Combine This

Yes, I know a baseball combine wouldn’t include a three-cone drill; at least, I don’t think it would.  But based off of Clare’s softball experiences, I’m willing to bet there’d be plenty of dumb stuff to take its place.

 

Of course, high school players don’t attend combines; they go to “camps” and “clinics” instead; that’s spelled c-o-m-b-i-n-e, by the way.  Coaches—and, believe me, that’s a mighty loose term—run these events with an eye to filling their own rosters.  One camp Clare went to between sophomore and junior year the coach threw some soft-toss to my daughter and then rated her in a tie for the fourth-worst hitter he saw that day.  Did I mention Clare holds the single-season and career homerun marks at Elmhurst College, along with total bases, or that she’s second in career at-bats; runs scored; extra-base hits; and RBIs? 

 

And yet this community-college coach missed it just as the D-I coach who had Clare hit off two tees simultaneously did; this person also had players try to catch tennis balls with one hand while backpeddling.  Another time at this school in a session with the team hitting coach, Clare was made to hit off a tee while bending on one knee and holding the barrel, not the handle, of the bat.  And that proved what, exactly, other than athletes have to be ready for when coaches want to play Simon Says?

 

Now, maybe you can see why cones and bench pressing, or whatever the baseball equivalent will be, don’t impress me all that much.  There are some things, the most important things, about a player that only reveal themselves in game situations.  And don’t expect me to backpeddle on that, either.

Monkey See...

The recent MLB owners-players’ agreement includes a provision for a pre-draft combine in 2020 and 2021 should the powers that be choose to hold them.  Be still my beating heart.  Nothing like baseball aping football.  First, the three-hour games, now maybe a combine to boot.

 

Just imagine, after measuring for wingspan (calling Mark “The Bird” Fidrych), teams can administer a battery of psychological tests.  Finally, the chance to ask, “How full can a full count go without spilling over?”  Then, it’s on to the trials of Hercules.

 

Doesn’t everyone want to see baseball players do the three-cone drill and shuttle run, five yards-ten yards-five yards?  And let’s not forget the jumps, vertical and broad.  Teams will want to weed out players incapable of jumping over the batter’s box or leaping above the highest stadium wall in Lilliput.

 

Of course, there’d be a bench press because the game has already gone the way of dumbbells.  And the 40-yard dash, except maybe they could take off ten yards so that it would be like running to first base.  I mean, something about a combine should be useful.

 

Bird-dogging

Bird-dogging

 

For reasons best known to itself, the players’ association has agreed to allow baseball owners to reduce the number of rounds in the next two drafts, to as few as five rounds this year and twenty in 2021.  Not only that, undrafted players can be signed to a maximum bonus of $20,000 before a penalty set in.  Somewhere, Branch Rickey is stirring.

 

For teams that still believe in scouting, this is a godsend, a way to stock up on cheap talent.  Yesterday’s NYT noted Paul Goldschmidt (eighth round), Jacob DeGrom (ninth) and Albert Pujols (thirteenth) as recent late-round revelations.  The Times being forever New York, it missed the White Sox very own Mark Buehrle, taken in the 38^th round of the 1998 draft.

 

Theoretically, a team could load up on thirty sixth-round draft choices.  That possibility must be stirring Charles Darwin as well as Branch Rickey.  I mean, talk about survival of the fittest.  The team acquiring the lion’s share of this undrafted talent would be stoking position battles up and down its minor-league system.  That’s not terribly fair to players, but it sure helps the organization.

 

Assuming it has enough scouts in the field to identify the undrafted talent, that is.  My guess is that many, even most, teams have quietly gone about the business of reducing the number of scouts in the field as they rely evermore on analytics.  Well, the next two baseball drafts will definitely favor old-school front offices, if there are any.

 

The Paying Customer

Baseball players and owners have reached an agreement that addresses at least some of the issues that have surfaced in the aftermath of postponing the season’s start.  I guess that’s a good thing.

 

The players get their service time and the owners some financial relief.  And the fans?  Maybe they’ll get some baseball, maybe not.  It’s not as if they have any skin in this game, right?  Maybe a brave new world has finally arrived, and games will forever after be played in empty stadiums.  The payroll savings would be considerable, and the commissioner could set up retraining classes for concessions’ people and other employees not deemed vital to the game.

 

Players want to play, owners want to profit.  Nothing new there.  But both sides could at least go through the motions of caring how the fans will be affected by all this.  Is that too much to ask for?

"Get Creative"

The Tribune had an AP story today that made me smile; it was about baseball coming up with a plan for the upcoming season, assuming there is one.  Among the ideas floated were doubleheaders and thirty-player rosters.  Not to brag too much, but I mentioned both those possibilities to Clare well over a week ago.  Great minds think alike, I guess, provided Rob Manfred isn’t the other mind we’re talking about here.

 

The story was divided into subheads, the last of which was “Get creative,” as in round-robin tournaments and neutral sites for postseason play (or November in-season play at D-I stadiums, just speaking creatively).  Better late than never, I guess, with that creative thing.

 

Too bad nobody with the White Sox wanted to be creative on the question of Comiskey Park back in the 1980s.  No, Jerry Reinsdorf insisted, we need a new home, in Chicago or elsewhere.  I was part of a group that floated the idea of turning Reinsdorf’s ballpark into a working national monument.  The park could have been structurally updated while restored to some agreed-upon era.  We also proposed a museum and archives focusing on Chicago baseball, complete with oral histories from Chicago baseball figures great and anonymous.  It seems we were prematurely creative.

 

Among the objections raised was, where would the White Sox play during the renovation?  It couldn’t be Soldier Field, because that would’ve meant a field with dimensions similar to the Coliseum, where it was 251 feet down the left field line (with a 42-foot high fence on top).  Oh, how the purists wailed, though not enough to force the Dodgers to move back to Brooklyn.  The Coliseum was a major-league venue from 1958-1961, and nobody demanded those transplanted Bums be stripped of their 1959 World Series win, other than White Sox fans, that is.

 

At one point, I was told baseball has some kind of rule to prevent the creation of any such dimensions again, and nobody wanted to consider erecting temporary bleachers around a field with more ordinary dimensions.  Creativity was not the order of the day, not when it came to saving Comiskey Park or Tiger Stadium, which also had a diehard group of fans fighting to save it.  But the new mallparks are quite nice, if you go in for that sort of thing.  Did I mention that the color line fell in Comiskey Park, where Joe Louis won the heavyweight championship and the Beatles played?

 

But I welcome creativity in baseball, most of all now.  After all, better late than never.

Context

The IOC did the heretofore unthinkable and postponed the Summer Olympics for a year.  Never has so much champagne been diluted by so many tears as when Olympics officials supped and wept after making the announcement on Tuesday, I’m sure.

 

The IOC had tried to counter calls for postponing the Games with a “fairness” argument, that delaying the Games would be unfair to those athletes who had trained so hard and might not qualify with bodies a year older next summer (though it sure would be harder to qualify with a dead body, I think).  Clare actually knows a wrestler from Elmhurst College, Joe Rau, who might fall into this category.  Rau almost made the U.S. Olympic team in 2016 and thought he had a real shot at qualifying this year.  There are numerous other athletes like him.

 

For them I sympathize, and offer a bit of context while noting that in life stuff happens and things work out.  At least they appear to for George Yankowski, who died last month at the age of 97.  Yankowski played major-league baseball at the tender age of 19.  Then war got in the way.  Yankowski went from playing for the Philadelphia A’s to fighting in the Battle of the Bulge.  He had a cup of coffee with the White Sox in 1949, and that was it, not that Yankowski was bitter.

 

I know this from reading Yankowski’s SABR (Society for American Baseball Research) biography that’s included in his baseball-reference.com entry.  Author Bill Nowlin quotes Yankowski saying he loved baseball as a “kid.  But looking back, baseball—compared to the service and the war—was really almost next to nothing.”  In that context, “Baseball was great, but winning a war dwarfed that.”  So believed a winner of the Bronze Star.

 

The cynic might point out that Yankowski had it easy, if such a thing is possible for a combat veteran, as a member of the Greatest Generation fighting in the Good War.  In that case, consider Al Bumbry, who spent all but one season of his fourteen-year career with the Orioles.  Bumbry went from minor leaguer to platoon leader in Vietnam.  Like Yankowski, Bumbry felt he had no cause to feel bitterness over the interruption of his career.

 

In his SABR biography by John McMurray, Bumbry explained why.  “Because before I went to Vietnam, I was in a Class A league, and I hit .178.  And then I come back, and, in a year and a half, I was in the major leagues.  So I can’t complain.  There was no guarantee that I was ever going to be playing after hitting .178.”  So believed another winner of the Bronze Star.

 

Stuff happens, things work out.  We need to believe that, no matter how much it feels otherwise.

Tommy John Tommy John

My vice president in charge of baseball news called yesterday to report that Mets’ fireballer Noah “Thor” Syndergaard needs Tommy John surgery.  “Why do pitchers keep getting Tommy John [surgery] without getting Tommy John [the pitcher]?” I asked at one point.

 

Allow me to explain.  Front offices today don’t want pitchers who do anything but strike batters out.  In other words, they’d have no use for the second coming of Tommy John, never mind a career that spanned 26 years and 287 wins.  No, they’d take one look at that 4.3 strikeout rate per nine innings (or SO9 for you laypeople out there) and walk away.

 

Somehow, baseball has reached a point where every infielder and outfielder operates under the suspicion of incompetence; hit it anywhere, fear the worrywarts in power, and somebody will drop it.  The only position beyond reproach is catcher.  Old position #2 is trusted to catch the ball most of the time, provided he can frame it all of the time.  Here are your building blocks to MLB executive thought, 2020: Throw it, catch it, strike ’em out. 

 

It’s a near-perfect strategy, provided you have a endless supply of “power arms.”  Syndergaard has a career SO9 of 9.7.  That’s nice, but not as good as Chris Sale, with a SO9 of 11.1.  Oh, wait, Sale needs Tommy John surgery, too.

 

I love Sale, that string bean with the heart of a lion, always have and always will.  I hope he comes back from surgery as good as new.  But, even if he does, the odds are he won’t have a career nearly as long and good as John’s.

 

And yet the 30-year old Sale with his 109 career wins possesses a career WAR of 45.3, as opposed to 61.6 for John.  Consider what that means.  If Sale does come back 100 percent and replicates the same stats over his next 100 wins, his WAR will be nearly 30 games higher than John’s, even with 87 fewer career wins.  This is analytic insanity, at least to me.

 

But not to a general manager like Brian Cashman of the Yankees.  He sees free-agent Gerrit Cole with a 2019 SO9 of 13.8 and signs him to a nine-year deal for $324 million.  Cole turns 30 in September.  What will his SO9 be in four or five years?  Tommy John went 37-17 between the ages of 34 and 35, in case you’re wondering, not to be confused with 43-18 the two years after that.

 

I explained all this to Clare, who summed it up with, “In other words, you’re saying only physical freaks who end up in the Hall of Fame can keep throwing that hard.”  Yes, grasshopper, I am, along with wondering why general managers keep taking the gamble and hoping that someone tells Michael Kopech all about the guy the surgery he had is named for.

 

Outta My Way!

The “good” brothers and lay teachers at St. Laurence High School were a grade-happy lot.  They handed out grades by the quarter and semester and for the year, six grades per subject per year.  Of my twenty-six grades for phys. ed., I managed twenty-five Cs and one B.  You try doing four-count burpies in the school parking lot.

 

All those Cs probably explain my exercise regimen these many years later; I treat every day like it’s a gym test, and the idea is to get an A so I don’t have to repeat class with Mr. Haughwout or Mr. Schwarz.  These were gentlemen prone to confuse gym with combat.  Dizzy stick, anyone?

 

So, I go through exercycles one after another and shoot for a daily A in pushups and sit ups.  Maybe I’ll live to a hundred, maybe I won’t.  But I won’t spend eternity repeating gym, if I can help it.

 

One problem, though.  At St. Laurence, we didn’t have basset hounds wandering the premises, poking their heads where they don’t belong.  For a breed not known for exertion unrelated to eating, the bassets in my life have always been interested in my exercising.  Every exercise is a game of chicken for them, I swear.

 

Penny, aka Satan, loves to park herself as close as she can to where she thinks my head will land on sit ups; the slightest miscalculation makes for headaches and scooting bodies.  But never does she want to sit anywhere but as near to me as possible.

 

Pushups, she’ll poke my thigh or sniff my hair.  If I touch my toes, she tries to bite my fingers.  With weights, it’s another game of “how close can I get?”, only it’s a lot scarier than with sit ups.  If I hit her with a dumbbell, call canine 911.

 

The only thing she’ll let me do is bike.  Thelma, Penny’s sainted predecessor, was just the opposite.  The first half of her life, she tried to lay as close to the spinning peddles as possible.  The second half, she’d jump up on the couch and lay directly behind me, after which she immediately fell asleep.  The peddles, chain and flywheel made a most delightful whir in those big ears of hers.

I don’t miss high school or any of my gym teachers.  It’s my exercise partners I can’t seem to live without.  

Bottom Drawer, Left-hand Corner

A few weeks ago, I bought an Uncle Sam “I Want You” poster from 1940, with a recruiting station address in Philadelphia (2^nd and Chestnut Streets, 2^nd floor of the Custom[s] House).  Lucky for me sellers on eBay have been dropping their prices since the start of the Coronavirus.

 

You’d think a piece of paper 12-1/2 ” by 9” wouldn’t cost much, and you’d be wrong; James Montgomery Flagg’s rendering of Uncle Same has long been an icon of American culture.  But these are End Times (just kidding, I think), and not all the old rules apply.  Something that started at five dollars under $400 ended up going for well under half that.

 

Of course, there was a corner to deal with; it looked as if someone had taken a lit match to paper.  I gambled I could trim the affected area and match the paper, more or less.  That sent me off on a scavenger hunt through the house.  Not only did I find a sheet of 1970s’ paper (from one of my undergraduate classes, no less), but I also came across a bunch of White Sox ticket stubs and a program.  Talk about your treasure trove stuffed in a back-porch drawer.

 

All but one of the stubs, along with a season schedule, are from 1990, when a friend was kind enough to share his “golden box,” a perfectly named season-tickets’ section, if there ever were; the seats were three rows back of the Sox dugout at Comiskey Park.  We took my parents to one of the games, and my father started ragging on Ozzie Guillen in the on-deck circle, yelling, “Tuck your shirt in!” so loud Guillen turned around to see who was shouting at him.  As I’ve said, going to a Sox game with my father was a lot like going to church.  You dressed a certain way, you acted a certain way, and heaven help anyone who didn’t.

 

What I didn’t expect to find was the ticket stub from August 25, 1967, game two of a Friday doubleheader, White Sox vs. Red Sox.  The first game, a makeup for a June rainout, had gone to Boston, 7-1, and things didn’t look all that good for the White Sox in game two.  They were starting a rookie four weeks shy of his 27^th birthday.  I’d never heard of the guy, and at the time I was what you’d call a rabid Sox fan.

 

If you’re going to be a journeyman major-league pitcher with a career mark of 11-18, you might as well make an impression in your first start, and right-hander Cisco Carlos certainly did that, not giving up a hit until two out in the fifth inning.  For his major-league debut, Carlos yielded 0 runs in 6.1 innings on four singles and a walk, this against a Boston lineup that included the likes of Carl Yastrzemski; George Scott; Reggie Smith; and Rico Petrocelli but not Tony Conigliaro.  The 22-year old star had taken a fastball to his left eye socket and cheek just seven days earlier.       

 

The 1967 White Sox being hitless wonders (.225 team batting average), Carlos had been staked to a 1-0 lead that reliever Bob Locker couldn’t quite hold.  The score was tied at one going into the bottom of the ninth.  Ron Hansen led off with a single, after which J.C. Martin bunted him to second base.  Pinch-hitter Smokey Burgess drew an intentional walk, and Ken Berry singled in Hansen for the winning run.  That was White Sox baseball once upon a time.

 

I was so excited I marked Berry with a three-run homer instead of a single.  In my defense, let me say Berry may have hit the ball off the top of the wall in right, and, even if he didn’t, the crowd sure made it sound like a homerun.  According to the baseballreference.com box score, there were 34,580 fans in attendance that night.  You need to understand that 34,000-plus fans at Comiskey Park sounded like 50,000-plus at a ballmall, if they ever made one that big.

 

The win put the White Sox record at 70-55, a half a game out of first place.  I remember that Friday as sunny, with the field bathed in golden sunlight those innings before dusk, but I can’t tell you if my father was happy that his, our, team had won.  I’d like to think so, and that we went to a hot dog stand afterwards to celebrate as was our post-game custom.  Of course, he was happy.

Just  like I was to come across that ticket stub in a drawer.

IOC to Athletes: Drop Dead

The one saving grace of professional sports’ team owners is that what you see is what you get.  Jim Crane, Mark Cuban, Jerry Jones and their ilk aren’t going to win a Nobel Peace Prize, even if they wanted to, which I’m pretty sure they don’t (assuming they even know such a thing exists).  Any true show of compassion or generosity that emanates from the owner’s box, which shouldn’t be confused with carefully crafted responses to a crisis, is merely an exception that proves the rule.  These guys are what they are, and only a fool would think otherwise.

But it’s not good to go through life in full-cynic mode.  As human beings with all those spooks and whatnot in our heads, we need heroes, which is one of the reasons sports exist in the first place.  Theoretically, amateur sports should fill the bill by circumventing the corrupting influence of money that comes with the pros, only it doesn’t.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the NCAA, March Madness, the College Football Playoffs….

 

There’s a moral dilemma to being a parent of an NCAA D-I athlete, and I freely admit I wish I could’ve experienced it.  The dilemma involves wanting the best for your child both in the short-run (think one to five years) and the long-term.  They’re not always the same, hence the dilemma.  But I was doubly “blessed,” if you will, by having a daughter who played D-III softball. 

 

First off, an infinitesimal percentage of female athletes in D-I do anything in their sport after graduation, so only very foolish people pretend otherwise.  For D-III, square the infinitesimal, which means only fools beyond belief would think their daughter is going to have any kind of athletic career after graduation.

 

Oh, I think there’s a saving grace to D-I baseball and softball.  Unlike certain other NCAA sports that will go unmentioned here, these two don’t generate mountains of revenue, or the scandal that comes with.  Think Rick Pitino and whomever you want.  So, I would’ve been more than willing to see if I could’ve handled the D-I parents’ dilemma, but it didn’t happen.  And I should get over it, as my daughter has rightly reminded me once or twice in a voice that sounds awfully parental.

 

Still, I have a boatload of good memories, and that’s a good thing because the Olympics, that other purported home to the amateur ideal, make the NCAA—and every pro sports’ team owner, for that matter—look like choir boys instead.  How do members of the IOC not get up every morning and look at the mirror in absolute shame?  Beats me.

 

What’s the old saying?  Oh, right, a fish rots from the head down.  That would explain the IOC shakedowns that host cities have paid (under the table, of course) since, well, a very long time if not since the beginning of the modern games.  And then we have the situation in the U.S., where coaches and doctors prey on Olympic hopefuls.  In case you’ve ever wondered what prisons are for, look no further than Larry Nassar.  Really, the next time an Olympics’ official demonstrates the slightest bit of courage will be the first.

 

With the COVID-19 outbreak, there’s a chance for someone, finally, to step up, but, whatever you do, don’t hold your breath.  The Summer Games in Tokyo must go on, damn’ the torpedoes or whatever it is that’s making people sick (and die).  Athletes want to stay healthy, and they don’t see how they can train if they’re supposed to self-isolate.  But maybe the big problem here is merely one of perception.

 

To the IOC, anyone qualifying for the Olympics isn’t an athlete but a gladiator.  And gladiators who are about to die salute the tyrant(s) in power.  No?

 

Peddles Away

I go through an exercycle every four years, on average.  That comes out to ten during my life as a spouse and seven as a parent.  Any time you’re ready to be tested, Peloton.

 

Sometimes, I wonder if companies pull people off the street to do the design work.  Three machines ago, I had a magnetic-resistance, electric plug-in model, the upside being it was very light and easy to store.  The downside stemmed from the location of the plug-in adapter; it was forever being stepped on or kicked when I got on or off the bike.  The four years for that model ended pretty abruptly courtesy of my left foot, or the right one.

 

The machine before last challenged me to be the best mechanic possible.  If a piece of equipment could be replaced, I did it, from computer screen to ball-bearing rings; I even found a way to repair the chain when it broke.  Then, one day last fall, the weld that held the seat mount to the frame failed.  Slowly did I fall into the couch, all the while on my seat.  You could say it was time for a new bike.

 

This one is better made than most of its predecessors, sort of.  The first problem had nothing to do with the design.  No, I think somebody fell asleep at the factory, which was how I ended up with a computer screen that did readouts in kilometers and kph.  Not much use, that.  I contacted the company, and a service rep—we’ll call her Alice—answered.  She sent the right computer screen and asked for a favor, that I write a glowing review of the machine on Amazon; in return, I would receive a $20 gift card for my troubles.  I took a pass.

 

Then, about ten days ago, one of the peddles started going bad.  By that I mean it wobbled.  Talk about a weird sensation sent up from my foot.  So, I contacted Alice again, and she provided replacement peddles that arrived yesterday.  I installed them, and everything was fine, maybe.

The peddles were shipped from China, which led me to dispose of all packaging as soon as I finished the installation.  From everything I’ve read, you don’t get Coronavirus from bicycle peddles.  The joke would be on me if you do.   

 

 

Live and Learn

Michele and I went out shopping for groceries today.  Too bad Salvador Dali couldn’t come with.  He would’ve loved those surreal aspects of our little trip.

 

Like, how is it possible for the streets to be all but empty and the supermarket parking lots pretty much full?  At some point, all the cars have to trade places, no?  Well, we did, going from street to space to cart, never once taking off our gloves.  Let me note here that a collision between shopping carts could’ve unleashed a chain of events too horrible to contemplate.  I maneuvered down aisles past people with zombie eyes, and about as much color in their faces.

 

I also maneuvered down aisles picked clean in sections.  Forget about toilet paper and bottled water.  I must’ve missed the part about how the Coronavirus starts with diarrhea followed by drought.  We also appear to have returned to a world based on canned foods.  Strange times, indeed.

 

It’s probably a good thing the Coronavirus didn’t get incorporated into the storyline for “The Shawshank Redemption.”  I mean, how would Morgan Freeman run a black market for an entire prison?  An economy based on toilet paper instead of cigarettes?  Mr. Whipple would’ve been nominated for an Academy Award.

 

Just for fun, I went down the magazine aisle where, lo and behold, they had all three of my baseball magazines.  Not only that, they also had the January/February issue of Baseball Digest, that publication “for love of the game since 1942.”  And here I thought it had gone the way of The Sporting News and The Baseball Register and Who’s Who in Baseball.

 

There were some nice stories, including one on WAR that had this gem: After the 2012 season, a team analyst for the Tigers came up with a WAR formula that valued Gold Glove second baseman Darwin Barney (an average hitter at best) over Triple Crown winner Miguel Cabrera.  As the saying goes, figures don’t lie, but figurers do.

 

Another nice feature was a listing of all the baseball people who had died in 2019.  Bill Buckner I knew about, Barry Latman of the ’59 White Sox I didn’t.  The same goes for Jean Buckley; Betty Carveth; Lillian Faralla; Helene Machado; Helen Smith; Joyce Steele; and Margaret Wigiser, all members of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.

 

Thank you, Baseball Digest, for letting women ballplayers break the glass ceiling, if just once in passing. 

We Interrupt the End of the World for this Bears’ Update

COVID-19 may be rewriting the rules for human society, but it’s not getting in the way of the NFL.  Spring sports paralyzed?  Too bad.  Summer Olympics on the ropes?  So sorry (not).  Open the sports’ section or turn on the TV, and it feels just like pro football in springtime, almost.

 

Bears’ GM Ryan Pace probably wishes things were back to normal, if only to take the spotlight off of him.  Damn’ those Cubs and White Sox.  At least Opening Day would’ve provided a teeny bit of cover for the secretive Pace to go about his hyperactive business.

 

In recent days, Pace has signed two free agents, tight end Jimmy Graham and linebacker Robert Young; resigned linebacker Danny Trevathan (rather than keep equally talented and three-years-younger linebacker Nick Kwiatoski); and traded for quarterback Nick Foles.  How do you say: I’m trying to fix all the stuff I’ve screwed up?

 

Pace signed the 33-year old Graham because his previous 1000 attempts to find a tight end have all failed.  He signed Young because his former first-round draft pick Leonard Floyd was a bust.  He traded for Foles because, well, see Leonard Floyd, above, and substitute Mitch Trubisky for Floyd.  He signed Trevathan for reasons known only onto Ryan Pace.

 

A trusty rule of thumb in all pro sports is to go young whenever possible.  Not one of the players Pace procured in the past seven days for the upcoming season will be under the age of 30 come September.  That’s a good thing, how?  Spending the few precious words he speaks in public every year to proclaim his love of Trubisky only to turn around and acquire Foles says what about Pace’s honesty?  I’m thinking along the lines of “lying while standing up” might be in order here.

 

Ryan Pace is blessed with unlimited do-overs because the McCaskeys allow it.  Chicago is a city steeped in the names of famous sports’ families.  How unfair that “Halas/McCaskey” survives where “Wrigley” and “Comiskey” exist only in the past tense.  

6-15-62

This is the game I wish I had the ticket stubs to, Angels vs. White Sox, June 15, 1962.  It was my first-ever baseball game.  My dad had the tickets, so he would’ve gotten the stubs, and my father was a man who did not care much for sentiment.  But I’ve been able to hang onto the memories.

 

Before my dad got home from work, my mother had me polish my shoes.  That’s part of the reason why I’ve always treated baseball as serious stuff.  Other people went to their first game as part of a group of kids, and it was a party in the grandstands.  Me, I went with my father and several of his coworkers at Wesco Spring; I was expected to be on my best behavior, during dinner at the old Glass Dome Hickory Pit and at the game.  Going to my first ballgame was like attending church.  Green cathedrals, indeed.

 

My dad would’ve been 48 going on 49, his kid seven weeks short of ten.  I think we had cannoli for dessert, and I know we had great seats, upper deck loge, close to the photographers’ nest between home and first.  It was like being in the choir loft at St. Gall.

 

Because we were at Comiskey Park, one of the classic ballparks, the upper deck was not at all what it’s like today, less a mountain peak and more top of a step ladder.  That said, I couldn’t get over how small the first major-league ballplayer I ever laid eyes on looked to me.  It wasn’t until much later that I found out Angels’ leadoff batter Albie Pearson stood a mere 5’5”.

 

The Sox started 42-year old Early Wynn, and my dad wasn’t pleased.  “This will be a loss,” he predicted, wrongly.  My father was what you might call a pessimist, and that was on a good day.  But better that than the fatalism he often gave voice to.  Nothing like bringing your daughter to visit Grandpa, only to have him say, “Tell me the man upstairs doesn’t say your time is up, and it’s up,” on hearing the news report of some person minding his own business only to get run over, crushed or hit by lightning.

 

Wynn made it through five innings, yielding four runs.  Eddie Fisher gave up another two runs in relief, leaving the Sox trailing 6-5 going into the bottom of the ninth.  My first-ever baseball game ended with Floyd Robinson hitting a walk-off, two-run triple.  And, yes, I have a baseball card of Robinson tacked on my office wall.

 

The game happened at precisely the right time to turn me into a forever Sox fan.  Nine days earlier, I was at my grandmother’s watching the Cubs and Giants on Channel 9.  It was one of those days Jack Brickhouse didn’t even try to pretend he was anything but a shill for the North Siders.  Now, talk about foreshadowing.  It was another Chicago walk-off in the most literal sense.

 

The Cubs won when pinch hitter Don Landrum, acquired the day before from St. Louis, walked with the bases loaded; I seem to recall that Landrum had his name and number done in tape on the back of his uniform.  Anyway, the win lifted the Cubs to a record of 17-35 on their way to a 59-103 season.  Let me just mention here the Cubbies had four future HOFers in their lineup that day: Ron Santo (batting leadoff!); Billy Williams; Ernie Banks; and Lou Brock.  Did I mention they were headed to 103 losses that year?

 

Brickhouse, as was his way with things North Side, made it sound as though the Cubs had just clinched the pennant.  There was a crowd of 3783 that day at beautiful Wrigley Field.  Brickhouse was screaming so loud most of the faithful assembled had to be able to have heard him.  Even at the age of nine, I thought it was weird that a grown man should be pretending something great had happened when it so obviously hadn’t.

 

I couldn’t tell you if Channel 9 broadcast the Sox game I went to nine days later.  I could find out, but it doesn’t really matter.  There were 19,214 Sox fans on hand that night, and we tend to be a loud bunch.  Even if Mr. Brickhouse had been able to pretend he was excited by Floyd Robinson’s triple, we likely wouldn’t have heard, or cared.  That’s just how Sox fans are.

 

The win put the Sox record at 30-32, and they’d finish the year at 85-77, so you could accuse me of just being a frontrunner.  Ah, but the good times of winning baseball stopped in 1968, around the same time those Cubbies came out of hibernation.  But I was never, ever tempted to look north for a team to root for, not even during those two one-hundred loss seasons on the South Side (56-106 in 1970 and 62-100 in 2018).  Baseball loyalty is forever, or should be.   

 

For what it’s worth, the Sox had three future HOFers in the lineup: Luis Aparicio, Nellie Fox and Wynn.  All would be gone by the start of next season, so I never formed anything approaching a deep attachment.  No, my favorite Sox from that night would be Cam Carreon, Robinson and Charley Smith, a journeyman infielder who would spend only one full season and part of another with the Sox before moving on to four more clubs on his way to a seven-team (ending with the Cubs, by the way) , ten-year career.      

 

But Smith set off the exploding scoreboard in the bottom of the second inning with a shot off LA starter Ken McBride, and you don’t forget the first major-league homerun you see or the person who hit.  I haven’t.

Reading and Watching

If I had to pick two baseball books to read right now (as opposed to, say, getting ready to reread a history of the Great Influenza), I’d pick James T. Farrell’s My Baseball Diary and Jim Bouton’s Ball Four.

 

Farrell published his Diary in 1957, which makes it both dated and timeless.  Among the best pieces is Farrell’s account of his grandmother—an Irish immigrant who came to the United States during the Civil War—going to games at Comiskey Park on Ladies Day; oh, how she loved to watch the players “lep.”  An added bonus for me is that White Sox great Billy Pierce autographed my copy of Baseball Diary.

 

Farrell is sublime, the eternal South Sider waiting for the day his heroes vanquish the despicable Yankees.  Bouton would be one of those New Yorkers, though more hilarious than hateful at his core.  A few years ago I started rereading Ball Four only to put it down because it was making me laugh so much.  It may be time to start reading and laughing again.

 

For some reason, I don’t look for baseball movies to make me laugh in the same way.  Clare does, which is one of the reasons she likes “Bull Durham” and “A League of Their Own” so much.  As a Tom Hanks’ groupie, I agree with her on the latter.  But Kevin Kostner I’m not sold on.

 

Don’t get me wrong, I love “Field of Dreams,” in large part because of all those Black Sox playing ball in an Iowa cornfield.  Just writing that makes me smile.  In fact, I probably like those scenes enough it doesn’t even bother me that much that Ray Liotta played Shoeless Joe Jackson as a right-handed batter.

 

Then again, Gary Cooper played Lou Gehrig as a rightie hitter; it was film technicians who figured out how to switch the image of Cooper cum Gehrig so that it looked like he was hitting left-handed.  Talk about movie magic, or pretend.  What I enjoy most about “Pride” is how Babe Ruth, Bill Dickey, Bob Meusel and Mark Koenig appear as themselves.  Cool.  Oh, and “the luckiest man on the face of the earth” speech.  It works for me.

 

And somehow so does “The Natural.”  I use the qualifier because I don’t particularly like Robert Redford or Glenn Close.  Oh, but that supporting case, with Robert Duvall; Wilford Brimley; Robert Prosky; Richard Farnsworth; and Darren McGavin.  Talk about a Murderers’ Row of acting talent.  Any scene with any combination of those people is worth watching.  My favorite may be Brimley and Farnsworth sitting in the dugout trying to guess the names of songs they’re humming.  Again, that works for me.

So does most if not all of “The Rookie.”  Dennis Quaid as a major-league pitcher—who knew?  But he makes it work, as does Rachel Griffiths in ways Glenn Close doesn’t.  There’s even a legend about nuns, which this Catholic boy would find hard to impossible not to believe.     

One Way to Keep Busy

I always try to keep the ticket stubs from ballgames I attend.  If only I kept them in one place, but No.  Oh, well.  Maybe the two I found today—one in the attic, the other in a bedroom drawer—were meant to be first.

 

The older of the two is from June 17, 1997, the second-ever Cubs-White Sox game and the first game I took Clare to; she was five at the time.  I can’t say what my daughter remembers, Brian McRae batting leadoff for the visiting North Siders or the unpleasant Albert Belle in left for the home team?  Doubtful.  Maybe it was the noise a crowd of 44,249 fans made during the course of a 5-3 White Sox win.  If nothing else, Clare can always say her first Sox game was also the first-ever Sox win over the Cubs.

 

That game I have some memory of, the one on June 10, 2000, not so much outside of it being a day game.  I wish I could say I remember Magglio Ordonez hitting a two-run homer against Kerry Wood in the bottom of the first, but that would be pushing it.  Certain names, though, ring a bell.

 

Frank Thomas, Ordonez, Paul Konerko, Carlos Lee—talk about power, in which case you’d also have to mention Jose Valentin.  A child watches a team like this, and she could grow up to lead her college in career homeruns.

 

That I remember, in the most vivid detail.

If and When

Sportswriters are just like the rest of us as we try to come to terms with the sea change that is the Coronavirus.  We haven’t been in these parts since 1918-19 or thereabouts.  The Great Influenza killed some 675,000 Americans and ushered in the Jazz Age.  Who knows what will follow in the wake of COVID-19?

 

In his column today, Tribune sportswriter Paul Sullivan offered that, “None of this really matters,” the “none” being sports within the context of a pandemic.  He added that everyone hopes “eventually we’ll be back watching our favorite teams and players doing what they’re paid to do—provide entertainment for the masses.”  Only sports isn’t Hollywood.

 

Oh, the line between the two has blurred since the first time Babe Ruth stepped in front of a camera and tried his hand at acting in the 1920s.  And I’d be willing to bet the house that “March Madness” comes with a script of sorts each and every year.  But here’s the difference.

 

We don’t really care how entertainers prepare for a role, how much weight they put on or take off or how they got those muscles so chiseled (provided they don’t drop dead in or because of the process).  If Sylvester Stallone wants to pretend he got his “Rocky” body without chemical enhancement, fine.  Of course, Stallone isn’t an athlete.

 

If he were, fans would expect him to pass a drug test.  I’d argue the great majority of fans want their athletes to pass any and all drug tests.  Why?  Because sports matter in a way Hollywood never has.  We value honesty and fair play because society depends on it.  We watch athletes try their level best, which also has to be their honest best.  That qualifies them to be heroes, in the way we would like to be heroic ourselves. 

 

Do I want to be like the title character in “Rocky”?  There are worse human beings.  Do I want to be like Sylvester Stallone?  That’s like asking me if I want to be like Mark McGwire, and the answer is, no, in case anyone is asking.

 

The last time baseball came out of a work stoppage, it allowed athletes to pump themselves up until they looked like Captain America or some other Avenger.  How did that work out in the end?  If and when baseball starts up again, fans will be far better served by ballplayers trying their level best, their honest best.

There's something heroic in that.

Pause and Regroup

It appears that all college spring sports will be cancelled.  D-I spring athletes may get another year of eligibility.  It’s not clear what happens to D-III athletes or what the situation is with high school sports.

 

You really have to be the parent of a varsity athlete to comprehend what the above means; consider it the difference between sympathy and empathy.  So much practice, preparation, and, suddenly, Nature intervenes in a way that will not brook objection or appeal.  Tom Hanks may be wrong about the crying thing.

 

Ten years ago this month, Clare had a game where she hit two homeruns, one so hard the ball ripped at the edge of a seam.  The second homer tied the game in the top of the seventh, and we won in extra innings.  The next day, the Sun-Times printed its list of the hundred top softball players in the metro area, and there was Clare, named one of the best second basemen around.

 

You can’t imagine what a weekend like that can mean to a family, unless, that is, you’ve been there.  Athletes live to perform, to win glory, but not this year, not for college—and, I suspect, high school—players this season.  The temptation is to ignore the danger and try to play on, only to risk something far more precious than a game or a season.  So, we pause and regroup for as long as it takes Nature to tire in its attack on us.

 

I just hope that when the games start again, people will consider why we play and watch sports.  With me, it’s not about entertainment; that’s why HBO and Netflix exist.  No, what I want is the chance to bear witness to exceptional effort, to see a ball cross over a fence and, when it comes back after being retrieved, behold a gash from where the girl made contact.

 

That’s sports to me.

Humbled

Sports are an extension of us but Nature, not so much.  If it were, we wouldn’t be dealing with this avalanche of cancellations and postponements.

 

NCAA March Madness is history, along with the Illinois high school equivalent.  College spring sports have been shut down, along with the current NBA and NHL seasons. Spring training looks to be over, and MLB Opening Day delayed at least two weeks.  Major League Soccer also has postponed the start of its season.

 

This may say more about me than I want, but the cancellation of the men’s NCAA tournament bothers me the least of all.  March Madness has always struck me as a corrupt bargain involving players; schools; broadcast networks; and the NCAA.  Student-athletes?  According to the NCAA website, March Madness—the men’s D-I basketball tournament for the uninitiated—generates $867.5 million in television and marketing revenue.  Lord Acton said something about power corrupting, yes?  Well, money is power with dollar signs attached.

 

For those college basketball players and coaches who do embody the ideal of amateur athletics, qualifying and not going to the tournament this year is rotten luck; for everyone else involved, oh well.  It’s the spring-sport athletes I really feel for.  My daughter used to be one of them.

 

The “one and done” phenomenon of college basketball isn’t a factor in college baseball; “three and done,” maybe, but I’m not aware of baseball players doing anything remotely close to the one season of college basketball followed by entry in the NBA draft.  As for college softball, the draft is something players get when they leave a dorm window open at night.

 

What matters for a good 95-97 percent of college softball players is making the most of those four years of eligibility they have.  Clare put it to me this way the other day, “If someone had told me I couldn’t play my senior year, we’d both need counseling.”  Notice she used the plural “we.”  She’s right.

 

Clare suggested an extra year of eligibility for seniors whose teams/conferences cancel entire seasons.  I’d go so far as to say anyone on a college baseball or softball roster on March 1, 2020, should be extended an extra year of eligibility, regardless their year in school.  Freshmen don’t want to miss out on a year of playing any more than seniors do.

 

For college athletes, that would help lessen the blow from the loss of a season.  But if high schools start canceling baseball and softball seasons, that extra year of eligibility won’t be an option, and a whole lot of people will need counseling.     

 

I know I would.

Check Your Calendars

The Coronavirus is wreaking havoc on amateur and professional sports worldwide.  The NBA has just suspended its season; the NHL may follow suit; and, with Opening Day a mere two weeks away, baseball will have to start making decisions soon.  It may be time to see if things old can be made new again.

 

That would include pushing back the start of the season to the second week of April.  I’d also recommend a shortened season of, say, 154 games (sound familiar?) with doubleheaders.  Consider these dates and numbers.

 

The 1960 baseball season started on April 12^th.  When both leagues went to a 162-game season two years later, Opening Day fell on April 9^th.  How interesting that as late as 1990 the season opened on, yes, April 9^th.  March madness, if you will, didn’t happen until 1996.  Then, it was March 31^st (White Sox at Mariners in the godawful Kingdome), and now it’s supposed to be March 26^th. 

 

Also consider that in 1959 the White Sox played 21 doubleheaders; twenty years later, the Sox were down to ten twin-bills.  By 1989, they were playing but three.  If disease dictates the season start later, doubleheaders could get the season to close to 154 games, if not 162.  All it will take is the players and ownership together hammering out a revised schedule.

 

And, along those lines, might I suggest a one-time only change, with MLB rosters expanding to thirty players, the better to handle, say, a season with fifteen or so doubleheaders?  Sounds sensible to me.  

 

“You Can’t Touch This”

Clare called me late yesterday afternoon with news on “our friend Michael,” that being White Sox pitching phenom Michael Kopech.  Appearing in a game for the first time since Tommy John surgery in September of 2018, Kopech threw his first pitch at 100 mph.  His second offering clocked in at 101, followed by 100, followed by 101.  All told, Kopech went one inning against the Rangers, throwing 11 pitches.  Six of them registered at or above 100 mph.

 

Kopech, who turns 24 at the end of next month, said he was “a little geeked.”  By that I think he meant “pumped,” in which case, yes, the young man was certainly geeked.  Kopech also insisted to reporters that, despite evidence to the contrary, “I’m not going to try to be a power pitcher.  I’m going to try to be a pitcher.”  Potato, potahto.

 

I’ll give Kopech this—he doesn’t feel the need for speed anymore, and he may sense that it can get in the way of performance.  Consider that Nolan Ryan, the all-time strikeout leader in MLB history, had a modest winning percentage of .526.  Then again, Randy Johnson, in second place, won 64.6 percent of his decisions.  Here’s hoping Kopech models himself more along the lines of the Big Unit.    

 

My daughter always loved hitting fastballs, whether thrown by male or female pitchers.  I imagine that deep down inside, she wonders how she would fare against the likes of Michael Kopech.  If only there were some way to find out.   

Take Two

Reynaldo Lopez and Dylan Cease traded places with their second starts, bad turning good and good turning mediocre.  What to make of it?

 

On Sunday, Lopez threw 4-1/3 scoreless innings with five strikeouts.  A day later, Cease gave three runs in three-plus innings.  Lopez says he was anxious his first start while catcher Yasmani Grandal says his battery mate was throwing eight different pitches for strikes in his second outing.  Less anxiety and fewer pitch types going forward, if you please, because less is always more.

 

As for Cease, he sounded more like ex-Sox Chris Bassitt than Jacob Turner, in other words, more self-critical than self-serving.  The young righty had crappy control—walking three while hitting a batter—and admitted it.  “Any time you give free passes or put them [opposing batters] in hitting counts, you’re asking for trouble,” Cease told reporters after the game.  ”If I execute pitches better, I throw more strikes, I’m not going to waste that many pitches” and things will probably work out.

 

I like that kind of self-assessment, especially if it leads to self-improvement.  We’ll see.

Addition by Not Signing

During the 2018 NLCS, then-Dodger Manny Machado stood out first by not hustling, then by explaining that he wasn’t a “Johnny Hustle” type of player.  And then the White Sox went after him big time in the offseason, only to have Machado sign a $300 million deal with the Padres.  Their loss, evidently.

 

For anyone who might think otherwise, the story about Machado that ran in The Athletic last week just might change their mind.  A player signed to be the face of a team supposedly on the rise admits, “Strength-wise. I wasn’t there.  My swing wasn’t there.  I got tired.  I got sloppy.  I stopped working, stopped doing things.  I just thought my talent was going to take over.”  Yikes.

 

Machado said all that as a mea culpa, admitting “there’s no excuse” for his actions and rededicating himself to working hard.  That’s nice, but it doesn’t get Andy Green his job back.  The Padres went from playing .500-ball ninety games into the 2019 season to finishing twenty-two games under by year’s end.  Guess who got fired, the manager or the star player?  All I can say is that a team had better do its due diligence before signing any player to a mega-deal.  San Diego obviously did not.

And then I have to wonder what the Sox saw in Machado.  How exactly would he have fit in with the likes of Tim Anderson and Jose Abreu, each a Johnny Hustle in his own way?  Lucky we don’t have to find out.        

Yo, Nero

I never thought I’d see the day where I felt bad for Cubs’ fan, so circle this date on the calendar.  On second thought, I feel bad for all major-league baseball fans.

 

As a professional sport, baseball finds itself slipping into irrelevance.  Managers of last-place teams act like the next pitching change will put them into the World Series; pitchers act like the next pitch will be their last and, so, something to avoid; hitters act like the batter’s box is quicksand waiting to swallow them up and, so, they’re forever jumping out of the box after every pitch.  Walk to the mound for a visit, again; shake off a sign, again; step out of the box again, reset batting gloves, again.  Oh, and run commercials at every chance.  This is a recipe for disaster, folks, as in every game a three-hour plus marathon of boredom.

 

So, what does the Ricketts family do?  They put their team on an exclusive cable channel, only half the area cable providers don’t want to carry it.  Then again, maybe that’s a good thing, unless fans are dying to see camera shots of Javy Baez from the ground up.  The Tribune the other day  suggested calling it “Javy Cam,” but that misses the whole Jack-and-the-Beanstalk aspect to it.     

 

A question for the Ricketts if and when all their fans can access the new Marquee Network:  Will the games be commercial-free?  I’m betting, No, they won’t be.  In other words, fans will have to pay to see games that once upon a time were broadcast free, which is why we all put up with commercials in the first place.  How, then, does Marquee represent progress?

 

If the Ricketts truly wanted to do right by their fans, they would’ve skipped the Marquee thing and taken people’s money by offering shares of stock in the team instead.  That’s honest, that’s ethical, that’s not the Cubs’ way.

 

Or that of any other MLB team, come to think of it.

XXX Marks the Spot

So, Thursday I ran out to Barnes and Noble to buy my usual three baseball magazines—Athlon’s, Lindy’s, Street and Smith’s—like I do every March, but not this time.  It was as if somebody’d picked the magazine rack, which runs a good thirty feet if it’s an inch, clean of news about the national pastime.

 

On to Plan B, aka Amazon.  Oh, Mr. Bezos had the magazines in question all right, plus $11.95 for shipping and handling, which would be like paying for a fourth magazine, if one were out there.  Where are the advantages of Prime Membership when you need them most?  On to Plan C.

 

That entailed driving to a neighborhood newsstand yesterday morning.  Let me note here that there are two kinds of newsstands in the world, ones with newspapers and magazines and ones with newspapers and magazines, some of which start with the letter X, as in XXX.  This was a XXX newsstand.

 

I pulled up, lowered the passenger-side window and took in a conversation between the two guys manning the stand.  Let’s just say physicians don’t discuss human anatomy the way these fellows were.  The discussion stopped long enough for me to make my purchase of three magazines, all X-free.

 

Then, today, I asked a friend I used to ride dinosaurs with growing up if he’d gotten his baseball magazines yet, and he told me he’d been to two drugstores with no luck.  Dear Commissioner Manfred, your sport has reached the point where it’s getting hard to impossible to find the supporting literature that once made it such a joy to follow.  The Baseball Register and Who’s Who in Baseball are gone, and those magazines I bought will be next.  If nobody wants to carry them, that means nobody’s asking to buy them.

At some point, nobody is going to care, about the sport let alone the supporting literature.

Reading Tea Leaves and Contract Extensions

Well, the White Sox have extended yet another young player.  As of today, the Sox and third baseman Yoan Moncada have agreed to a five-year extension worth $70 million with a one-year team option for $25 million.  There seems to be a definite pattern here.

 

Back in January, GM Rick Hahn signed centerfielder Luis Robert to a similar deal, just as he did last spring with outfielder Eloy Jimenez.  And let’s not forget that that three springs previous, Hahn started this whole extension thing with a six-year deal for shortstop Tim Anderson.  My guess is that Hahn is going to try his best to get starter Lucas Giolito and, if he shows Rookie-of-the-Year promise, infielder Nick Madrigal signed to extensions.  Ditto first baseman Andrew Vaughn when his time comes.

 

These deals allow the Sox to go in a couple of different directions.  Right now, the team makes a very attractive investment should Jerry Reinsdorf decide to sell (please, oh please).  Young, affordable stars playing winning baseball could mean a very nice revenue stream into the foreseeable future.

 

But let’s say it doesn’t.  Reinsdorf or any possible successor would still be insured against his investment going belly up.  All it takes is for two or three of those affordably-signed players to have plus careers (insert appropriate WAR here).  That way, the Sox front office can start flipping players again the way they did Chris Sale, Adam Eaton and Jose Quintana, all of whom were attractive to new teams in part because of the affordable contract control built into their extensions.  Irony abounds.

 

The White Sox signed Sale to a seven-year extension worth $60 million in 2017, a dollars-and-years amount that enticed the Red Sox to trade away Moncada, Michael Kopech and two other minor leaguers.  Sale, who signed a $160 million deal with Boston in 2019, is trying to avoid Tommy John surgery on his left elbow.  Kopech, seven years younger than Sale, got his out of the way last year.  Everything seems to be going in favor of the White Sox.  How strange.

 

Beats the alternative, though.