On Top of the World

This time of year makes me feel as if I’m literally on top of the world, looking down—or ahead—at the year to come.   Of course, this allows me to run “downhill,” as they like to say these days.

New Year’s Eve has always been an interesting time for me.  Things happen, like when a woman fell into my lap at the Diner’s Club (!); I did nothing other than to help her up.  Then there were the two times in high school, bookending the year 1968.  The one New Year’s Eve was very bad, the other pretty neat.

Actually, I can’t remember a thing about December 31, 1967.  It was the next day, New Year’s 1968.  I’d put off doing math homework all vacation, and the next day, Tuesday, school started again.  For some reason, I was the only one home, the better to feel miserable as I lay in bed trying to make sense of some equation or math problem.  Maybe I should say here that sophomore year wasn’t that much fun for me.

Fast-forward 364 days or so, and it was close to zero out, not that the six of us cared.  We were all huddled in our friend Bob’s basement playing Strat-O-Matic football; this was what adolescent boys did then when they didn’t have a party to go to back in those near-prehistoric days.  My team was the 1967 Washington Redskins.  I picked them if for no other reason I loved the players’ names: Chris Hanburger; Sonny Jurgensen; Joe Don Looney.  Did I say “love”?  Washington also had a John Love on the team, to go with Jim Ninowski, Charlie Gogolak…

So, we played all afternoon and then broke for supper.  My father was a Chicago fireman and had to work that day.  That left my mother, my sister Betty and me.  I drew the short straw and went to Johnny’s hotdog stand two blocks from our house, not that I minded; it was all an adventure to me.  I brought the food home, we ate, and it was back to Bob’s for some more football.  Strat-O-Matic does all the major sports.  Back then, it was strictly a board game based on the last season’s statistics.  On we played until an early curfew, 9 PM for me.  I made it home with the game and no spills on the ice.

More than 20 years later, I still had that game and that year of teams.  I’d already been married (even Stat-O players can find a mate) for over a decade when the idea came to have a complete set of all Strat-O-Matic baseball teams ever produced.  Now, the company reprints years, but not ca. 1990.  Anyway, I traded the football game for a couple of baseball seasons, only to have my trading partner complain that he was short a team, the Philadelphia Eagles of Izzy Lang, Norm Snead and company.  In a last-gasp effort to save the transaction, I contacted my friend Bob, whose parents still lived in the house.  Lo and behold, the Eagles’ team was there in the basement, undamaged and ready to join its partners after a very long absence.

I finished assembling my Strat-O-Matic collection not long after.  A year or so later, Clare was born.  There’s a connection running through Strat-O-Matic and childhood friends and New Year’s Eve that makes perfect sense to me from on top of the world.  Happy New Year.   

An Omen, Perhaps

I was checking the various online sites for the latest White Sox rumors when I came across a headline on why Ken “Hawk” Harrelson wants to announce Sox games for four more years; and here I thought it was just to torment me.  Seeing that was like seeing a bad accident—I just had to look.  So, I clicked and went straight to a blank page.  When I tried a second time, the same thing happened.  I found the same headline on another site, only to go 0 for 3.  Then, Michele and I went grocery shopping for New Year’s Eve.  My luck ran out when we got back home.  I now know why the Hawk wants to keep going.

It’s for the grandkids.  Their grandpa will have been involved i major-league baseball for parts of eight decades.  How great for the kids.  How sad for the rest of us.

A Reason to Watch

My favorite professional sport will always be baseball, as opposed to my favorite sports.  Those would be baseball and softball, whichever my daughter was playing at the time.  Those games I watched intently from start to finish.  With the pros, only baseball deserves that kind of attention.

Bears’ games I’ll watch from the start because I’m on the exercycle at noon on a Sunday, but if the monstrosities of the midway are tanking it, I’m off doing something else as soon as my time on the cycle is done.  With the Bulls, I mostly watch the end of the second quarter and then check the score at the end of the third; if there’s cause for optimism, I’ll watch the fourth quarter, which is what happened last night with the Nets at the United Center.

My, did Jimmy Butler put on a show, scoring 40 points to lead the team, his team, to a 101-99, come-from-behind win.  Butler scored the game-winner on a buzzer-beater jump shot from the top of the key (and isn’t it fun to write those words).  Even more impressive, Butler prevailed despite rolling an ankle late in the game.  If you had told me something bad had happened to his knee, I’d have believed it from the looks of things.

Standing there with a mic in his face maybe 90 seconds after the game ended, Butler answered a question about the ankle, saying, “Yeah, I can feel it, but it’s still attached to my body.”  Never would it occur to Derrick Rose to say that because never would it occur to Rose to play like that.  

Options

Right now, my prescription for preventing early-onset cabin fever is daily biking to episodes of “Penny Dreadful” on Netflix.   I’m still trying to decide whether or not to root for Dorian Gray.  As for the Pinstripe Bowl, I’ll take a pass, pardon the pun.

This would be a perfect time for indoor golfing, if only I cared about the outdoor variety.  I wouldn’t be too surprised if Clare did a little of it, though.  Her fiancé Chris is a big golfer, and he’s been trying to get Clare to stop approaching her golf swing like it was an at-bat.  Good luck with that.  As for the indoor stuff, Clare actually had considerable experience in college.  For two years, Elmhurst softball started the season playing a tournament at a golf dome in Davenport, Iowa.  So, there’s going to be a real temptation may for my daughter to approach winter golf the way she did February softball.

This would also be the perfect time for ice fishing, if only I had lost my mind.  Not yet.  Or I could go bowling (indoors, of course).  I did that plenty of times in my 20s and 30s.  Some friends even had a day-after-Thanksgiving tournament in the 1980s.  I think I bowled a strike at the same time Doug Flutie threw his Hail Mary to beat the University of Miami in 1984.  But try to find a bowling alley these days that isn’t geared to high-end hipster fun.

Onward, Penny Dreadful.      

Perchance, to Hibernate

Sometime in the distant past, my wife and I thought we would give cross-country skiing a try, but we never got around to it, what with the cold and all.  I also grew to dislike the smugness of the people who do it, winter and summer.  As soon as a blizzard hits Chicago or New York, there they are with their skis and poles snaking down the middle of State Street or Madison Avenue.  Then, when the snow melts, they take to the bicycle paths, poles in hand, practicing the proper technique.  I have yet to hit anyone with my bike, but, if I ever do, may it be one of these clowns.

For a few years, when Clare was in the primary grades, we went sledding in the neighboring suburb of Riverside, where they have a nice bluff that leads down to the Desplaines River.  The first time we went, Clare was maybe seven.  We waited our turn in line, my child as excited as all get-out.  When it was time, she got in the sled first with me bringing up the rear, so to speak.  We both held onto the steering rope, if that’s in fact what it was.  Then off we went.  Let me just say that there comes a point in life when your back does not enjoy hard bumps and sudden jolts the product of sledding down a hill, with your daughter wondering if we’ll end up in the river.  And wouldn’t that be fun?

This went on for several years, until I told Clare I didn’t want her to get hurt.  She never did, on a sled, at least.  The scooter—producing a broken arm—is another story.  When she was in high school, I wouldn’t let her go skiing; I didn’t want a broken leg affecting her softball skills.

In our house it’s a long way to spring.   

Just Take a Breath and Relax

Just Take a Breath and Relax

When I was a kid, the weather man on TV tended to be both performer and meteorologist.  In particular, I remember P.J. Hoff, whose forecasts almost always included a weather-related cartoon.  One of Hoff’s many characters was the Vice-president in Charge of Looking Out the Window.  What would that august personage see today?

Well, last night, Christmas, he would have gone to bed with the ground covered in snow, and this morning he would have wondered where it all went.  Somehow, because of how this front and that high-pressure system worked out, the temperature has climbed nearly 20 degrees, into the 50s, which can only mean one thing on the news today.  No, Mr. Hoff won’t be coming back from the dead, though I wouldn’t mind for ever so many reasons.  Instead, we’ll be getting all of these shots of people biking and running along the lakefront.  Then some blithering anchor will say how it feels like spring.  (The same person just days before was hoping for a white Christmas.)  Only no one’s throwing a ball around or shooting hoops in the park because it’s too wet and muddy, and there’s garbage everywhere.

If I want to think baseball, I’ll go online and track the latest White Sox trade rumors; the Sox hope to get another haul of prospects for starter Jose Quintana.  Whether or not they do, following those rumors is safer than pretending we’ve zapped into March.  This is one of those days you can’t trust what you see outside your window.  Right, P.J.? 

 

The Nose Test

There used to be a big sign on the outfield wall at Philadelphia’s Baker Bowl.  “The Phillies use Lifebuoy [Soap],” it read, “but they still stink,” fans joked.  Off of yesterday’s 41-21 loss to the Washington Redskins, the Bears must be using a lot of Lifebuoy.

Never has an NFL team tried to play without a secondary.  (I was forced once as a coach in Pony Ball to do without a shortstop; it didn’t go well.)  Washington quarterback Kirk Cousins threw at will (the Bears also aren’t big on pass rushing), and his receivers pretty much caught his passes the same way.  Cousins passed for 270 yards while his backfield ran for another 208 yards.  At the same time, Bears’ quarterback Matt Barkley threw five, yes, five interceptions.  But don’t expect Bears’ coach John Fox to criticize his players, or his coaching.  Why, the players work their tails off, as Fox likes to say, and tailess players could be part of the problem, along with a lack of talent and sideline preparation.

The Bears could draft as high as third in the spring. (Oh, imagine the excitement downtown if only the NFL had decided to hold up Chicago a third straight year for the “honor” of hosting the draft.)  Of course, two out of the last three of the team’s number ones played a total of four games combined this season, so you have to wonder about talent assessment.  But, hey, even a stopped clock gets the time right twice a day.  Maybe the 2017 draft will be one of those times.

And I do know this--there were close to 22,000 no-shows at Soldier Field yesterday.  The McCaskeys don't like it when the sheep start thinking for themselves and stay away.  For better or worse, there will be changes at Halas Hall come the offseason.  

"Downhill"

When did the word “downhill” enter the sports’ vocabulary as a positive, as opposed to a term describing players no longer at the top of their game?  It seems every NFL game I listen to has an announcer talking about how somebody is great at “running downhill.”  There are football hills I don’t know about?

And now I just read this description of a pitcher in the Yankees’ organization—he “creates good downhill plane towards the plate.”  Huh?  No uphill plane?  Why any plane at all?  Why not say that somebody’s a good runner, linebacker or pitcher?

Next, they’ll start talking about an NBA forward or guard with great “downhill acceleration.”  Which leads to this thought: What happens when everyone reaches bottom?  

 

Self-interest

Three star college running backs—Christian McCaffrey of Stanford, Leonard Fournette of LSU and Shock Linwood of Baylor—have all opted out of upcoming bowl games so they can enter the NFL draft being of sound body.  Opinions on their decision vary.

A columnist for the Tribune calls it a “Smart Move. Educated Move.”  He says the players are being no more motivated by money than the universities and coaches they play for.  In addition, the columnist hopes the move leads to something more “because I love players trying to gain control of their bodies and rights.”

His reasoning makes sense, to a point; nobody wants to get injured before the big payoff.  But you could also argue that a super performance in said bowl games would only enhance a player’s status in the April draft.  Another possibility is that this notion of self-interest will work itself backward.

Why, if you’re a high school senior, should you play in your school’s postseason if you already have a scholarship to a major school?  Why keep playing Pop Warner once you know you’re going to a high school with a topnotch football program?  Why bother to throw a ball around with friends if you’re already on a good Pop Warner team?

I also wonder how exactly money would be divided up between suddenly empowered players and schools.  Are we talking 19-year old starters suddenly making six-figure “stipends” because they play for Notre Dame or Alabama?  And that would be less outrageous than Jim Harbauugh’s salary at Michigan?  How?  My opening offer would be a modest, five-figure stipend; free graduate-school tuition; and free lifetime medical care for problems related to playing.

I wonder what Mr. Columnist would say to that?  

Just For One Day

David Bowie had it right that we can all be heroes just for one day.  Anything longer is gravy.

I don’t like heroes so much as I need them as role models.  John Glenn always exhibited a unique balance of ambition, duty and humility while Ted Williams overcame his inner punk to serve his country in not one but two wars.  I also like how my daughter handled things the summer between her junior and senior years of high school.  Talk about grace under pressure.

Clare batted .425 that spring, which we hoped would catch the attention of a couple of area D-I schools.  In fact, two coaches spent the summer torturing us with vague promises of coming to her travel tournaments.  I very much would’ve liked it had they shown up for the one where she hit five homeruns, but they didn’t.  Trust me, it was their loss.   

For reasons neither of us could ever figure out, the two new coaches for Clare’s team didn’t particularly like her.  I mean, they kept in the sixth-spot for all but one of the games that weekend, and one game they benched her because we were late; still, she pinch hit a home run.  The next weekend, she batted seventh, and, by the time we were at nationals, Clare was batting even lower, when the let her hit.  By the end of the season, my daughter was pretty sure her softball career would never make it to college.

The thing is, Clare didn’t mope or howl at the moon.  Instead, she sucked it up, told me—quite incorrectly, I might add—that it would probably all be over next spring and went about running for homecoming queen in the fall of senior year.  You have no idea how surprised we all were when colleges started contacting us about playing for them.  I guess that was her reward.

For Cindy Stowell, it was just the chance to appear on Jeopardy! this year; she said it was a lifelong dream, and I can relate to that, wanting to and in fact appearing on the game show back when Clare was three.  Only I lost the farm in Final Jeopardy (What is the Rhodesian ridgeback?) while Stowell went on to win six times.  Only she didn’t live to see her appearances broadcast.  Stowell died of colon cancer early this month at the age of 41.      

Incredibly, she knew she was dying when stood there, signaling button in hand, intent on beating challengers intent on dethroning her.  According to reports, she competed while dealing with a fever and taking pain medication; all I had to worry about was the damn’ button.  Seven times, host Alex Trebek chit-chatted with Stowell in that period after the first commercial break, the two of them pulling it off brilliantly, that here was just another goofy Jeopardy! nerd; Trebek was one of the few people to know about Stowell’s condition.  The champ won over just over $103,000, all of which she donated to cancer research.

This is how you compete, on the field, on a game show, in life, in the shadow of death.  Stowell’s memory deserves to last far longer than just one day.

Fore!

Golf has always been a rich man’s game.  Why do you think it attracted the likes of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller?  But with friends like that, the game needed to at least pretend it was a sport for the masses.  Hence, the career of Arnold Palmer as the everyman hero.  Before Palmer, in Chicago municipal golf courses did the trick.  Back when they were a couple without kids, my parents played one of these courses not far from the house.  Random clubs found their way into the garage and under the porch when I was a boy.

We now live in times when the good must give way to the spectacular.  Which brings us to the news last week that two adjacent public courses—South Shore and Jackson Park—will be turned into one super course in order to attract major PGA tournaments; Tiger Woods has been enlisted as chief designer.  The project comes with an estimated cost of $30 million, 80 percent of which will come from private funding.  Right.

Somehow, this idea is going to revive interest in golf as well as the South Side of Chicago, to which I can only say, Good luck with that.  People have this way of hanging onto outdated notions about places, especially my hometown.  Chicago, Wrigley Field excepted, was and always will be the playground of Capones past and present.  The White Sox could draw just under three million fans in 2006, and people still whispered the new stadium was in a “bad” neighborhood, whatever that meant.  But maybe Tiger Woods will lead a South Side renaissance, together with the Obama Presidential Library.

What I want to know is how the plan will affect the average duffer.  The winter rate for 18 holes at Jackson Park is $22, with cart, and $13 for 9 holes at South Shore, with cart.  The park district says it wants to keep greens’ fees for the new course under $50.  But, guys, they already are. 

Calling Dr. Berra

I saw in the paper today that the Mariners hired someone to be their “minor league mental skills coach.”  Yogi Berra was right—baseball really is ninety percent half-mental.

Probably the other sports are, too.  The Bulls have looked just awful lately, including a home loss where they scored all of 69 points against the Bucks on Friday.  So, what happened in their next game?  Why, they scored 69 points in the first half last night against the Pistons on their way to a 113-82 win.  How do you reconcile the two games?

Well, in between Bulls’ coach Fred Hoiberg ran his players through a three-hour practice; that had to send a whole bunch of messages.  Coaches and managers have always doubled as psychologists.  You think Casey Stengel didn’t have a Ph.D. in the workings of the human mind?  The Cubs’ Joe Maddon definitely thinks he does, too.  And let’s not forget Phil Jackson  What the Mariners are doing may be a little more New Age, trying to get everyone to realize and unlock their potential by the time they reach Double-A.

It can’t hurt.  Clare had a whole routine she went through on game days in college, starting with breakfast; she insisted on a cereal that had slugger Albert Pujols on the front of the box.  My daughter also had her own mix tape that she listened to that put her in the right frame of mind to hit.  All I know is she walked away from Elmhurst College with her name on a bunch of records’ lists.  With athletes, never underestimate the power of the mind.  Go, Bulls.  

Proper Attire

Let me admit right off to wearing shorts and a t-shirt yesterday, this despite a noontime temperature of 11 degrees at the Chicago lake front with a wind chill of minus four.  Of course, I was inside on my exercycle.  The clown on TV with his shirt off was at Soldier Field to watch the Bears lose to the Packers, 30-27.

By and large, baseball fans don’t do stupid on a level with football fans.  The one thing they/we are guilty is that shirt thing.  It’s definitely a young, white-guy tendency done for reasons only a psychiatrist would understand.  Both types of fans will wear uniform jerseys, but that’s where it stops for baseball types.  The crazies I saw yesterday felt a need to take it a whole lot further.

First were people who thought a wedge of yellow-colored foam perched atop their head is a testament of the truest devotion to team and state.  Then there were the folks who couldn’t stop at painting their faces in Bear blue and orange.  No, they also had to put a bear’s head where the foam wedge would otherwise go.

The website for the Washington Redskins sells a hog nose as the “perfect addition to your Redskins wardrobe!”  This is for fans who need to connect to a long-ago offensive line known as the Hogs.  And Cleveland Browns’ fans—masochists that they are—can order their Dawg Pound clothing.  Or they can all just dress up in hog or dog costume because….Honestly, I don’t know why.  How long until Opening Day?      

Old-school Etiquette

Once and current Yankee Aroldis Chapman told reporters on Friday that Cubs’ manager Joe Maddon “abused me a bit on how he made me pitch, and sometimes he made me pitch when I didn’t need to pitch.”  You don’t say?

For openers, let’s enjoy the irony here of Chapman, who served a 30-game suspension for violating MLB rules on domestic violence, saying he was abused.  Aroldis, what goes around comes around.  Secondly, let’s count up the number of unwritten rules Chapman broke with his remarks, starting with “Don’t second guess your manager” followed by “Keep it in the clubhouse.”   

I happen to think that Chapman is absolutely right; Maddon did misuse him in the postseason, especially bringing in his closer with a seven-run lead in game six of the World Series.  Only it’s not the player’s job to call his skipper a Bozo—that’s for the sports-writing establishment to do.  Old-school rules, never written down, hold that you do your best and let others handle the criticizing.  Unless, of course, by abuse Chapman means an overuse so serious that he was injured.

Oh wait, the closer’s comments were part of his signing a five-year, $86 million deal to return to the Yankees, so it would seem that the extra pitching didn’t hurt him.  In that case, put a sock in it, pal, until you retire.  That’s when you get to write a tell-all book.          

On a Winter's Day

Eight days before Christmas and the cold outside is Chicago frightful.  What’s a person to do?  For me, it’s the perfect time to go on baseball-reference.com.  A name and a click can be so delightful.

Take Jeoff Long, for instance.  Half a lifetime ago, the White Sox took a chance on this 22-year old outfielder-first baseman in the summer of 1964.  Long had 35 at-bats after being acquired from the Cardinals, and I vaguely remember being on hand for one of them.  The Sox scorebook said the team was very high on Long, but he was traded with Ray Herbert to the Phillies in a package for Danny Cater and Lee Elia.  More clicks all the way around for those other names.

And, while we’re at it, let’s not forget Greg Bollo, a Sox farmhand Tommy John said had a ton of talent before he injured his elbow.  (Had things gone a little differently, we could be talking about Greg Bollo instead of Tommy John surgery.)  If Greg Bollo is worth a click and a look, why not Fred Klages, Rudy May…

Punching Down

Angels’ closer Huston Street felt the need the other day to defend the baseball tradition of dress up, up to and including guys as gals.  Street told the AP it’s all about “a tradition of team building in a safe manner.”  In support of this wonderful tradition of donning odd clothes, he cites children dress up and Halloween.  That neither of these activities involves coercion appears to be of little interest to Street.

You see, the players aren’t making fun of anyone in some cruel manner.  No, they’re just “dressed up in uncomfortable clothes, as a contrast of macho dudes dressed in too tight fitting or too revealing clothes for our body type.  Anyone looking at the exercise from a lens of humor would see the contrast for what it is and wouldn’t be offended.”  So sayeth someone who might’ve looked great as Little Lord Fauntleroy.

The irony here is almost too rich for words.  Ballplayers want the right to dress up—dare we say cross dress?—in their version of a woman, but women can’t expect to dress and take the field as major-league ballplayers.  And that lens of humor thing—does it include black face and war bonnets, or how about a simple diaper? 

And why not a dunce cap, while we’re at it?                   

Worth A Thousand Words

During the course of her softball career, Clare had a teammate whose brother was drafted by the Texas Rangers.  Just for fun yesterday, I went on the Rangers’ website to check if he’d been placed on the 40-man roster.  That’s when I saw the picture.

It was supposed to show the holiday spirit of all those Rangers’ players handing out gifts to sick children.  There were seven women in the picture, all wearing the same identical team pullover as the men.  For a second, I thought, Wow, that’s a lot of females in the front office.  Then it hit me.  These were wives or girlfriends, that, or the general manager doesn’t care about subordinates hand-holding in public. 

As for my daughter’s six degrees of separation from the major leagues, the player in question has another year to go before the Ranger have to decide about putting him on the roster.  And the way it’s going, about another hundred years before adding any women.        

Playing Fields

I imagine most people think of Chicago as the reincarnation of the Wild West, only with more guns.  The city is more than that, and always was.  I can’t imagine growing up anyplace else, especially Phoenix, where my parents were planning to move when I was seven on account of my asthma.  Things got better, we stayed, and I have yet to come across a rattle snake or scorpion in the wild.  There were plenty of garter snakes in my corner of the South Side, though.

Not to mention chickens and roosters.  Yes, loud fowl, the kind that go cock-a-doodle-doo in the morning.  The people across the alley from us had a coop attached to their garage.  Mind you, we weren’t anywhere close to the city limits and what was referred to then as “the country.”  Somehow, our neighbors kept their flock until I was twelve or thereabouts.  It made for an interesting adolescence.

Five blocks from our house was another chicken coop, behind a field where we all played softball and football.  A line of scrub trees—that for some reason we called “the boas”—lined the south end of the field in front of a house while the chickens took roost behind another house on the north end.  I’m pretty sure I hit a softball through the boas, breaking a window, and I know I nearly broke an ankle playing football.  I got tackled and actually heard a “crunch!” that ended up being a very badly sprained ankle.  You could say I hobbled into my sophomore year of high school.

I’m not aware of anyone who played on the field at 50^th and Christiana ever becoming a professional athlete.  Maybe we would have with the proper venue.  That seems to be the logic behind the push for new sports’ stadiums—we’ll play better in something newer.  Yeah, right.

The Oakland Raiders are pretty much complaining they’re stuck in the boas and want someone to build them a proper palace.  The city of Oakland desperately wants to hang onto the team and has come up with a plan to provide $200 million of a $1.3 billion project, with the city and Alameda County kicking in real estate worth another $150 million.  Poor Raiders, they have to go through the motions of considering the proposal because things in Las Vegas, where owner Mark Davis wants to go, haven’t gone quite as planned.

I bet Kenny Stabler would have been a really good quarterback if only he hadn’t been stuck playing on a field like we did on Christiana.  I wonder if Stabler was the only Snake in Oakland?

Good News, No News

As part of the new MLB collective bargaining agreement, veteran players will no longer have the power to make rookies dress as women, as in Lady Gaga; Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz; Wonder Woman; or players from the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.  There are pictures floating around on social media.  The new rule also restricts the wearing of costumes that might offend by race, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc. 

The move is worth two cheers.  One gets deducted because the commissioner’s office apparently was motivated as much by optics as ethics.  In none of the three stories I read—including the NYT and there was no mention of the new rule on the MLB website—did anyone say it was flat-out wrong.  And the players first wanted to make sure they weren’t ceding too much disciplinary authority.  Yes, God forbid you lose the right to make a rookie dress as a woman.

On a related note, at least to me, the Baseball Transactions ran nearly 3-1/2 inches in today’s Tribune.  This is the time of year when all sorts of baseball positions get filled, e.g., quality control (?) coach, director of international scouting, trainer for the Rome (Ga.) Braves in the South Atlantic League.  But for all the names listed in tiny type, not one belonged to a woman, unless the likes of “Eric,” “Derrick” or “Paul” qualify.   

I also see that Andrew Lorraine (MLB career pitching record of 6-11 with 6.53 ERA) and Gary Varsho (84 rbi’s and .244 BA in eight big-league seasons) were named scouts by the Pirates.  Obviously, the Pirates don’t see a relative lack of success on the major-league level as a bar to employment for a scout.  In that case, why not hire women?     

Not My Kind of Sport

Hands and feet, those are my problem.  With bigger hands, I might’ve been able to enjoy playing basketball and football.  The NBA and NFL would go out of business—or subject their balls to a radical downsizing—if all their players had hands like mine.

On second thought, maybe my feet weren’t the problem when it came to learning how to ice skate.  No, it must have been my sense of balance, or lack thereof.  Stand me up, and I’d fall right back down on the ice.  After a half-hour of that, I mastered the pitiable art of ice “walking,” whereby I could walk on my skates across the ice, that is, until I fell down again or I started walking on my ankles.  Painful but true.

No doubt, my scariest time in high school was a gym period freshman year.  For no good reason I can think of, the gym teacher decided to play something called “basketball tag.”  The player with the ball had to dribble with one hand while trying to tag someone else with his other.  There were six to ten guys running around in a tiny square, two feet by three feet, or so it seemed to me.  Believe me, if they’d put a stopwatch on me as I dodged being tagged, I could’ve qualified for the Olympic 100-yard dash, easy.

Now, volleyball I liked, but we hardly ever played it in winter, and, when we did, there was always this stupid punishment attached—throw the ball over the net to the other side and you did pushups.  Some smart aleck or doofus always managed to do precisely that, so we had to stop and drop.  Who knows, maybe this is some kind of safety rule and that’s why you never see anyone throwing the ball over the net in college or the Olympics.

The one indoor sport I was good at was racquetball.  I mean, this is a game where you can score a point by hitting a ball off the ceiling or hitting a dying quail that would’ve landed in the net in tennis but ends up hitting the front wall, just an inch or so above the floor.  I was good at that and returning shots while flat on my stomach.  I also loved the noise of racquet against rubber ball.  Whack!

But I ran out of people to play and never taught my daughter, which is too bad because I hate being relatively inactive every winter.  No bicycle, just an exercycle.  No baseball, just games I never really played as a kid.

How many days until pitchers and catchers report?   

Too Much by Half

Lost in all the hoopla over the White Sox blowing up (dare a skeptic say “trashing”?) their roster was news that the Cubs are raising the price of season’s tickets by an average of 19.5 percent.  It will now be possible to spend $409 to watch a ballgame on the North Side.  The mind boggles, or at least mine does.

Allow me a geezer moment with a “Why, I remember back when” story.  In eighth grade, I bet a teacher two tickets to a White Sox game that his homeroom wouldn’t reach its quota for a school fundraiser.  I won the bet, and he paid off by dumping so many pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters onto my desk (after which he announced, “Everybody clear their desks, now!”  The man was a real joker.)  If I had won that bet today, a Cub ticket would’ve buried me alive in pocket change.

You can’t beat City Hall, they say, or hold back the march of time, but I can damn well complain about them.  The more expensive baseball gets, the more the ballpark turns into an “experience” on a par with Great America or Disneyland.  The new parks have that function built into them while the classics like Wrigley and Fenway have to gobble up surrounding streets in order to create some sort of festival area.  Anyone who wants to watch a simple ballgame either gets with the program or gets labelled a crank.  Guess which category I fit into?

So it goes.  Paul Konerko, who made a shade under $130 million most of that with the Sox, is hailed as “a blue-collar hero” while Dexter Fowler can switch from the Cubs to the Cardinals in the blink of an eye.  Granted that the reserve clause was wrong, but how is baseball as “experience” better for fans?  If the cost of games continues to rise, attendance will start to decline as fans opt to watch on television.  When that happens, MLB will find a way to charge for every game broadcast.  Just wait.    

Heroes

Clare called again yesterday afternoon from work, this time with a different sort of update:  “Did you hear?  John Glenn died.”

When our daughter was six, she had settled on becoming an astronaut.  She loved to look at the moon and the stars and must have imagined a place for herself among them.  The day she graduated kindergarten, we went down to visit my sister in Houston, which included trips to Galveston and the Johnson Space Center (along with a baseball game in the Astrodome).  At the space center, Clare was strapped into some kind of contraption that spun her around and upside down.  If she didn’t come out of that seeing Jesus, she did become aware of John Glenn, whom I’d never mentioned.

When she started Mustang ball for the Berwyn Park District in third grade, Clare found herself on the Padres; that was how she first became interested in Tony Gwynn.  (I can only imagine if she had gone on the Red Sox, which might’ve led to Clare being Clare a la Manny Ramirez.)  “I really had some strange role models,” our daughter said at dinner.

Not at all. 

More of the Same

Clare walked through the door last night (and I almost mean that in the literal sense) after work and announced, “I’ve stopped following the White Sox on social media.”  I don’t know Greek or Latin, but I think it means she didn’t like the Sox trading outfielder Adam Eaton to Washington for three prospects.  I share my daughter’s pain.

The Sox acquired three minor-league pitchers, all of whom they had a chance to draft or sign originally but didn’t.  The centerpiece of the deal is right-hander Lucas Giolito, a #1 draft pick of the Nats in 2012  and MLB’s #1 rated pitching prospect.  Rather than pick Giolito, who was available to them, the Sox drafted outfielder Courtney Hawkins, who in five seasons has hit for a .227 batting average.  Our former #1 pick was left off the 40-man roster this fall, but fear not.  Nobody wanted him in the Rule 5 draft.  So, again, I’m left to ask if and when the White Sox will admit to making a mistake in their drafting and scouting that these trades are meant to make up for.

 I have yet to come across anyone in the sports’ media who’s noted that all seven of the prospects from the Chris Sale and Eaton deals were originally passed over by the White Sox because their front office—with the same scouting director from 2012-2015—didn’t like them or ownership didn’t put up the funds to sign them.  What’s changed, outside of a few deckchairs being moved along with a reshuffling of some positions?  We’ll see soon enough, I hope.

In the meantime, I find it interesting that the two players the Sox moved first were involved in the Adam LaRoche spring-training debacle.  Adam Eaton put his foot in his mouth by saying what a leader LaRoche’s 14-year old son was in the clubhouse while Sale went after team VP Kenny Williams for the way he handled the situation.  Professional athletes in the 20s often say—and do—dumb things.  But if the Sox front office had done its due diligence before signing LaRoche, they would’ve known he was basically homeschooling his son in the clubhouse of his previous team.  No LaRoche, no foot in mouth, no tirade (and quite possibly, no cutting up uniforms in the middle of the season).  So, the players are gone, but not the “architects.”  Nice work, that, if you can get it. 

Left Unsaid

The White Sox traded star pitcher Chris Sale yesterday to Boston for four prospects, and I only had to talk Clare back from the ledge a little.  She didn’t like the move, and I don’t much, either.  Of course, all the local sports “authorities” said it was the smart thing to do.

Oh, really?  Then answer me this: why didn’t the White Sox go after these players the first time around?  Three of them—infielder Yoan Mocada (Cuba), outfielder Luis Alexander Basabe (Venezuela) and pitcher Victor Diaz (Dominican Republic)—weren’t subject to the MLB draft.  All a team had to do was scout and sign.  That means the Sox didn’t know about them, didn’t want them or couldn’t afford them.  What changed?

With Mocada, considered the #1 MLB prospect, it was all about the money; he cost the Red Sox $31.5 million to sign, plus another $31.5 million because that put the team over the luxury tax.  GM Rich Hahn told reporters the team was interested in Mocada when he first turned pro, but “We quickly realized we weren’t going to be able to sign him.”  Really, how come?

I checked today, and Forbes lists the worth of team owner Jerry Reinsdorf at $1.34 billion.  What exactly can’t Reinsdorf afford in life?  Certainly not a ballplayer from Cuba.  If Hahn were being truthful, he would’ve said the Sox didn’t want to spend the money on Mocada.  This was in 2015.  Apparently, the team thought they were just fine with Carlos Sanchez, Tyler Saladino and Trey Michalczewski, their tenth-ranked prospect who hit .226 for AA Birmingham this year.  So, are they now saying they were wrong about these players? 

And what about pitcher Michael Kopech?  This was a player available to the White Sox in the 2014 draft, but they passed him over for Carlos Rodon.  What makes Kopech better now, after his 50-game suspension for PEDs and broken wrist from punching a teammate?  Kopech now is the second-ranked prospect for the Sox, ahead of pitcher Carson Fulmer, who went into yesterday as the team’s top prospect.  What exactly does Kopech have that Fulmer doesn’t?

I told Clare and Michele this is a win-win for our Sox, that either the gamble works, in which case I’ll have to eat a whole bunch of crow, or it doesn’t and the team is anointed Chicago baseball laughingstock of all time.  That means Rick Hahn and Kenny Williams will be looking for work while Reinsdorf looks for a seller.  I don’t care which possibility happens, as long as it happens soon.  Life is short, and Sox fans suffer through too much of it.        

Unnecessary Roughness

It’s tempting to pile on 49ers’ quarterback Colin Kaepernick for his take on the state of race relations in America.  Kaepernick hasn’t exactly distinguished himself with comments, and the amount of money he intends to contribute to social-justice causes seems to be more out of future earnings than what’s he made as a six-year NFL player.  But I was young, too, once, and talked in ways not so different from Kaepernick.  My father, who ran into burning buildings for a living as a Chicago fireman, let me live.  You could say it’s time to pay it forward.

I do wonder, though, if there are any demons inside Kaepernick.  His points would be better made while having an MVP season, not with a team now 1-11 after losing to the heretofore hapless Bears on Sunday.  At 29 and mired in his second straight subpar season, Kaepernick will have a hard time finding a football job next year.

Deep down, he may not even want one, at least not in quarterback-poor Chicago.  Kaepernick said some strange things after the game, about what an honor it was being in Chicago “on the anniversary of the assassination of [Illinois Black Panthers’ party] chairman Fred Hampton,” who was killed by Chicago police in a raid on Hampton’s apartment in December 1969.  The consensus is that police did all the shooting, despite their initial contention that people inside the apartment shot first.  So, Kaepernick honored a slain revolutionary by completing one pass on the day for four yards and rushing for another 20?  The conversation he wants to start off the field isn’t the one his stats will allow him to have.

Even if he’d torched the Bears’ secondary for five touchdowns, his words would’ve fallen pretty flat with anyone who’s not already a member of the Kaepernick choir.  Take me, for instance.  My uncle—and Confirmation sponsor—was a Chicago cop who didn’t shoot anyone black or white in his time on the force.  Should he have resigned in protest over what other officers did?  If so, then shouldn’t Kaepernick do the same and leave the NFL, which on more than one occasion has been accused of racism?  Conversations can get messy once they start.

Kaepernick has a college degree and is certainly capable of earning more; he could become a teacher, professor or lawyer.  Or he might run for office.  Only those accumulating stats and questionable remarks—about not voting and who to honor at Soldier Field, named for veterans of the armed forces—are not going to make him electable in many places.  My father gave me time to grow up.  Kaepernick needs that same chance.  Once that happens, then we can judge.

Playing with House Money

Sports columnists and whatever their TV version is called are among the most irritating human beings on the face of the earth.  Yesterday, one of them declared the worst thing in sports is “allegiance to a boring team” and the “White Sox are a boring team and have been for years.”  Therefore, they have to blow everything up and start from scratch the way the Cubs did.  This coming from a guy who admits he “questioned almost everything the Cubs did as they went through their rebuild.”  In other words:  I was wrong then, but not now.  Yeah, I want to trade Chris Sale based on that rationale.

Sox fans are somewhere between skeptical and numb because they know more than Mr. Columnist, who couldn’t be bothered to consider his position.  The White Sox are oranges—or stinking garbage—to the Cubs’ apples.  Their ownership and front office haven’t shown they can string together smart decisions the way the Ricketts family and Theo Epstein have.  They get it right on Sale and Adam Eaton only to get it laughingly wrong on Adam Dunn and Adam LaRoche and Jeff Samardzija and Jeff Keppinger and Wil Ohman and…

Now here’s the thing about trading Sale, Eaton or Jose Quintana to the Dodgers, Nationals or Red Sox.  Those teams have pretty consistently finished higher than the Sox, so those prospects they’d be offering the Sox already had a chance to draft and decided not.  That makes the Sox front office just like Mr. Columnist, wrong the first time but not now.

Forgive me if I don’t share in their confidence.   

The Myth of Invinciblity

Football and hockey players are tough, baseball players are soft, or so the cliché goes.  (As for softball, my daughter played her entire junior year of college with slow-healing gouges on both her shins the result of a conditioning mishap, but who cares about women in sports, right?)  Football in particular plays into the myth, with all the John Foxes talking about player “owies” and all the commentators prattling on about a player’s “toughness.”  I tell ‘ya, Bill, that is one tough hombre—until he isn’t.

Take Rob Gronkowski, or Gronk, as they like to call their tight end in Foxboro.  Great player, plays hurt, seven operations and now facing an eighth with no guarantees that what gets done on his back will allow him to play again.  Gronkowski is 27.  I wonder what his quality of life will be in ten years or twenty.  But, hey, we love our Gronk.  Next man up.          

Pay Up

LeBron James and the Cavaliers came to town yesterday to play the Bulls, and King James paid off a bet as well.  He’d wagered Dwayne Wade that the Indians would beat the Cubs in the World Series, or he’d show up in Chicago wearing Cubs’ gear, and that’s just what happened.  Pro basketball players caring about baseball, I love it.

I also didn’t mind the Bulls handing the first-place Cavs their third straight loss.  The new-look Bulls are 11-7 on the season, which is nice.  But here’s a possible cause for concern:  They fly down to Dallas for a game tonight without Wade, who turns 35 next month.  It’s a scheduled day off to keep Wade fresh and ready to go for the playoffs.  If that doesn’t work, April and May will be all Cubs, all the time.   

Sly as a Fox (Not)

Esteemed physician and football coach John Fox delivered some bad news to reporters yesterday: Bears’ quarterback Jay Cutler is going to have surgery for a torn labrum in his right, throwing, shoulder.  Truly, who could have guessed, except maybe everyone without the surname McCaskey or a paid employee thereof?

Here’s what the Bears’ “coach” said:  “There were some different treatments that I’m not going to get into all the exacts [!], but typically things you try to do to avoid surgery, and they didn’t take for him [?!##!] like they [who?] were expecting, and we’re at the surgical mode [huh?] at this point.”  As soon as his stay in Chicago is over (and how much longer can that be?), Fox should consider a career in standup comedy.  His deadpan delivery reminds me of Jackie Vernon.  For all you kids out there, Google.

You just have to wonder if anyone in Halas Hall realizes how stupid the organization looks for having denied the obvious for close to two weeks, especially with the supposed coach expounding on the definition of “tear.”  I shouldn’t complain too much, though.  As long as the McCaskeys run the Bears, the White Sox won’t be a laughingstock.  Then again, if the Sox were the acknowledged laughingstock of Chicago sports, maybe we’d get a new owner.  Then again, the Bears are the laughingstock, and the McCaskeys don’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon.   

Peace I Bid You

MLB owners and players agreed to a new collective bargaining agreement last night, and I’m reminded of an African proverb: When elephants fight, only the grass suffers.  But fans don’t appear to have been trampled too much.

The ceiling on the luxury tax got raised, so there’s no danger of a hard salary cap for the length of the five-year agreement.  The team with the best record will host the World Series, which should satisfy all those cranks who’ve complained about home-field advantage being decided by an exhibition game, aka the All-Star Game.  Compensation for signing a free agent has been loosened up, so teams won’t have to worry about losing their first-round draft choice should they sign somebody.  There was discussion of increasing the roster size to 26 players, but nothing happened.  Just think, teams would’ve been able to carry thirteen or fourteen pitchers.

For fans, there are two changes of note, starting with more afternoon games on travel days; this should fill the blooper reels with ever more players losing balls in the sun.  And the season is going to start a few days earlier, to allow for more off-days, only it won’t unless all the warm-weather and dome teams are scheduled to play at home the first two weeks of the season.  Put another way, try playing in Chicago or Detroit or Cleveland at the end of March.

I know a certain former softball player who could tell you how hard that is.