Father's Day

My Father’s Day started with a dream about softball, sort of.  Clare’s first travel coach talked to me maybe three or four times total, one of them being to ask me to drive a player home, which I did all of once.  Yet that formed the basis of my dream, along with our dog and a missing tooth.  Go figure.

 

Clare and Chris came over in the afternoon; by this time I’d already seen the replay of a White Sox-Cardinals’ game from 2006, a 20-6 rout of the Cardinals.  You could tell Tony LaRussa was on the premises from all the hit batters courtesy of St. Louis pitchers.  Nice score, mixed memories.

 

A year removed from the World Series, the Sox would go a disappointing 90-72, not good enough to qualify for the postseason.  Did I say disappointing?  The next year, they slipped to 72-90.  But they played a game from that season, too, the one where Jim Thome hit his 500^th career homerun, a walk-off against the Angels.  “He didn’t even finish his swing,” marveled my daughter, who once disliked Thome because we traded Aaron Rowand to get him.  Clare now thinks of the big guy pretty much as I do, as an always-humble, left-handed Paul Bunyan.  Too bad we couldn’t have drafted Thome back in 1989.

 

The Indians got around to it in the 13^th round.  Thome attended Illinois Central College in East Peoria, a place Sox scouts apparently were unable to find.  Speaking of draft picks, in that Cardinals’ game, the 2006 first-rounder for the Sox had a few minutes on camera.  I had no recollection of him, probably because he amassed a 4.64 career ERA in the minors.  And, no, he didn’t turn things around in the majors, for the simple fact he never got there.

 

After dinner, we watched a repeat of The Titan Games hosted by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.  Basically, the fastest strong person wins.  The neat thing is they had Jessie Graff on from American Ninja Warrior.  If you need someone to jump twelve feet between buildings or scale a sheer wall, Graff is the person you want.  But, if you want someone to lug a sledgehammer attached to a 200-pound boulder (this after doing a lot of lifting and cranking and obstacle-course maneuvering), you want the contestant who’s probably a good forty pounds heavier.

 

The night ended with tentative plans to go hitting and getting a game of catch in sometime soon.