Prints

Over the past two years or so, I’ve bought a number of negatives showing White Sox players from the 1940s.  By force of will, I finally made myself find a photo lab that can actually develop negatives.  It was definitely worth the effort.

 

All the film was shot at Comiskey Park between 1942-48.  Some of the pictures show players doing stuff well before game time; other shots were taken during the course of games.  For whatever reason, it’s mostly pitchers and catchers.  Trust me, judging from the look on his face (and the cigarette in his mouth), catcher Tom Turner was not somebody you messed around with.

 

To look at these photographs is to realize what was lost with the razing of Comiskey Park.  There’s no escaping those arches that framed the park, and why would you want to?  Pitcher Johnny Rigney squats in the outfield grass, waiting for somebody to throw him a ball; behind Rigney is the outfield wall, “352” painted next to the foul line that extends up the left field wall.  Behind the grandstand seats are those arches.

 

Thurman Tucker is in the cage taking BP, against a backdrop of arches.  Catcher George Dickey (brother of Bill) looks into the camera from his spot in the bullpen down the left field line, arches in the background.  Guy Curtright takes a practice swing for the camera, arches off in the distance.

 

My favorite photo shows Sox catcher Ralph Weigel at bat during a day game, the sun catching the back half of his profile (the left side) during a swing.  The image has an unmistakable Joe DiMaggio feel to it.  By accident or on purpose, the photographer caught Weigel doing his version of The Swing, made famous by DiMaggio.  Arms and legs in motion, head steady—you can find any number of pictures that capture DiMaggio working his right-handed magic.

 

Ralph Weigel was a career .230 hitter the three years he spent in the major leagues; 1948 was his lone season on the South Side, where he hit .233.  Weigel never homered in the big leagues, though he did have seven doubles and three triples in ’48.  Maybe this pictures is from the game he went three-for-four with a double against the Red Sox at home in June or the double and triple he had in a September game against the Browns.  That’s the one I’ll go with.

 

Such a swing, those arches.

Keeping Tabs

Clare and I have been keeping tabs on players going up and down.  In the former category is White Sox minor-league relief pitcher Will Kincanon, who’s looked quite good so far this spring.  Kincanon is on our radar for the simple fact we may have run into him shopping or out to eat or waiting in line at the Polar Bear (for ice cream).  In other words, Kincanon is a local kid, a few years younger than my daughter and a graduate of Riverside-Brookfield High School, one Clare’s archenemies from softball.

 

We’re also watching ex-Sox Gordon Beckham, in camp with the Padres on a minor-league deal.  Beckham is now 33, eleven years removed from his rookie season on the South Side, and what a season it was.  Beckham hit .270 with 14 homeruns and 63 RBIs in just 378 at-bats.  I can still remember a game from September 2009, two out and nobody on in the top of the ninth at Minnesota with the Twins leading 2-0, Joe Nathan about pick up the save.  But lo and behold, Beckham and Paul Konerko went back-to-back against Nathan to start a Sox comeback.  The future looked ever so bright for that young man.

 

I think it was the next spring, with Clare and her Morton teammates at the batting cages; Coach Euks asked me what I thought about the rumored trade of Beckham to San Diego for Adrian Gonzales.  “No way,” I said.  “We’d be giving up five years on that deal.”  Little did I know that Beckham had already peaked, offensively.  The league caught up with the right-hand hitting Beckham, and a broken hamate bone in 2013 didn’t exactly help.

 

Oh, but could that boy field.  Yolmer may have been a little better at second base, but not by much, and Beckham had more range, I think.  If anything, it’s been the glove that’s kept him in the big leagues.  Clare tweeted a picture yesterday of Beckham airborne, parallel to the ground, going after a ball.

 

It’s never too late to make an impression, Gordon.

Three's a Charm

Bad things happen to very rich people, is the only way I can put it.  Jerry Reinsdorf, for all of his multi-billion-dollar net worth, is saddled with Jim Boylen as coach of the Bulls.  You may know Boylen by the nickname he’s intent on establishing for himself as Mr. Timeout.

 

Three times this month, Boylen has called a timeout with 64, 30.3 and 28.4 seconds left in games where his team had absolutely no chance of winning.  But Boylen thinks these are teachable moments, as evidenced by the Bulls’ 20-39 record so far this season.  So much to learn, so little a teacher.

 

Reinsdorf is a man who values loyalty before talent.  He showed that a very long time ago with the White Sox when he got rid of general manager Larry Himes, who drafted Frank Thomas and Robin Ventura (the player, not the manager), among others.  He did it again with the Bulls, preferring Jerry Krause to Michael Jordan and Phil Jackson.  At least with the Sox, Rick Hahn has shown a modicum of talent to go with the loyalty.

 

But the Bulls, oh my.  Maybe a little reverse psychology is in order.  Hey, Jerry, we love what Gar Forman has done as GM of your team, what with Jim Boylen as coach and all.  

A Family Affair

Yesterday, Clare came by for dinner, hot dogs from Lucky Dog on 16^th Street and paczki from the Oak Park Bakery.  Now, that’s how you do Fat Tuesday in these parts.

 

Talk followed food.  We celebrated Daniel Palka getting a walk in the bottom of the ninth with the White Sox down by a run to the Giants; Palka scoring from first on a double by Adam Engel; and Engel scoring the winning run on a single by Seby Zavala.  Who cares if it’s only spring training when it’s your favorites who’re doing the heavy lifting?  Then we argued over the matter of baseball injuries.  I think ballplayers have reached the point of diminishing returns when it comes to muscle mass.  There comes a point, or so I’d argue, when the body can’t absorb a violent swing; think Aaron Judge or Giancarlo Stanton.  The gym rat disagrees.

 

But this was not a “turn back the clock” night, and the daughter is married.  Her husband didn’t come with because he’s in school as part of a career change.  Chris left college coaching to become a high school teacher and, with luck, coach.  But first he has to take some classes in order to get his teaching certificate.

 

He already has a high-school football assistant-coaching job lined up, and at a place we know well.  The summer between sixth and seventh grade, Clare was playing on a summer high school softball team.  Don’t tell her I said so, but she was that good, at least hitting.  Anyway, we were playing this particular school Chris will be at, and we couldn’t find the softball field.  But now my son-in-law has found the football field there.

 

Around and around we go in life, connections made and remade.  I made sure Clare had two paczki to take home with her.    

 

The Scouting Report

Clare told me she’s been following ex-Sox Nicky Delmonico on Twitter; Delmonico is a non-roster invitee to spring training with the Sox.  “He’s been talking about how he’s trained all off-season and how strong he is.  But I wonder if he did anything with his swing.”

 

Truth be told, the left-handed hitting Delmonico has himself a beautiful swing.  I’m serious.  The problem is that it’s the same swing for fast balls, curves, sliders and changeups.  And it’s a swing that only covers one, small section of the plate.  Delmonico has a good eye, sometimes, and will get a walk, which is always better than a strikeout or a popup.  What he needs to do is actually see the ball in the strike zone and hit it where it’s pitched, not where he’d like it to be.

 

Here’s the thing that really gets me—my daughter sees this plain and clear, without the help of video equipment.  Right now, there are a couple of female hitting coaches, one for the Cubs and one for the Yankees, working in the minor leagues.  They’re part of the new wave of coaching, which appears to be very reliant—or dependent—on equipment.  I think a lot of players in the years to come are going to hear about how the camera doesn’t lie.

 

But will it allow players to reach their full potential?  Of that, I’m not so sure.  As I’ve said numerous times, give me the late Bill Robinson for a hitting coach because Robinson believed, “A good hitting instructor is able to mold his teachings to the individual.”  And, yes, it meant that, “If a guy stands on his head, you perfect that.”  I can’t help but think the new-wave hitting coaches, both male and female, are going to turn into Walt Hriniak clones, preaching the same swing for everyone based on video “evidence.”

 

I got me a girl who looks at hitting the way Bill Robinson did, only she ain’t in the business.  But maybe she got word to Nicky Delmonico.  He went three-for-three yesterday against the Dodgers.

You Decide

Last week, Mark Gonzales, the Tribune’s Cubs’ beat writer, did a story that showed just how bizarre the new metrics can be in evaluating catchers.  If you believe that pitch framing and an equation some mad mathematician cooked up, aka defensive runs saved, are accurate measures, you’re likely to believe anything.

 

Willson Contreras isn’t considered a good pitch framer while Tyler Flowers ranks as one of the best.  Excuse me, Tyler Flowers, who did a pretty good imitation of a statue crouching behind the plate those seven long, long seasons he was the on-again, off-again catcher for the White Sox?  Flowers, who played in only 83 games for Atlanta last season, led the National League in passed balls with 16; Contreras, playing in 99 games, had six.  Flowers has a career caught-stealing rate of 23 percent vs. 31 percent for Contreras.  So, who do you want catching in the ninth inning of a one-run game?

 

Gonzales noted that ex-Sox catcher Josh Phegley, despite having a career-best 62 RBIs in 106 games in 2019, was released by the A’s and found it hard to attract interest from other teams given his low pitch-framing and defensive-runs-saved marks.  (Phegley signed a minor-league deal with the Cubs, including an invitation to spring training.)  To offer some context to what the metrics might say, Gonzales talked to ex-Sox pitcher Chris Bassitt, also with the A’s last year.  Phegley caught Bassitt in 17 of his 28 pitching appearances in ’19.

 

This is how Bassitt put it:  “I don’t understand the numbers” that Phegley has.  Bassitt also said he “loved” throwing to Phegley and suggested anyone curious enough should “Go ask a pitcher: Do you like throwing to this guy?  If the answer is yes, they they’re a good catcher.”

 

Just don’t expect the numbers to say so.

 

Oh, Those Munsters

The Bears made page-one of the Tribune sports’ section yesterday, though I suspect not for reasons they would’ve wanted.  The Munsters released cornerback Prince Amukamara and wide receiver Taylor Gabriel in salary-cap moves.  Tribune sportswriter Brad Biggs wrote that in his two years with the Bears, “Gabriel was overpromoted.”  The same holds for practically the entire roster, and front office.

 

Consider that on Thursday GM Ryan Pace signed another tight end, six-year veteran Demetrius Harris, who played his college basketball at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.  Notice I didn’t say where Harris played his college football, because he didn’t; the U of W at M doesn’t have a football team.  No, the Bears went out and signed a football player who never played the game in college.

 

How Ryan Pace.  How Bears.  How funny yet sad.

Ka-ching!

NFL owners are pushing hard for a ten-year collective-bargaining agreement with players that will add one more game to the regular season and two more playoff teams.  Players have yet to sign off on yet more chances to have their bells rung.  I wonder why.

 

What I find amazing is that the owners have already “compromised” on the issue of an expanded season; initially, they wanted two more games.  In other words, they wanted to increase the length of the regular season by 12.5 percent.  That would be like tacking on another twenty games to baseball’s 162-game regular season.  The players should counter with accepting the extra two games only if all owners suit up to play in them.  Calling Jerry Jones, calling Robert Kraft…

 

No one is talking yet about how a new CBA would affect fans.  Season-ticket packages would go up, yes?  The owners are offering to shorten the preseason by a game, but do you think they’ll say goodbye to that revenue?  And how exactly will an unbalanced schedule work?  Will that extra game be played at a neutral site?  That should be fun with players.  Or will there be teams that play more away than home games?  I can just see owners fighting over the gate receipts.

 

Hey, the players could sell tickets so fans could watch.   

Philosophical Differences

I am a middle-aged man adrift in his sport.  I grew up at a time when baseball players employed a full arsenal of tools that have now been reduced to just two—hit it over the fence and strike him out.  Right now, that first one in particular is bothering me.

 

Blame the Cubs for my foul mood, although they’re hardly alone in going all New-Age Analytics.  Cubs’ manager David Ross says he’s going to use third baseman Kris Bryant as his leadoff man, and he may go with first baseman Anthony Rizzo in the two-hole.  Nellie Fox is spinning in his grave, and Rickey Henderson is so upset he may start talking in the first person.  The days of setting the table for the middle of the order are no more.  The middle of the table is now at the top.  Up is down and down is up.  You get the idea.  If only I did. 

 

Until the invasion of the numbers’ crunchers, hitters like Bryant and Rizzo would’ve batted three/four or four/five, but that’s so old school, so flat earth.  In the new way of thinking, the old way of manufacturing a run took too much time involving too many factors, any of which could lead to an out.  Single or walk; stolen base; sacrifice bunt; sacrifice fly, oh my.  Instead of all that, why not just stand there and jack the ball?

 

The old way involved multiple batters to generate one run while the new way proposes every batter has the potential to generate a run all by himself.  But here’s the thing—Singles, stolen bases and bunts can generate plenty of multiple-run innings, just as launch angle can prove to be a false friend.  Yes, everyone but the pitcher can hit the ball very far, but having a bunch power hitters batting one through eight (or nine, depending on the league) also means a lot of strikeouts and injuries.  I don’t ever seem to recall Nellie Fox or Willie McGee or Vince Coleman going down with an oblique.

 

I’m not going to hold my breath for Bryant to steal or Rizzo to bunt him along; that’s not how we play baseball in the Analytic Age.  Clare told me today that she saw on MLB Tonight that the Red Sox weren’t going to do much if any bunting this spring.  Why should they?  It’s all go long or go home.  I’m so sorry, Nellie.

KISS

             White Sox minor-league first baseman Andrew Vaughn, baseball’s #16 prospect according to MLB.com, is projected to take over from Jose Abreu in the not-too-distant future.  “Vaughn” and “future” aren’t words that necessarily belong in the same sentence.  “Old school” would be a better fit.

 

Vaughn was the third player taken in the 2019 draft last June.  The former UC Berkeley star told the Sun-Times yesterday, “I try to stay away from all the analytics because it will get into my head.  So I go out there with what feels good in the cage and bring it to the game.  See it and hit it.”  Vaughn says he doesn’t think about launch angle because then “you start doing weird stuff.  You see guys swinging PVC pipes, doing weird stuff with their swings, and that’s just not me.”  Or my daughter.

 

Clare went through her own PVC experience with a travel coach, who once took a bunch of different-sized wiffle balls and threw them on a cement floor; the idea was to hit as many balls as she could as they bounced merrily along.  After that came talk about elbows and hips.  It made me want to cover my daughter’s ears.

 

Like Vaughn, I’m a firm believer of see ball/hit ball, as long as you emphasize really seeing the ball.  Clare’s weakness in baseball was the slider away.  I yelled, screamed and shouted at her whenever she went fishing.  If hitters don’t know the strike zone, they don’t know (literally) the first thing about hitting.  Wiffle balls and PVC just get in the way.

 

As she grew older, my daughter picked up the lingo batting coaches are so fond of.  Ask her—not me—about hip rotation, and she’ll have an opinion.  But if the day ever comes for Clare to teach hitting, I can only hope she starts off by keeping it simple, like Andrew Vaughn says and her father taught her.    

Good Luck

            You can tell spring is in the air because all Clare can do is talk baseball and softball.  There’s the White Sox, college games on ESPN (Joe Girardi popped up at an NU softball game in Florida!), and a story that took us both back s good fifteen years or more.

 

            Again, with great minds thinking alike, the two of us had read this on-line piece independently of the other.  The one difference was that I hesitated to forward it to my daughter, who didn’t think twice about sending it to me.  The story concerns the Humboldt Park Gators, a recently-formed youth baseball team in Chicago, for girls ten to twelve years old.

 

            The point of the piece was girl power, which I truly hope they have in the middle of the lineup.  But the story needed more detail, as in what kind of league they play in; my guess is Pony, given that it was mentioned their season will end in mid-July just like it did for Clare, but maybe not.  In any case, I have my fingers crossed for a follow up.

 

            Many of the girl players mentioned the isolation they felt playing on boy-dominated teams.  Amen to that.  Clare was the only girl for five years of baseball.  The girl players said the boys were alright, in which case things must’ve changed for the better, however incrementally.

 

Clare was with the same group of boys for four years; they tolerated her presence.  The other year, for reasons I’ve never figured out, she was put on another team, where a teammate told her how “you suck” and an opposing player shook her hand after one game and said, “Nice game, bitch.”  That’s the kind of stuff you don’t want another generation of female baseball players to go through.

 

            I loved watching my daughter play baseball, hit for power, and hold her own in a homerun-hitting contest where many if not most of the participants were from travel ball.  A team like the Gators would’ve been nice.  I can only hope there’ll be more of them before too long.

 

Pick a Side

            Forced to choose between millionaire ballplayers and billionaire owners along with their lackeys, fans can’t help but to side with the players.  What choice do we have?

 

            Take owner Tom Ricketts of the Cubs (please).  Over the past few months, the Cubs’ chairman has shown himself to be deaf—he claims he couldn’t hear boos directed his way at last month’s fans convention—and dumb in ever so many ways, as when he said in December, “We probably missed our [Wrigley Field renovation] budget by around one-hundred percent.”  A less-than-positive response had Ricketts claiming he was “kind of” kidding.

 

            And in case anyone out there hasn’t gotten sick of Ricketts doing his poormouth routine, he was at it again yesterday talking to reporters in Arizona.  “The fact is, it’s not really about how much you spend,” Ricketts was quoted in today’s Tribune.  “It’s about where you spend it and getting the right guys on board.”  Along those lines, maybe Ricketts would like to explain why bleacherreport.com ranks the Cubs’ minor-league system 26^th out of 30 and whether Daniel Descalso or Brandon Morrow or Tyler Chatwood fits into that “right guys” category.    

 

            And in case anyone out there wants an update on negotiations between Comcast and the Cubs’ new Marquee network, chill.  “I think that in the end everyone will do what’s right for the actual customers,” Ricketts said in today’s Sun-Times.  Gosh, I wonder if I qualify as an actual customer.  I mean, I have Comcast and don’t want to be stuck paying for Marquee.  What do I do, Tom?

 

            There must be an owner or two free of jerk tendencies. I just can’t name them, and I definitely wouldn’t put Ricketts in that category.  He’s just a rich guy forever thinking rich-guy ideas.  Put all those rich guys in a room, and you end up with them voting for Rob Manfred as commissioner.  If only one of the rich guys could be bothered to tell their lackey to shut up.

 

            Manfred added yet another tone-deaf remark in defense of his handling of the Astros’ sign-stealing scandal.  The commissioner doesn’t intend to strip Houston of its title.  “The idea of an asterisk or asking for a piece of metal back seems like a futile act,” Manfred was quoted in an AP story today.

 

            Let’s see.  If the World’s Series trophy is a piece of metal, then World Series ratings are just numbers on a piece of paper, right, and merchandising agreements so many words spread on yet more paper, yes?  If there’s a difference, I don’t see it.

           

            In that same AP story, Dodgers’ third baseman Justin Turner said the “only thing devaluing that trophy is that it says ‘commissioner’ on it.”  Amen, brother.      

A Flood of Foot-in-Mouth

The more the Astros talk about their cheating ways, the worse they come off.  Thanks to MLB.com for being brave—or clueless—enough to print the torrent of head-scratching remarks.

Let’s start with new Houston manager Dusty Baker, barely two weeks on the job and already talking gibber.  Baker is upset that other teams are saying they may throw at Astros’ hitters.  Oh, my.

“I’m depending on the league to try to put a stop to this seemingly premeditated retaliation that I’m hearing about,” Baker was quoted in an MLB.com story from February 15.  “In most instances in life, you get kind of reprimanded when you have premeditated anything.  I’m just hoping that the league puts a stop to this before somebody gets hurt.”  Because, after all, “It’s not good for the game, it’s not good for kids to see it.  Stop the comments, and also stop something before it happens.”

Wow, Mr. Old School all of a sudden wants help from above.  Any other time I’d expect to hear a lecture from Baker on how the game can police itself, but, of course, that would be in defense of his players throwing at or sliding into the opposition, spikes high.  Obviously, this is different because Dusty Baker thinks it is.

If he were given to reflection, Baker might wonder why the rest of baseball is so upset with the Astros.  Hint:  It has something to do with the severity of the punishment meted out, or lack thereof.  The Astros get to keep their 2017 World Series rings along with the winner’s share, and all they had to do was recite some lines about being sorry and having learned their lessons, however unspecified.  Absent a more thorough investigation that spelled out what the Astros did, who did it and when, having Dusty Baker around saying stupid stuff will have to suffice as added punishment. 

That, and having a player like Carlos Correa try to talk his way out of a paper bag.  In an interview with Ken Rosenthal (the transcript also published in MLB.com on the 15^th), Correa started off on the right track, saying, “It was wrong, and we’ve got to own that, and we’ve got to take that.”  If only Correa has stopped there, but no.    

            He felt the need to respond to the Dodgers’ Cody Bellinger, who’s pretty adamant the Astros stole the ’17 World Series from his team and Jose Altuve snatched that year’s MVP from Aaron Judge of the Yankees.  In Correa’s moral universe, it’s OK for other players to say the cheating was wrong, “But when you stand in front of the camera and you don’t know the facts, you don’t know what happened and you’re not informed and you try to rip one of my teammates like that, when you don’t know—“  Well, yes, then what?  Correa didn’t finish his line of thought, maybe after he realized the only way someone could get all the necessary facts would be for Carlos Correa to spell them out in detail.

 

            Instead, Correa jumped into a stream of consciousness, splashing this way and that.  He went after ex-teammate and whistleblower Mike Fiers, who needs to “tell the truth.  He should tell the whole world the truth,” which would include saying Altuve didn’t cheat.

 

            Only that’s irrelevant—Altuve’s cheating teammates gave him opportunities he wouldn’t have had otherwise.  If you benefit from the actions of cheaters, well, you’re sort of a cheater yourself.  Same for Correa’s spin on the 2017 ALCS and World Series.  Once the opposition thinks you’re cheating (and you are and have been), you have an unfair advantage.  Maybe the Astros did play it straight those two series (but why would they if the cheating worked?).  In that case, their cheating allowed them to get inside their opponents’ heads, so to speak.

 

            The Yankees and Dodgers may have taken every Houston run as proof the Astros were cheating, again, even if they weren’t.  That in turn could have led to despair.  It doesn’t matter what set of signs we use, those guys will know.  Yes, head games are as old as sports, and they should be judged the way sign-stealing has been.  There’s a right way and a wrong way to psyche out your opponents just as there’s a right way and a wrong way to steal signs.       

 

            Maybe someday the Astros will figure that out, but I won’t hold my breath.

 

Love Is...For Suckers

On Friday, Valentine’s Day, the Cubs ran a full-page ad in the news’ section of the Tribune.  It featured a conversation heart with the words “Love Is” inside it, followed by a saccharin definition thereof, starting with DEDICATION.  Trust me, the emphasis isn’t mine, any more than the idea to print copy in red ink and caps.  You’ll need to see red, then, to get the full effect.

That way, you can appreciate how, “Love is DEDICATION[.]  Cubs fans, you love your team, and the way we see it, you deserve a network that feels the same way. So we’re making a promise:  to be dedicated to you and everything you love about Cubs baseball—the games, the players, the analysis, the history, the fun, the personalities.  So here’s to the beginning of a long, beautiful relationship.”

Yeah, right, and a tip of the hat to Theo Epstein’s grandfather and great uncle, both of whom won Academy Awards for helping write the screenplay for “Casablanca.”  Now, back in my teaching days, I’d go after students who paraphrased someone else’s work without attribution.  If a student wrote, “So here’s to the beginning of a long, beautiful relationship,” I likely would’ve asked if that was intended as a paraphrase of Humphrey Bogart telling Claude Rains, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” I’ll leave any possible offense or objection to Epstein.

Personally, I hope the Cubs’ Marquee Network crashes and burns.  Why?  Two reasons, both connected, starting with the fact I’m a White Sox fan.  The Cubs’ organization can do whatever they want, as long as I don’t have to subsidize it; this is consistent with my belief that the public shouldn’t subsidize the construction of pro sports’ facilities. The fact that all cable users, whether or not they’re Cubs’ fans or even baseball fans, will be paying for the addition of Marquee to their cable providers leads us to reason #2, already hinted at:  I don’t want to give money to the Cubs, pure and simple.

Be cute with your ads; plagiarize from “Casablanca” however much you want; see if viewers will care about personalities associated with a ball club that loses 100-plus games.  I don’t care.  Just keep your Ricketts’ hands off my wallet.

Cheer

My wife insists that, while our daughter may look like her, she has my personality one-hundred percent.  That helps explain how Clare and I decided, without telling one another, to start watching the six-part Netflix documentary “Cheer,” about a community-college cheer squad in Corsicana, Texas.  

The danger is to generalize about college cheerleading from this particular story.  I want to call cheerleading redneck ballet, and I think it is in Texas along with other points south and west.  That said, one of the people followed throughout the series is from Chicago’s West Side by way of suburban Naperville (interesting backstory, that).  And correct me if I’m wrong but all the Big Ten schools have cheerleading squads that do much of the stuff shown on “Cheer.”

And how do I explain what’s shown?  That, my friends, is one tough question.  At least in softball, virtually every player comes away with a batting average and/or an earned-run average; in cheer, all the participants are running and jumping and tumbling in pursuit of perfection as determined by some very subjective judge(s).  Great cheerleaders are like great offensive linemen.  If you can pick out one, you can pick out the other.  Maybe.

The football analogy fits, though, because cheer is one injury-prone activity.  Consider that one of the routines involves forming pyramids 2-1/2 people high (the half because the top person rests on another person’s thighs as opposed to her shoulders) and the people on top are called “flyers” because they fly back down to earth once the routine finishes.  They also crash down if anyone beneath them buckles or for some reason doesn’t catch them during other routines.    If you love concussions and joint injuries, cheer is the sport for you.

The level of conditioning is extraordinary—everyone has muscles, to the point I’d argue female participants have less body fat than classical ballerinas and more muscle, as you might expect with gymnasts.  Because the female cheerleaders are going 20-25 feet into the air (for example, they do a somersault to the ground after being held up by male counterparts who are holding them, with hands above their heads, to put the flyers up into the stratosphere), they tend to be smaller than ballerinas and thinner than conventional gymnasts.  And they do all this without ever having a chance to record a base hit or strikeout.

Again, the danger is to generalize from the story at hand, and even that one requires care.  A number of the male participants are gay.  How many?  More than in football or basketball or baseball or softball?  I can’t honestly say.  But at least three of those other sports, the male-dominated ones, have never been known for tolerance in matters of sexuality.

Cheer is different.  For me at least, it was fascinating to watch the interaction of straight and gay athletes in pursuit of a common goal.  After the national competition in Daytona, one of the cheerleaders considers joining the military, both for himself and his country.  “I love America so much,” he says.  Watching athletes in high school and college, I always got a strong sense of patriotism.  The person who professes his love of country in “Cheer” is gay.  There may yet be hope for the future.

All of which brings us to the coach; here I can generalize.  She is a type, as all coaches are, and she happens to be one who will have her people do pushups when someone makes a mistake.  And like all coaches with a hint of humanity about them, this one cares about her athletes, to a point.  She sincerely wants them to succeed in life, just as she wants them to avoid injury.

But like any other coach of a sport (and this documentary has convinced me what these people do is a contact sport onto itself), she’s willing to put her people at risk in the name of winning, and she’s willing to push the envelope, to be creative, in finding the right routine that will win her squad a trophy.  Coach doesn’t want anybody to get hurt, but she’s ready to improvise when it happens.

Clare played for people like that.  I watched her play for people like that.  Only the action on a baseball or softball field is contained.  What cheer squads do is controlled chaos, bodies in seeming perpetual, gravity-defying, motion until the music stops.  You won’t ever hear me knock the sport of cheerleading in its modern, 21^st century form.

Neither will that virtual clone of mine, I’m sure.    

And So It Came To Pass...

That on the fourteenth day of February in the year of our Lord 2020 the Chicago Tribune ran a sports section without mention of a certain “professional” football team.  Contrary to any widespread fears in the sports’ department, the sky did not fall.

In other words, I couldn’t believe my eyes this morning.  The White Sox and Cubs both found their way onto the front page of sports, with spring training not even officially started yet.  Each team merited the equivalent of a full page of coverage, sans ads, no less.  As for the NFL, it rated an eight-line story on the quarterback situation in San Diego.  As we say on the South Side from time to time (though not in these exact words), who cares about stuff like that?

The Sun-Times was just as impressive, with six tabloid pages devoted to the Cubs and White Sox.  As with the Trib, NFL news was relegated to a few paragraphs in the sports’ briefs, and nowhere did I find a hint of the Bears or the McCaskeys, who probably will have their PR people working overtime placing stories on the family’s latest donation to charity.  Did I say, who cares?

Ah, if only this delightful turn of events could last into the summer months.  Now, that’s a hope to spring eternal.

Say What Again?

You know how public outrage sometimes forces people to take down stupid tweets and Facebook posts?  MLB.com might want to take down the stories and videos relating to today’s Astros’ news conference, where players and other members of the team addressed the cheating scandal of 2017-18.

Here’s Jose Altuve, responding to the question if he knew what the team was doing was wrong:  “Yeah, kind of.”  Wrong answer, Jose.  Good thing you kept talking and admitted, “I’m not gonna say to you it was good.  It was wrong.  We feel bad.  We feel remorse.”  And I worry about apologies cloaked in the third person singular (“it”) and passive voice (“It was bad.”).  What was bad, exactly?  Something along the lines of “we cheated” would’ve worked better.

Not to pick on Altuve.  Sean Bregman also hid behind the passive voice in saying, “I’m really sorry about the choices that were made by my team, by the organization and by me.”  Sean, do you ever say, “Look at the ball that was hit by me”?  I doubt it.  Then own up to your actions and say, “I regret the choices I made.”  Bregman says he’s learned from this, but you have to wonder what.

And then we have George Springer saying, “I regret the fact we are in this today.”  In what?  Oh, the aftermath of the cheating scandal you and your teammates perpetrated.  That’s what you should be regretting, George.  Springer’s remorse compares to Carlos Correa’s, which didn’t get in the way of Correa calling allegations of Astros’ hitters wearing buzzers “a lie” and “straight-up false.”  If that’s the case, Carlos, detail for the public exactly what you and your teammates did and didn’t do while cheating.  I’m curious.

The only adult on the 25-player roster appears to be pitcher Justin Verlander, who didn’t even join the team until the 2017 trade deadline at the end of August.  Verlander told reporters.  “I wish I had said more, and I didn’t, and for that I’m sorry.”  Now, there’s how you own up to wrongdoing, that and by saying as Verlander did, “We crossed a boundary, we broke the rules, and we’re sorry.”

Very active, very direct, very personal.  Verlander I won’t boo when his team comes to visit 35^th and Shields this season.

Be Careful

Like the saying goes, be careful what you wish for, because you might just get it.  For me once upon a time, that meant Joe Maddon managing the White Sox.  Luckily, it didn’t happen.

But, yes, I really wanted it to.  From a good, long distance, Maddon looked like a genius, pulling proverbial rabbits out of a hat at Tropicana Field for the Rays.  Just imagine what he could do at 35^th and Shields, I told myself when Maddon became available after the 2014 season.  Alas, Maddon went north, and we eventually got Rick Renteria, the guy Theo Epstein showed the door to make room for the incoming genius.

The thing is, Maddon  up close bugged me from the start.  You don’t bat the pitcher eighth, unless it’s Gary Peters (Babe Ruth would go a little higher), but Maddon did it all the time.  You don’t take your star third baseman and risk injury by playing him in the outfield, but Maddon regularly that with Kris Bryant.  You don’t play musical chairs with the leadoff spot, but Maddon did it with perverse delight.  And you stop with the themed dress-up parties after a while, only Maddon kept doing them.

What Epstein got right was that Maddon would be the right guy at the right time, only he didn’t know how short a time it would be after a World Series championship in 2016.  Maddon said as much in an ESPN.com interview yesterday, how “when I started there [in Chicago]—’15, ’16, ’17—it was pretty much my methods.  And then all of a sudden, after ’18 going into ’19, they wanted to change everything.”  Hmm.

In other words, the Cubs won big when the front office did things the Maddon way, and everything soured once Epstein called for change.  Here’s what I think—the Epstein-Maddon relationship started to fray the second bench coach Dave Martinez moved on in 2018 to manage the Nationals.  Martinez was with Maddon in Tampa before Chicago.  He brought something to the dugout no one really appreciated until he left.

Maybe I would’ve seen that had the M and M boys landed on the South Side, but they didn’t.  Oh, well, you can’t always get what you want, not that I’m complaining here.

Send in the Clowns

I bristle at the argument that baseball, or any other professional sport, is mere entertainment.  If so, then why the fuss over PEDs’ use or sign stealing?  Integrity is essential to sports; in entertainment, it’s little more than a character trait.  Then along comes the commissioner’s office yesterday proposing a playoff format Clare calls “straight out of Bozo buckets.”  For you non-Chicagoans out there, just cue the circus music.  Same thing.

The idea is to add two more playoff teams from each league; abolish the one-game wild card “play in”; give the team in each league with the best record a first-round bye; and have a best-out-of-three first round where the other two division winners would pick who they want to play from the bottom three wild-card teams.  Let me repeat that: Teams would pick who they want to play.  This is pure Bozo buckets, which is why other elements of the proposal aren’t worth talking about.

Oh, but MLB.com/Pravda sure liked it, cooing over a possible “Selection Sunday.”  Why, just hours after the end of the regular season the post-season “could begin with a dramatic live television show during which two teams from each league would have the ability to select their first-round opponents.”  Yeah, maybe by tossing a cream pie in their opponent’s face.

Monkey see, monkey do.  Baseball sees basketball thinking about changing things up with an in-season tournament and wants to get in on the action.  God forbid the viewing public thinks MLB is some old stick-in-the-mud.  Give the customers what they want—that’s entertainment.

Fans be damned.

Look Away, Look Away

There I was peddling away on the exercycle Saturday afternoon when I happened upon the Seattle Dragons/D.C. Defenders’ season opener of the XFL.  Let’s just say near mid-February football didn’t exactly hold my interest.

Eight teams with 416 players will try to make their way without me through a ten-game regular season and two-game postseason, with half the teams qualifying.  Everything wraps up April 26, barring any earlier collapse.  At the risk of sounding way too judgmental, how sad.

The odds for anyone jumping from the XFL to the NFL are at best 416-1; outside of providing a treasure trove of sports’ trivia, the XFL is unlikely to leave much of an impression once it goes the way of all non-NFL football leagues.  The World Football League gave us the “dickerod.”  What will it be for the XFL?

About the only thing the existence of the XFL proves is that de facto semi-pro football can draw a crowd—17,163 at the Dragons-Defenders’ game—and, more importantly, a television audience, at least at the outset; between them, ESPN and Fox are committed to broadcasting all regular-season and playoff games.  Why not broadcast independent-league baseball, then?  The quality of play is pretty much the same.  Maybe baseball fans know better than to watch an inferior product.  Maybe football is less a sport than an addiction.

According to the Sporting News website, the X in XFL stands for “Nothing at all.”  It’s a safe bet the same holds true for the other two letters.  

Forgive and Forget, Not

Go ahead, call me a real SOB for my inability—or refusal—to forgive and forget.  Sports in particular makes me this way.

I don’t forgive Jerry Reinsdorf for tearing down Comiskey Park to get a publicly funded ball-mall.  I can’t forget what Bud Selig allowed during his reign as baseball commissioner.  I won’t forgive Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens or Barry Bonds.  (Sammy Sosa is a Cub more than a White Sox, so him I can just forget).  And I can’t imagine why anyone would forgive and forget when it comes to ex-IU basketball coach Bobby Knight.

Yesterday, Knight returned to Assembly Hall for the first time in two decades.  According to news reports, everyone on hand pretty much did what I can’t.  They forgave him for the chair throwing; outbursts of vulgarity; and assault allegations that cost him his job at IU.  Fans acted as if they were part of the Second Coming.  Truly, Hoosiers are a breed apart from the rest of us.

Bobby Knight is showered with cheers by people who should know better.  Rush Limbaugh is awarded the Medal of Freedom for reasons known but unto President Trump.  Knight has campaigned for Trump.  Connect the dots.

Snapshot

Bill Murray had it easy in “Groundhog Day.”  All he had to do was repeat February 2^nd over and over until he got it right.  That’s just Hollywood fantasy.  In real life, you make it to February only to find the days start going backwards into January.  Or so it can seem on a Saturday when snow and clouds combine to blanket my world in a most depressing shade of gray.

If nothing else, eBay helps keep me from going totally bonkers.  Most every day, I do searches on the White Sox and Comiskey Park to see if any interesting photos turn up.  (I’m also doing this with B-17 bombers, but that’s a different story.)  Yesterday in the mail I got a piece of the past purchased in order to get me to the future, or at least April.

It’s a snapshot, barely measuring 3-1/2” by 2-1/2”, of Comiskey Park; according to the stamp on the back, the film was developed July 19, 1941, in Denver.  Now, that doesn’t mean the picture was taken earlier in the month or even that year, it could’ve been anytime between that date and August 14, 1939, the first night game at 35^th and Shields.  The light towers show clearly in the snapshot.

So do the onion-domed ticket booths that lined 35^th street in front of the main entrance.  So does the unpainted brick façade and so do the words “Comiskey Park Home of the White Sox” that crowned the entrance.  There’s a cop directing traffic and cars as big as boats passing by.  Fans look to be entering the park, maybe even the companion of the person who took the photo.  Or they could’ve walked into McCuddy’s tavern, across the street on the south side of 35^th Street.  The picture had to be taken from in front of McCuddy’s.

It would seem likely that the picture was developed not long after it was taken; in other words, this is a shot of Comiskey Park during the 1941 season, the year Joe DiMaggio hit in 56 straight games and Ted Williams batted .406.  The Sox could do no better and no worse than .500 on the season, 77-77.  They were a team that hit all of 47 homeruns while leading the American League with a 3.52 ERA.  Did I mention the 106 complete games?  Talk about a different time.  

The Sox were in town from July 5^th to the 20^th, during which time they faced the Indians, Senators, Yankees, Red Sox and A’s.  Suppose our friend(s) went to one or more games between the 5^th and 16^th; three days would’ve been enough to get to Denver by train and get the film developed.  Who wouldn’t want to see local heroes Luke Appling and Ted Lyons face off against the likes of Lou Boudreau; DiMaggio; Williams; and Jimmy Foxx?

I know I would, especially against the visiting Yankees.  DiMaggio started his 56-game streak against Eddie Smith of the Sox on May 15^th; at Comiskey in July, the enigmatic one went 7 for 15 in games 50-54 of the streak.  DiMaggio, Appling, the summer before Pearl Harbor—all in a snapshot found on eBay. 

Our Lucky Stars

According to the story I read yesterday on MLB.com, the Angels and White Sox are among the seven winners from the “Mookie Betts trade fallout.”  Wow, who knew?

With the Angels, it comes from their acquiring outfielder Joc Pederson, who was made expendable with Betts’ arrival.  Pederson joins Justin Upton and Mike Trout to give the Halos (yes, Hawk Harrelson did rub off on me despite my best efforts) an outfield “as good as almost any” in baseball.  Again, wow.

I must be missing something with Pederson.  Baseball-reference.com ranks him with the likes of Wally Post and Dave Nicholson, to say nothing of Phil Plantier and Cory Snyder.  As good as what?  If Trout makes Pederson as good as Frank Robinson made Post, the Angels may be a little better.  Otherwise, Pederson is just another guy who hits homeruns in an era that confuses power with talent. Think Mark Trumbo or Chris Davis.  Now try to think of them in the postseason.  Hint: They both were, not that they did anything memorable, outside of Trumbo going one for hour and Davis hitting .185 over the course of three series.

Now for the White Sox:  Betts leaving Boston helps our wildcard chances (along with that of the Angels and Rays).  Just keep in mind that “to write off the Red Sox in 2020 is silly.”  Then, what do you call writing, “The AL wildcard spots are wide open,” before pitchers and catchers have even reported to camp?  

A Missing Link or Two

It’s a cold, gray, snowy Thursday in February, saved only by thoughts of baseball.  The game itself brings smiles, ah, but the Mookie Betts’ trade throws in a few laughs as well.

The Trib got me chuckling this morning with a column it ran from the Los Angeles Times.  Getting Betts and pitcher David Price has the Dodgers “leaping all the way from February to deep in October.”  That’s what happens when you get “arguably baseball’s second-best player in the last four years behind Mike Trout.”  Take that, Nolan Arenado, Anthony  Rendon, Matt Scherzer, Justin Verlander, Christian Yelich…

How interesting that Betts qualifies as the missing link, or that a team with 106 wins last year even has a missing link.  You could argue that having three starting outfielders is better than having a platoon of four or five, which the Dodgers went with last year, only Casey Stengel never had a problem platooning players when he won all those pennants—and World Series—with the Yankees, now did he?

Here’s what I think on a cold, gray Thursday in February—come October, the Dodgers are going to be judged by the person they kept, not the ones they added.  It all comes down to Mookie Betts making Dave Roberts a better manager than he’s shown himself to be.  We’ll see.

Good Question

I was sitting on the couch last night watching (or trying to) Leslie Jones f-bomb her way through an Netflix comedy special when my assistant general manager texted to say the Red Sox had traded Mookie Betts and David Price to the Dodgers in a three-way deal that included the Angels.  The mind reels.

Basically, the Red Sox traded the 27-year old Betts because of doubts they could sign him to a contract extension in this, his walk year.  Price went in the name of salary relief, given that the Red Sox want to get under the luxury-tax threshold.  One of the richest teams in professional sports seeking salary relief?  The mind reels.

As for Betts, he will have earned $32.5 million by the end of the 2020 regular season.  I’m tempted to ask how much more he wants or needs (and, yes, want a little of it thrown my way), but that would be wrong.  Betts’ payday will pale in comparison to that for the owners of the Red Sox if and when—forget the “if”—they sell the team.  Forbes has put a value of $3.2 billion on the team.  How much do major owners John Henry and Tom Werner need to keep the proverbial wolf on the other side of the door?  The mind wonders while trying not to reel.

Later, the assistant GM called to discuss the deal, and she posed a good question:  “Is Betts an L.A. kind of guy?”  I don’t know, but I get a feeling we’re going to find out.  And, if he’s not, there’s always free agency.

The Bulls and Dorian Gray

I don’t know he did it, but Jerry Reinsdorf has a Dorian Gray dynamic working between his two rebuilding teams.  The better the White Sox look, the worse the Bulls get.  They sure stunk on Sunday.

The visitors from Chicago actually led Toronto by three at the half.  Now do the math to figure out how much the Bulls were outscored by the Raptors in the second half to lose by a score of 129-102.  According to the Sun-Times, guard Zach LaVine was not happy with coach Jim Boylen calling a timeout with just over a minute left in the game.  Boylen said afterwards he wanted to call a play for one of the subs in order to help his development.

“If I can endure the last minute, the last timeout and coach my team, I think the other team [not to mention Bulls’ players] can, too,” said Sphynx Boylen.  Yo, Coach.  The other team could care less what you do in the last sixty or so seconds of a game they’re going to win.  The question is, can your own players endure you as coach?

For an answer, just look at the team record of 19-33.

Feet to the Fire

Feet to the Fire

Anyone part of the Chicago Bears, from ball boy/girl to McCaskey matriarch, when seen out in public should be asked the following question: Patrick Mahomes?  It should go on for as long as it takes to get a real answer.

That means if GM Ryan Pace ventures out of his cocoon (something he’s loath to do), he gets the question.  Head coach Matt Nagy says a word about how happy he is for his old coach Andy Reid, he gets the question.  Virginia McCaskey on her way to a charitable function, she gets the question; ditto all her kids.  How did this football organization, founded by the man who all but founded the NFL, screw up on quarterback Patrick Mahomes?

Some extraordinary talent was on full display last night as Mahomes and his Chiefs toyed with the 49ers, spotting them a ten-point lead going into the fourth quarter of Super Bowl LIV.  Final score: Chiefs 31 49ers 20.  Mahomes led two drives ending in touchdown passes.  The third touchdown, on a 38-yard run by Damien Williams, was simply the exclamation point that may attach itself to Mahomes the rest of his career.  Forget the two interceptions he threw and remember the 21 points his team scored during crunch time.

And, if you don’t want to ask anyone in the Bears’ “family” about Mahomes, switch over to kicker and ex-Bear Robbie Gould.  He was good for two field goals and two PATs.  Oh, Ryan….

Dog Days, Part II

Sports-wise, there’s really nothing much on TV for me to watch or in the paper to read about.  I don’t care about hockey; the Bulls stink; college basketball has way too little to do with college; and today is it for football, the ultimate game until next year, as Duane Thomas might say.  Did I mention golf, figure skating or skiing?  No sane person would.

Salvation of a sort may lie with the Sun-Times.  I have a feeling—granted, it could be no more than a delusion—the paper will be devoting a ton of space to the White Sox, what with their special Saturday section and all.  The trick is to hold on another ten days, when pitchers and catchers report.  Forget the Tribune.  I’ve given up on the enterprise once housed in Tribune Tower.

You may recall last year how the Trib couldn’t be bothered to send a beat reporter on Sox road trips last season, and things could be getting considerably worse very soon.  The paper is now under control of extreme cost-cutters, the kind who might stoop to wire stories for home games, for teams other than the Bears, of course.  Nothing will change in that regard.

End of the world, with a giant meteor hurdling on a collision course with Earth, the Tribune will print a final addition with at least one Bears’ story in it.  How do I know?  Just look at today’s sport’s section.  Amidst all the Super Bowl hoopla is a story on the back page literally the length of my arm.  “The season never ends: Key dates, deadlines for Bears.”  Sometimes, it feels like the meteor can’t get here fast enough.

Lucky for me I found a couple of items of interest in the Sun-Times’ tiny type yesterday—ex-Sox players Yolmer Sanchez and Charlie Tilson have signed minor-league contracts, with the Giants and Pirates, respectively.  According to the Giants’ website, Yolmer passed on a number of guaranteed, major-league offers for the chance to win the starting job at second base.  Good luck, Yolmer, although I think you project better as a super sub. 

Tilson, now with his third organization, qualifies as a journeyman (along with fellow ex-teammate Ryan Cordell, who signed a minor-league deal with the Mets a few weeks ago).  It must be odd, and frustrating, to know that you’re a better ballplayer than most anyone out there, that your cup of coffee in the bigs is beyond what the great mass of high school, college and minor-league players will ever experience.  On one level, you’re all but god, yet on the one that MLB front offices operate on you’re little more than insurance, or Plan D.

How philosophical I grow in the hours before Super Bowl LIV.