Dog Days

 Don’t talk to me about the dog days of August.  Baseball is baseball.  If you’re a fan, you root.  It used to be that your team was contending or out of the running; either way, you found something to focus on, like a young Bill Melton batting leadoff at the end of the 1971 season.  The White Sox would finish 79-83, with Melton winning the AL homerun crown.  Manager Chuck Tanner batted his third baseman leadoff the last two games of the year.  Melton responded with three homeruns, giving him 33 on the year, one better than Norm Cash and Reggie Jackson.

Now, of course, we get to console ourselves that our out-of-contention teams are at this stage—or that one—of their rebuild.  Whatever, it’s baseball, unlike now, when you look out the window onto a world of dirty, cold Chicago gray.  Golf on TV, anyone?  The rebuilding (and that’s being generous) Bulls?  My only real option is to hope the Bears make a deep run in the playoffs.  The closer they play until SoxFest at the end of January, the less I think about not having baseball to think about.

That was the nice thing about Clare and softball; it hardly ever stopped.  December, January, February: there was always winter practice.  Because Clare didn’t drive yet, I took her, and because practice was so far away, I stayed to watch.  On top of that were our weekly visits to the batting cages.  The softball season in high school and college started before spring training could even finish, so I was a happily occupied parent.

I hated the drama that came with being the parent of an athlete.  (I’m pretty sure this had little or nothing to do with gender; vying for a starting position brings out the extreme in people male or female.) But how I loved the way it filled the time.