Out of Sync

I have this picture of the All-Star Game, with demigods hitting walk-off homeruns in extra innings.  How black-and-white of me.  MLB.com ran a story today with this headline so appropriate for 2019:  Win $250K in the HR Derby Bracket Challenge.  Over and under, anyone?

Once upon a time, baseball ran from gambling the way cartoon elephants did from a mouse, only it was very real for the eight members of the White Sox banned for life by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis.  Oh, what Buck Weaver or Shoeless Joe Jackson could’ve done with that kind of money.  Truly, it’s a curse to be born too early.

Civil War

White Sox fans really do hate Cubs’ fans; whether or not those folks return the favor is immaterial.  I wonder if it was ever this way in New York or Philadelphia.  Clare is going to the Sox-Cubs’ game tomorrow, and I’m crossing my fingers she won’t pick a fight with some loudmouthed Cubs’ fan.

The two teams have found ways to play one another since forever, probably starting with the 1906 World Series, won by the good guys four games to two.  I have in front of me a scorecard courtesy of the old Chicago Herald-American of a Sox-Cubs’ exhibition game, played sometime between the late 1930s and ’40s; again, the good guys won by a score of 4-1 with Ted Lyons pitching.  And today’s Sun-Times noted the exhibition game of August 18, 1969, won, unfortunately, by the bad guys, 2-0.  But the Cubs went in the tank soon after, so there’s that.

I remember the game because we were coming home from our family vacation in Colorado.  My father drove the Dodge to the top of Pike’s Peak, and we lived to tell the tale.  It was after dinner somewhere when we heard the news that Sox rookie Carlos May lost the top half of his right thumb in a training accident with the Marines, something about a mortar mishap.  I was days away from starting senior year of high school.  St. Laurence was a world away from the Rocky Mountains, just as I am today from 1969.

Giolito against Lester.  Go Sox!

Seeing is Believing

Reynaldo Lopez, he of the 4-8 record and 6.34 ERA, vowed to do better the second half of the season, this after giving up seven runs on nine hits in a 11-5 loss to the Tigers yesterday afternoon.  I’m not holding my breath.

What Lopez did not say, what two beat reporters did not mention as well as the Sox TV team, is that our talented, befuddled righty won’t pitch inside to left-handed hitters, of whom Detroit started five; they generated six hits.  It seems pretty clear, to me at least, that Lopez reverts to his fastball as soon as he runs into trouble with his secondary pitches, only he can’t throw his fastball for strikes on a consistent basis; there are way too many 97-mph pitches out of the zone.  Come the fifth or sixth inning, the fastball is down a few mph and very hittable, especially when it’s left on the outside half of the plate to lefties.  Oh, and his in his last start I think, Lopez didn’t leave the mound to cover home on a wild pitch with a runner on third.

The White Sox keep flirting with .500, but general manager Rick Hahn is adamant he won’t make decisions based on a longshot chance at a wildcard spot.  Fine.  That being the case, give Lopez one more start to prove himself.  If he can’t, send him to Charlotte to figure things out.  After all, what’s a rebuild for, if not to see who to keep come the renaissance?       

Don't Look Back

Didn’t Satchel Paige say something about not looking back because somebody could be gaining on you?  This would seem to be the case with Jose Abreu.

The White Sox first baseman hit his 20^th homerun of the season last night, a three-run walk-off in the 12^th inning to give the Sox a doubleheader sweep of the Tigers.  Named to his third All-Star team last week, the 32-year old Abreu is hitting .272 with 63 RBIs.  After the game, he reiterated his desire to stay with the team past its perpetual rebuild phase.

But here’s the thing—the Sox keep drafting first basemen.  In 2017 they took Gavin Sheet is in the second round.  Sheets is doing nicely in Double A but apparently not well enough to keep Rick Hahn and company from selecting Andrew Vaughn with the third pick in the MLB draft last month.  What’s the rush, exactly?  As ever, Hahn isn’t saying.

All a fan can do, all a player can do, is take the game at hand and not worry about the ones after today. 

Grumpy Old Man

I must be on the wrong side of history.  Colin Kaepernick feels one way, I feel another.  The U.S. women’s soccer team acts one way, and I want it to act another.

Nike was all ready to launch a Fourth of July shoe featuring an American flag as designed by Betsy Ross.  Kaepernick, an advisor to Nike, protested on the grounds that the symbol has been coopted by the alt-right; Nike then dropped plans to introduce the shoe.  It seems to me the alt-right will coopt every patriotic symbol it can grab hold of if we let them.  Better to pry the symbol out of their hands than cede it to them, or so says the grumpy old man.

And then we have the women’s soccer team, one game away from the World’s Cup.  Yesterday, the U.S. beat Britain, 2-1, with forward Alex Morgan celebrating her goal by pretending to drink a sport of tea—get it, they’re playing Britain?—and, yes, with pinkie finger extended.  Again, it could just be me, but a team that has no love for Donald Trump may be coming off to the rest of the world as Trump 2.0 for its antics.   

Passings Not

Wow, the Mets are in a bad way.  They commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the Amazin’ Mets only to look dumb in the process.  It’s never a good thing to identify former players as dead when they’re not.

 

Yet that’s exactly what the New Yorkers did with pitcher Jesse Hudson and outfielder Jim Gosger.  Granted, neither Hudson nor Gosger made the postseason in ’69 so they may not be part of the collective memory the way Tommie Agee and Ed Kranepool are, but still, all you had to do was go to baseballreference.com and check; most likely, some intern couldn’t get properly motivated when given the job.  Gosger in particular was upset to find out he was listed among the Mets’ dead.

I feel a connection here because I “managed” Gosger back in eighth grade; he was on the 1965 Red Sox, one of my Strat-o-Matic teams.  Good field, decent hitting and speed, with what we call nice column coverage, if I remember correctly.  Anyway, the now 76-year old Gosger says he follows the Red Sox, Mets and his home-state Tigers; the ten-year major-league veteran is a lifelong resident of Port Huron, Michigan.  That’s the other reason I remember him.  Port Huron is where the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) wrote their famous statement, beginning with “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.”

Gosger’s biggest regret as a ballplayer is not receiving a World Series’ ring from 1969.  That shouldn’t be too hard for the Mets to do, that is, if they can be bothered to get it right.

Tower of Babel

All good things come to those who wait, I guess.  White Sox general manager Rick Hahn must have decided enough was enough with pitching prospect Dylan Cease.  The boxes have been checked, the Triple-A challenges met, so up Cease comes to the Sox; he’s set to make his major-league debut Wednesday against the Tigers at home.  The question for me is, did Hahn wait too long to act?

 

By the end of May, Cease looked ready; by the end of June, he looked gassed, with a 8.31 ERA for the month to go with 14 strikeouts and12 walks in 17.1 innings.  What happened from one month to the next?  Hahn really didn’t say, unless it was hidden somewhere in the patter of his gibber.

 

“We’ve said all along Dylan Cease was going to get to Chicago based on what Dylan Cease is doing, not based upon what other players are doing,” said the oracle of 35^th Street to reporters on Friday (and reported in today’s Tribune).  “Based upon what Dylan Cease has been doing, we’re getting awful close to that time.”  If you say so, Rick.

 

The good news is the Sox, finally, will have three young pitchers—Giolito, Lopez, Cease—in the rotation.  It should be four, but Michael Kopech is recovering from Tommy John surgery.  I’ll take what I can get, while also asking that top prospects Louis Robert and Nick Madrigal receive September call-ups so fans can get a look at them and the two of them can get their feet wet. 

What do you say, oh oracle?