Poking Around

The lack of spring training must be getting to me. I’ve been poking around in all the weird places to get my baseball fix. All things considered, I should’ve stayed off of baseball-reference.com. At a certain point, looking at the In Memoriam section can get to you, or did me. Twenty-three former players have already died this year, including, recently, Ike Delock and Fred Lasher. I know both of them from Strat-O-Matic. Delock finished an eleven-year career in 1963, and I have no memory of ever seeing him pitch, but he was a mainstay for those old-timer 50s Red Sox teams Strat-O-Matic has done. Lasher I probably have some sense of from the late ’60s; anyone on the Tigers back then seemed to do well against the White Sox. But, like Delock, I knew him more as a game piece than an actual human being. Games pieces last indefinitely, provided they’re stored away from the reach of basement floods. Human beings are different. Delock was 92, Lasher 80. I did better on eBay, where someone was selling two photos of a Sox game at Comiskey Park from July of 1943. Orval Grove of the Sox shut out the Yankees, 1-0, losing a no-hitter on a two-out double by Joe Gordon. Both look to be snapshots taken from center field. Nice, but not worth the $100-a-piece asking price. I can make an offer, but I doubt the seller would accept $45 for both. Doing my “Chicago White Sox press photo” search, I cam up with a photo of Sox owner Arthur Allyn with Sox GM Ed Short and American Football League Commissioner Joe Foss. According to the caption, Allyn “has been mentioned as a prime candidate for an A.F.L. franchise.” Wouldn’t that have been something? From what Ken Rosenthal says in today’s The Athletic, players and owners are deadlocked over the issue of an international draft; owners want it, Latin players in particular are opposed. So it goes. If nothing changes by tomorrow, I may check and see if anyone’s bought those snapshots.