the winner’s bracket.  Oh, did I mention that they came back from a 4-0 deficit in the bottom of the seventh and then won in extra innings?  I should have.

And let me tell you about the weather, 47 degrees—40 degree wind chill—with clouds and wind gusting from any damn’ direction it wanted.  Let it be said that on May 14, 2016, I was wearing long underwear, a hat, gloves and two sweatshirts in order to survive watching a college softball game.  I also kept my mouth shut rather talk back to these two Wright State fans next to me who were just ever so smart and certain that Valpo would fold after putting up a good fight.

Of course, the real thing here for a certain father and daughter is how unreal it all felt.  Clare willed herself a connection with the team as a walk-on graduate assistant last year.  Me, I couldn’t tell you any of the players’ names without the scoreboard telling me.  But if you’re employing my kid, I’m rooting for you.  (Please, Clare, do not take a job with the Yankees.)  I couldn’t help but feel the same excitement the other half-frozen Valpo fans did as their kids came back from the abyss to tie the score with two runs on a two-out hit and then win the game when [insert player’s name here] beat the tag at the plate to win it.

After the ceremonies, I wandered around the field a little like Henry Fleming in The Red Badge of Courage.  What exactly had just happened?  I couldn’t say, other than that the Wright State players were all huddled together like a group of POWs while the Crusaders partied like it was 1999.

How especially great for the Valpo seniors, to be going to the NCAA.  How altogether terrible for the Wright State seniors, that this loss should be their last college game.  How much like life sports can be when we let them. 

Sale-ing Along

Last night in Yankee Stadium, Chris Sale threw all of 99 pitches in a complete game rout of the Yankees, 7-1.  Sale has started the season 8-0 in eight starts.

All White Sox wins are sweet, against the Yankees doubly so.  One of my guilty pleasures is reading the NYT sports’ section online.  For anyone who doesn’t know, all sports were invented in New York, and those that weren’t have been perfected there.  If you don’t believe me, just ask a New Yorker.

The Times’ story compared Sale to Randy Johnson, which was very nice of them, and went on to note that the Yankees were hoping starter Luis Severino—2-2/3 innings, seven hits, four walks, seven runs—might be in the same league as Sale.  The Times’ doesn’t have a comics’ page, but that doesn’t keep it from being funny.

Baseball Bacchanal

Now that they’ve routed those pesky rooftop owners, the Cubs are going after Wrigleyville bars with an outdoor bar of their own.  The team is opening up a large plaza outside the ballpark, where it intends to sell alcohol every day for as long as it can get away with, city approval pending.  The bars don’t like the added competition, but there’s not much they can do about it.  The Cubs are on a roll these days, both off and on the field.

I seem to remember a king back in the Middle Ages who criticized one of the Popes, saying that the leader of the Church is supposed to lead his flock, not fleece it.  These days, baseball fans are the flock, and every game is another chance to break out the clippers.  The only reason this fight isn’t being repeated around the Cell is because Jerry Reinsdorf prefers scorched earth leading up to his stadium or, more precisely, parking lots.  There isn’t a bar for blocks around, meaning anyone who wants to (over)drink has to do it inside Mr. Reinsdorf’s facility.  Yes, the Cell is publicly owned, but that’s never stopped Reinsdorf from acting like it’s his and his alone.

When Reinsdorf and partner Eddie Einhorn took over the White Sox in 1981, Einhorn complained that Comiskey Park under Bill Veeck had become the world’s largest outdoor saloon.  Everything old is new again, wouldn’t you know?

 

As I was Saying....

 It wasn’t even a West Coast game Tuesday night, but a rain delay in Texas put the end of the White Sox-Rangers’ game past my 11 o’clock bedtime.  Anyhow, the Sox were up 11-6 going into the bottom of the eighth.  With the alarm set to 6:15, I shut the TV off thinking what I always do in these situations—if they lose, I’d only feel miserable watching.  Well, they lost by a score of 13-11.  But at least I had my sleep.

Then, yesterday, it was a day game, so I recorded it.  Trust me, fast-forwarding past the bad stuff cuts down on the anger (although I still shout at the screen even as the players run around looking like characters in a Benny Hill skit).  You lose the lead three times, you deserve to lose, and the Sox did, 6-5.  What a blessing, not having to watch a debacle in real time.

Too Smart by Half

 The Cubs took the Nationals to the woodshed over the weekend, sweeping a four-game series at Wrigley Field.  Along the way, the Nats’ Bryce Harper had 19 at-bats, 13 of which resulted in walks.  In Sunday’s13-inning contest, Harper garnered six walks and a hit-by-pitch.  And nary a game did the Nationals win.

Washington pitcher Tanner Roark dismissed this pitch-around strategy as “scared baseball,” but it’s just Joe Maddon being Joe Maddon.  As a Cub fan (perish the thought), I’d worry, but as a White Sox fan, I’m content to wait.  As I’ve said on occasion, the one thing Maddon wants more than being the smartest guy in the dugout is having you know he’s the smartest guy.  And that could be his undoing.

Last year, it was batting the pitcher eighth, an idea, thankfully, now come and gone.  As for Walk-A-Bryce (Nats’ manager Dusty Baker likened the strategy to basketball’s Hack-A-Shack), it worked, and you can’t argue with success.  But with Maddon, once is never enough.  He’ll be tempted to do it again (against Jose Abreu in the World Series, I hope) or push the envelope even further, like all three outfielders playing ten feet behind the lip of the infield with the bases loaded in extra innings on the road.  He’s Joe Maddon, don’t you know?  

Just a Matter of Time

 Last night’s White Sox-Rangers’ game started at 7:05 PM and ended two minutes shy of 11:05.  The game might have ended in under 2-1/2 hours had the White Sox bullpen not been so generous.  But extra innings it was, and a White Sox win in twelve thanks to Todd Frazier’s grand slam.

Only I’m too old for this, and I wonder how many baseball fans aren’t.  At some point, the Toyota and Dodge commercials blend together, and I’m seeing Jose Abreu doing donuts in the batter’s box.  Back when Clare was in travel ball, there was something called the international tie breaker for games that went into extra innings—every half-inning started with a runner on second; somebody usually scored soon enough to put sunbaked parents out of their misery.  I’m not suggesting the tie breaker for baseball, but…

Thank God for TiVo.  When the mood strikes, I can record an entire game or replay the last half hour.  At 10:30, it was time for option #2.  I finished reading the paper and a magazine and then fast-forwarded along to the good stuff, viz., Frazier’s slam.  As for those late-night West Coast games, I’m content to find a box score online.  Call it age, wisdom or what have you.

Lesser of Two Evils

 In a way, it’s great how both Chicago teams are dominating their respective leagues going into the second week of May.  The Cubs have the most wins in major-league baseball with 24 while the White Sox are two behind that number.  Why, there was so much baseball in today’s Tribune sports’ section that the Bears were bumped to the back page.  Outrage, I say.

And it is, because despite all the fun Chicago baseball fans might be having right now, sports are a business.  Some Bears’ official woke up this morning to see where that Trib story ran and was unhappy.  Odds are Halas Hall will launch some kind of media counterattack.  You don’t mess around with them, Jim.

At least the Bears have weight to throw around.  Pity the other spring/summer sports around here.  We live in a zero-sum world, where media coverage is finite, so many minutes and inches of column space allotted on a daily basis.  The Tribune usually runs a six-page sports’ section.  To cover the Cubs and White Sox, something has to give.  Hello, professional soccer.  Goodbye, coverage.  Hello, WNBA….

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred was in town last week, if only to have everyone fawn over him.  But Manfred was nice enough—and savvy enough—to say how great it is for both Chicago teams to be doing so well; he even entertained the possibility of a Crosstown World Series come October.  But if he were being honest, Manfred would’ve admitted MLB has a default preference for all things New York and Boston, as evidenced by yet another MLB broadcast of a Yankees-Red Sox game.

Mother’s Day in the Bronx, what we all want to experience.  Right, Commissioner?  But if I have to pick between being inundated with Chicago baseball stories in season or Chicago football stories out of season (is there such a thing for the NFL?), I’ll go with option number one any day.  Sorry, Fire and Sky fans, but it’s a zero-sum world.    

Neanderthal

Last month, somebody in the NYT sports’ section wrote that criticism of Jose Bautista’s bat-flipping was code for the bad old days of lily-white baseball.  In other words, tattoos and homerun antics are a sign of social progress, all of which puts me, Buck Showalter and Goose Gossage on the wrong side of history.  So be it.

That also makes what Jose Abreu did yesterday pretty reactionary.  And what exactly did the White Sox first baseman do?  Why, he apologized for his behavior on Friday night.  After taking a fastball off his body from Twins’ reliever Trevor May, Abreu took a few steps towards the mound, but stopped far short of trying to deliver a punch.

Upon further review, Abreu did not like how he behaved.  “What I did probably didn’t look too good,” he told reporters through a team interpreter.  “It didn’t look like I had respect for the game.  That’s why I apologized.  Not because I did something bad.  It’s just because in the eyes of the people who saw the game and all the kids, it wasn’t the best reaction.”  Holy Bryce Harper, that makes Abreu into a kind of Uncle Tom, and me considerably worse.

I also liked what Chris Sale did last night, after giving up two runs in the first inning on a bases-loaded walk and hit-by-pitch.  Sale took the ball and hit himself in the head, twice.  After the game, he called himself “an idiot” for doing that.  OK, we don’t want our star pitcher giving himself a concussion, not ever and especially not when he’s started the season at 7-0, but you have to love what he demands of himself.  Sale went on to retire 19 of the last 20 batters he faced while striking out nine in seven innings.  Nothing idiotic about that.    

There but for the Grace of God....

 Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley wanted the 2016 Summer Olympics in the worst way, which is about the only way we would’ve gotten them.  In office, Daley was forever paying it forward, that being a financial day of reckoning.  He signed off on generous labor contracts so there’d be no strikes to get in the way of his Olympics, and he promised there’d be no public funding (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).  And now the financial day of reckoning has come.  At least we don’t have the Olympics.  That’s Rio’s problem.

And what a mess it is, the cost overruns and polluted waters and now the threat of the Zika virus.  Talk about your perfect storm.  It’s really too bad the International Olympic Committee is corrupt to the bone.  An organization truly committed to amateur sports—as opposed to, say, endless perks for IOC members—long ago would’ve settled on one of two ways to handle the matter of venue that pops up every four years.  For openers, the IOC could’ve established permanent sites.  I don’t know about winter (Switzerland?  Mt. Placid?), but it would obviously be someplace in Greece for the summer games.

If, for any reason that didn’t work out, they could then rethink the bid process.  Why do the host cities always have to rebuild the Pyramids?  Why not adaptive reuse instead?  This is what Los Angeles did in 1984.  For example, the Coliseum and Dodger Stadium were used; ditto Pauley Pavilion.  That translates into Soldier Field, Wrigley Field (or the Cell, depending on the optimal number of urinals) and the United Center, along with your choice of university swimming pool.

If our former mayor could’ve pulled off an LA-style deal with the IOC, then the Olympics would've been worth having here.  I bet a whole bunch of athletes are wishing he had, too.

This Date in....

In eight days, our daughter graduates Valparaiso University with a master’s degree in sports’ administration.  Eighteen years ago today, I picked her up from kindergarten at St. Bernardine’s.

It was a Wednesday, misty, foggy and cold, perfect softball weather although at the time I had no idea what that meant.  As is my habit, I got into the car and put the radio on to the ballgame.  The Cubs had a rookie pitching by the name of Kerry Wood, a real hotshot, and that day he was by tying a major-league record for strikeouts.  Twenty Astros went down on strikes against the 21-year old right hander.  It took Wood 122 pitches to get those strikeouts.

Wood threw way too many pitches his rookie year, including 133 in a 9-2 win over the Reds.  That was his last start of the season.  It also happened to be August 26^th.  Wood missed the next season with Tommy John surgery and was never the same.

The hotshot could also be a hothead, much in the way of the White Sox Chris Sale.  But Wood did mellow over the course of 14 seasons (he was that good, even after multiples injuries), as I hope Sale does.  Sale broke the franchise strikeout record last year, with 274 punch-outs.  This season, he says he wants fewer strikeouts with quicker outs.  That should save wear and tear on his arm.

Too bad Kerry Wood learned the importance of that lesson the hard way.  At the age of 38, he could still be pitching, from kindergarten to graduate school, if you will.

Cry Me a River

 Joe Girardi, manager of the AL East’s last-place Yankees, hates defensive shifts so much he wants to ban them.  And yet the last-place Yankees are among the top MLB teams employing the shift.  According to a story on si.com, opposing teams are batting .323 against shifts by the last-place Yankees’ when they put the ball in play while batters for the last-place New York team fare the worst against shifts employed by opposing teams.  It almost sounds as if Girardi of the last-place Yankees is a sore loser.  It sure looks like the Yankees are a bad team in the field and at the plate.  However will the national pastime survive, let alone ESPN?   

He Gone

Clare called me sounding so excited I thought maybe she’d found a roll of hundred dollar bills on the ground.  To my daughter, it was even better.  “Did you hear?” she asked excitedly.  “The White Sox cut Danks.”

Indeed, the team gave starting pitcher John Danks his release.  As you might expect, players expressed sadness at the news.  Carlos Rodon called Danks a mentor while Chris Sale said he was a major influence.  The temptation, of course, is to hope Danks’ influence can be minimized, but that’s unfair.  Seriously.

Fans will never know what players do; they’ll never see what players go through.  If John Danks was Carlos Rodon’s mentor, good for him; again, I mean that.  If he lent a positive veteran presence in the clubhouse, I can only hope someone steps in fast to fill that role.  The players know that, without admitting it to the cameras, what happened to their teammate yesterday will befall them, as it does everyone, from Ernie Banks to Joe DiMaggio.  Such is life.

John Danks didn’t need the tweets or jokes centering on his performance to know where he stood.  It’s always open season on underperforming, overpaid athletes, but a high ERA doesn’t lessen John Danks’ humanity.  On the other hand, athletes can’t know the sacrifices fans make, how money gets saved and moved around in order to afford going to a couple of games, let alone season tickets, or how many if not most fans live vicariously through a team; that becomes impossible when a player dogs it.  And I wonder, when was the last time Chris Sale worked the third shift or begged for overtime?

There are things we’ll never understand about professional ballplayers, and there are things they’ll never know about everyday fans.  Good luck to John Danks.    

May Day

How fitting that the Bears released two veteran players on Sunday, which just so happened to be May Day.  Someone should try to explain the significance of that to the NFL players’ association.

“Both men did everything we asked of them,” Bears GM Ryan Pace said of now-departed safety Antrel Rolle and offensive lineman Matt Slauson.  "Part of growing as a team is making difficult decisions like the ones we made today.”  Who you crappin’, Ryan?  It was damn’ easy to make those cuts, given how the playing field tilts in your direction.

According to the Tribune, the Bears will save over $5 million against the salary cap.  I suspect Pace would cut his own mother to save that kind of money.  The players are fools to have accepted a cap, and they’re fools to go along in the charade of how much their deals are worth.  Virtually all baseball contracts are guaranteed.  With football, I doubt if anyone outside of MVP-type players gets guaranteed money.  What difference does it make?  Well, the casual fan is likely to confuse football with baseball.  Rolle had a three-year deal at just over $11 million.  In baseball, that money would be all his.  But Rolle plays a sport where he didn’t even get half.

Maybe if more fans knew that, they’d feel some sympathy for the players should they ever decide to walk out.  There’s only one way to find out.   

Check Your Local Listings

 I always thought that New Yorkers were loath to leave the center of the universe; ditto Bostonians.  But there must be a whole bunch of East Coasters relocated to Cook County that I don’t know about.  How else to explain all three games of the weekend Yankees-Red Sox series being available to Chicago audiences, courtesy of MLB Network and ESPN?

Personally, I kind of like watching the Yankees because they’re so old they make me look and feel young.  But if I want to scout other teams starting the season off hot, well, either I get the MLB package, or I try to tune in games on the radio.  Come in, Wake Island, are you there?

The East Coast bias in sports’ broadcasting is a given.  The Cubs will get some attention because they’re lovable and the roster was rebuilt by Theo Epstein, one of those relocated Bostonians I mentioned earlier.  Any success on the North Side in the years to come will be traced back to the East Coast, trust me.  The only way to get their attention otherwise is to sweep one of the two icon teams in a series, and, hey, the Red Sox will be in town tomorrow to kick off a three-game set against the White Sox.  But with John Danks scheduled to start on Wednesday, I’m not feeling too good about a sweep.

Family Matters

Yesterday, we went to Valpo to help Clare clean her apartment and pack.  In two weeks, she graduates with a master’s in sports’ administration.  Where does it say exactly the parent has to lug around the adult kid’s stuff?

After we cleaned and filled my car with boxes and whatnot, we had sandwiches and coffeecake.  (For those of you who’ve never had real coffeecake, my sympathies.  Truly, you have no idea what you’re missing.  Hint: The secret’s in the butter.)  Of course, the White Sox game was on, a titanic struggle with the Orioles from Baltimore that lasted clear through the drive back home; the forces of good won.  It could be me, but O’s manager Buck Showalter is starting to resemble Ear Weaver.  Showalter might want to have that checked out.

Clare still has three posters over her bed, of Paul Konerko (Paulie!  Paulie!  Thanks!); Mike Trout (oh, to have drafted him); and Mickey Mantle, with a quote from Mantle about going up to bat every time looking to hit a homerun.  That as much as anything is my daughter’s philosophy to life.  And soon it will fill up our house again, along with all her stuff.