Best-laid Plans

It was love at first-sight for me, baseball wise, with Toronto’s Marcus Stroman.  The five-foot nine, 23-year old righty starter posted an 11-6 record as a rookie last season with a 3.65 ERA and a 1.17 WHIP (walks and hits per inning pitched).  To give you an idea how exceptional that last stat is, it took Sandy “the left hand of God” Koufax eight years in the majors to record a better WHIP.  As to character, Stroman pals around with ex-Sox fan favorite Mark Buehrle, he of the “get it down in two hours” mindset for pitching a game.  Like I said, love at first sight.

The White Sox could have drafted Stroman but chose outfielder Courtney Hawkins instead.  Hawkins is two years younger and has made it to spring training already, so maybe my team wasn’t as clueless as usual in scouting talent.  Or we could just be dumb-ass lucky.  Stroman tore the ACL in his left knee during fielding practice this week and is expected to miss the entire season.  

Here’s hoping Courtney Hawkins wasn’t the right choice by default.

Kissimmee Memories

Clare stepped off the plane in Orlando last night to a thermometer reading of 87 degrees.  Did I mention I hate my daughter right now?

After today’s games, the girls want to hit the beach, even though the Tigers and Astros are playing (literally) just down the road from them.  We saw those two teams in a spring training game four years ago.  Clare should remember it well; I do.  She had already hit her first college homerun for Elmhurst, on our 31^st wedding anniversary, which was a nice touch.  For our one off-day in Florida, we decided on a ballgame.

The seats were great, just three rows from the field a little behind first base, and Miguel Cabrera was a revelation; he had time enough for a whole bunch of autographs.  But the Tigers’ bullpen seated just in front of us wasn’t so nice.  They—and you guys know who you are—kept staring and staring at Clare, perhaps because she was dressed in the way of a 19-year old Midwestern girl looking to get a little color before heading back to the tundra.  About the seventh inning, there came another round of stares that broke the camel’s back, so to speak, or prompted a parent into action.  It wasn’t me but the mother bear, who glowered long and hard enough until she got a mumbled apology and no more stares.   

And now the new softball graduate assistant gets to play mother bear.

Clueless

Derrick Rose addressed the media for the first time since his meniscus repair February 27.  Rose was doing better incommunicado.

The enigma from Englewood said that, unlike Bulls’ management, he had no timetable for his return.  No, instead, the injured guard is “thinking about getting the most out of every day.”  Peace of mind has come from giving his life over to God.  That’s what the man said.

And this, too: “I’m just trying to take my time, listen to my body, cheer on my teammates while I’m out, just try to better myself as a person, a basketball player, a businessman and a teammate.”  He might want to check on the value of that Derrick Rose brand right not.  On second thought, he might not want to know.

Clare spent the weekend freezing in Ft. Collins, Colorado.  My daughter is coming to grips with the fact she’s stuck in the dugout, at least as far as college softball is concerned.  If the devil is looking to make a tempting deal, he could do worse than offer Little Hurt a few more years of eligibility, for there are those in life with a talent but nowhere to practice it.

To say nothing of millionaire athletes both talented and clueless.

Notes on a Requiem Mass

 I’ve disliked Jerry Reinsdorf from the day he engineered the destruction of a classic ballpark so that a publicly-funded outdoor mall could take its place.  Add to that his running out of town the best basketball player of all time along with a coach who could weave silk out of old gym shorts.  I also have this thing about billionaires, a kind of human cockroach with money.  Yes, the eminently rich Reinsdorf was recently elevated to billionaire status.

But the man is also human, as was shown by last week’s death of Minnie Minoso.  Reinsdorf says he fell in love with the ex-Sox great the first time he met him.  Even a rich man could see what this poor man had accomplished both on and off the field, though I wonder how the relationship would have progressed had Reinsdorf followed through on his threat in the late 1980s to move the Sox to Tampa.  Anyway to recognize the goodness of this human being, who had no wealth beyond the adulation of countless Sox fans, may be what gets Jerry Reinsdorf into heaven in the end.

It was fitting that a ballplayer from the 1950s should have his funeral mass at Holy Family Church, which dates to 1857; neither that kind of player nor place is common these days.  And it was a good thing there were pews enough to fit everyone.  Of course, the mighty got to sit up front while the ordinary squeezed in where they could.  I’ll give a break to Frank Thomas because he is extraordinarily big.  For a man who once admitted he didn’t know all that much about Jackie Robinson, Thomas showed he’s learned enough to appreciate the life and contributions of the first black Latin player to reach the majors.

And, soon-to-be 88-year old Billy Pierce can sit wherever he wants.  The lefty great—go and compare his career stats to Whitey Ford—walked unaided to the pulpit to offer his praise for an old teammate.  Perhaps someday the Hall of Fame will find a way to include Minoso and Pierce while one of them is still alive.

At the end of mass before everyone processed out, a young man walked to the altar and played a tape Minnie Minoso had the foresight to make.  “Since I came over here in 1951, you gave me your love and your respect,” offered the voice of a man who could not be dead.  Ever polite, Saturnino Orestes Arrieta Armas Minoso thanked his listeners, then added, “I love you and God bless you.”
He did, for somewhere between 89 and 92 years.  

Who, Me?

Who, Me?

The NCAA has just come down hard on the Syracuse basketball program, long the domain of Coach Jim Boeheim.  It appears that players from time to time had other people do assignments and “volunteered” for youth clinics after being paid to do so.  Oh, and the drug protocol came with the occasional wink or nod.  Who knew?

The punishments probably will include forfeiting victories and the loss of scholarships, if not a ban on postseason play.  It could have been worse, but the university won brownie points for alerting the NCAA of possible problems.  School officials didn’t move to correct those problems necessarily, but they kept track of them.  How brave.  As to Boeheim, the coach acknowledges there were violations yet he feels “disappointed.”  Why?  Because “The [investigating] committee chose to ignore the efforts I have undertaken over the past 37 years to promote an atmosphere of compliance.”  Huh?  Division I coaches are the closest thing to God on earth; what they say goes.  If the Syracuse basketball program stinks, the odor starts with the head coach.

Next week, I’ll probably drop in on Clare’s old softball coach at Elmhurst; he wants me to score games this year.  Coach Mike has an office to make the tiniest Manhattan studio apartment look like the Ritz, with stacks of paper threatening to bury coach and visitor alike.  There are also pictures, including more than a few of my daughter.  But I’m willing to bet there isn’t a slush fund stashed away in a desk drawer or a paper written for one of his players.

That’s a lesson Division III could teach the big guys, if only they cared to listen.

Let Them In

The Tribune today had a big story on baseball in the Dominican Republic, which is providing anywhere from 25 to 40 percent of the players on minor league rosters.  In the Dominican, most people are poor, and baseball is the escape route of choice.  The odds of signing a six-figure bonus are slim, but better than the lottery.

The national pastime has always lent itself to the ideal of social mobility; mill ball and stickball fed major-league dreams and minor-league teams long before the northward flow of Dominican talent.  And just as sure as Dominican agents take an ungodly cut out of a signing bonus for their services (as much as 30 percent according to the Trib), pro scouts cheated Midwestern farm boys eager to sign a contract.  Some things never change.

But they should.  Major-league baseball is all too willing to cultivate talent in the Caribbean no matter the potential for abuse.  Closer to home, supremely gifted athletes wait for a chance to play that never comes.  Their crime is their gender.  That or they’re not poor enough to exploit yet.         

#9

Baseball, unlike football, has a past that matters.  Take Red Grange or Y.A. Tittle out of the NFL, and who cares?  Do the same to MLB with Babe Ruth or Bob Feller, and you have a problem.  Who broke the color line in football or the NBA?  Who broke the color line for the Brooklyn Dodgers April 15, 1947?  And why did Minnie Minoso have to die yesterday?

I was too young to ever see Minoso play, but the film clips they showed on the news were enough to get a sense of the man and his times.  Baseball on the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s produced a body electric, fueled by Minoso, Aparicio, Fox and Pierce doing battle with the Yankees, White Sox pinstripes superior in look if not result to those other, more famous ones.  Minnie Minoso didn’t so much run the bases as he flew around them.

All those 1963 hits and 1136 runs scored and 1023 runs batted in didn’t start until Minoso reached the age of 25, or 28, or later; the exact age remains a mystery.  The stats did not depend on Minoso’s ability to speak English, which came slowly, or to deal with the prejudice of fans who disliked a player both black and Cuban, which came right away.  Minoso simply produced in such a way as to win the undying affection of those born south of State and Madison.  I saw that at SoxFest four years ago.

Minoso was walking by and stopped to autograph a ball for me; he was like royalty in a three-piece suit.  A line of people formed instantly.  No one joked or slapped the old player on the back.  Rather, they stood quietly in line waiting their turn to greet the man who by his play so long ago would now be our king.