What a Load of Bull

Some rebuilds work, others don’t.  At 13-25 and three years removed from the last time they saw .500, the Bulls fall into that second category.

I want to like head coach Jim Boylen, I really do, but he’s a moose caught in the headlights.  Boylen keeps saying his young team is going to learn from its mistakes, in which case they should all be basketball geniuses.  Boylen owns a .313 (!) winning percentage in a season and a half.  If he’s not careful, if his players keep needing to learn, Boylen will be challenging Tim Floyd’s career .280 mark before long.

White Sox fans should count their lucky stars.  Of the two Jerry Reinsdorf-owned teams, theirs looks to be headed in the right direction.  As much as it pains me to say this, at least Sox general manager Rick Hahn has a clue.  And Gar Forman over at the Bulls?

Why, he’s the exec who back in 2011 acquired Niko Mirotic, aka The Next Sure Thing.  Mirotic lasted five seasons (and one punch from Bobby Portis in practice) before deciding he liked European hardcourts better.  But, hey, Forman packaged Mirotic and a second-round draft pick for three bodies and a first-round draft choice.  Anybody seen Chandler Hutchison lately?

Monday, the Bulls played the suddenly-rebuilt Mavericks, losing 118-110 in another one of those learning experiences.  Dallas is now winning thanks in large part to 6’7” guard Luca Doncic, who scored 38 points against those ever-learning students on his way to a triple-double.  Then, last night, the Bulls played the Nets, a team that actually had a worse record.  No more.  Even without injured rookie Zion Williamson, New Orleans prevailed, 123-108.

The mind reels.  So do the Bulls.

Bot This

One day last week, Michele passed along a tweet that purported to be from a national baseball group, though it sure read as political, maybe by way of a place where they don’t play much baseball.  We do live in strange times.

Anyway, the tweet, along with another one I found from the group, talked about a baseball crisis that isn’t being addressed.  And what could it be, you ask?  Why, criminal activity around Guaranteed Rate Field!  The tweet called it an emergency and wondered if the White Sox shouldn’t move to now-vacant Turner Field until conditions improve.  Give me a break.

Mental midgets have brandished the specter of crime in and around 35^th and Shields to slur the White Sox and nearby black residents for as long as I can remember.  “Oh, you don’t want to go to Comiskey Park, it’s not safe.”  So, my parents must’ve wanted to reduce the number of children in their family when they let me take the bus, alone, to the park once I reached high school.  And my dad must’ve had a plan all those times we parked in Bridgeport for a night game in the 1960s and ’70s.  Yeah, he was going to toss me to the wolves so he could make a run to the car.

Happily, I’ve lived long enough to see actual Chicagoans, including Cubs’ fans, stop mouthing this gibberish.  In Chicago, where race has mattered from day one, the White Sox have always been sensitive in that regard.  I’ve come across correspondence from as early as 1917 where someone a part of the Great Migration was amazed that he could attend a major-league ballgame in the presence of white people.  Comiskey Park was for a time home to the Negro Leagues’ Chicago American Giants in addition to the annual Negro Leagues’ All-Star Game.  None of this turned off white fans from packing the park during the Go-Go Sox era, or its replacement across the street during the 2005 World Series season. 

Go to a Sox game, and you’re likely to see the most mixed sports’ crowd in Chicago: white, black, brown.  All that matters is the play on the field, not the color(s) in the stands.  Somehow, I think the fact that ex-president Barack Obama is a Sox fan played into those tweets.  I’ll take a Sox fan, regardless of color, to a dweeb tweeter any day of the week.

Stop It, Already

The Tribune just can’t help itself.  This infatuation with the Bears is a sign of bad journalism; a spot-on reflection of a fan base unable to move on; or both.  Take your pick.

Sunday, David Haugh did a nice page-one column on how, “Seldom do the Bears say what they really mean,” in large part because the notion of transparency is both foreign and offensive to them.  Haugh doubts that GM Ryan Pace is being totally honest about his commitment to quarterback Mitch Trubisky, and so do I and probably most of Beardom.  But filling up the back page was a puff piece on Virginia McCaskey.  The Bears’ matriarch is celebrating her 97^th birthday.

Then, yesterday they did a “if only” story for the just-completed season, as in if only this field goal had been made, that penalty avoided and any of a number of errant passes caught.  Guys, if this team had won two more games and made the playoffs, all they would’ve accomplished is embarrassing themselves over the weekend.  The Bears are an organization in search of leadership, which in Halas Hall gets confused with a flow chart.

Which brings us back to Virginia McCaskey.  The family literally hides behind her image as Grandma Bear and sole surviving cub of Papa Bear.  If she’s in charge, it’s time for her to take the blame the way any incompetent owner would.  Only the Chicago media is still too afraid to attack someone approaching their centennial.

But they have no choice, if in fact she’s in control.  And if she’s just providing a smokescreen to cover the incompetence of her offspring, then it’s time for the media to stop paying attention to Virginia McCaskey and focus on the McCaskey—George, I think—actually in control.  Your choice, guys.  

Right Back at You

There I was, peddling away on my exercycle while watching the Vikings-Saints’ game Sunday.  And what the camera did catch, right after the Vikings kicked a point after—some proud Saints’ fan flipping a double-bird to the FOX football audience.  Why, thanks, buddy, and right back at you.

There’s a thin, verging on invisible, line dividing acceptable behavior at a sporting event from the stuff idiots do.  The Saints’ fan, like most Yankees’ fans, was full-on idiot.  I yell at players but never swear at them those White Sox games I go to.  Call it learned behavior.  My father never swore when he took me to a game, and I certainly never swore (or threw anything) when I took Clare to games.  Kids learn what you teach them.

So, who raised this Saints’ guy?  Oh, and buddy, your team still lost, again.

A Slip of the Tongue

Mike Rizzo and I have a lot in common, outside of him being general manager of the Washington Nationals and me just being a sports’ gadfly.  We both grew up in the city, went to Chicago-area all-boys’ Catholic high schools and love the game of baseball.  OK, my not playing in the minors would count as another difference.

The Sun-Times did a nice profile of Rizzo on Saturday.  As I’ve said, hats off to the Times for doing sports, from preps to pros, right at least one day a week.  The story notes how the Nationals’ winning the World Series last October over the analytics-driven Astros qualifies in some quarters as a victory for “old school” baseball.  Rizzo thinks of his front office as more of a hybrid.  He told the Times, “You walk past the desk and cubicles of some of the smartest young men I’ve ever been around,” those being the Nationals’ “Ivy League-born and ‘bred” numbers’ crunchers.  “We marry that to some of the orneriest, grinder baseball lifers that there are.”

Notice how Rizzo said “young men.”  I doubt that was a slip of the tongue, just as I doubt any of his ornery lifers are female.  New or old, in some fundamental ways, baseball doesn’t change at all.  Too bad.

The Proof’s in the Pudding

Thank you, Bears, Blackhawks and Bulls for being so less than good this year.  Thank you, Cubs, for going into postseason hibernation, which is better than saying or (not) doing stuff that only alienates your fan base.  Whatever the reason, all of the other Chicago teams have let the White Sox steal a whole news cycle for themselves, again.

On Thursday, the Sox announced they signed top prospect Louis Robert to a six-year, $50 million deal, with two club option.  So, we won’t be playing the service-time-clock game on the South Side this April, unless it involves Nick Madrigal.  Ask, and you shall receive.  Be careful what you ask for.

Barring injury or an 0-for-50 spring, Robert will be in the Opening Day lineup, and fans will see if the 22-year old is worth the $102 million have invested in him since his 2017 signing.  (That figure includes the $26 million signing bonus and $26 million luxury tax.)  I imagine the wannabe GMs are busy figuring out the postseason roster(s).  Not me.

Where other people might be clamoring for free-agent outfielder Nick Castellanos, I want to see what this team, its coaching staff and front office can do with the talent on hand.  Teams that get caught up in win-now mode do stupid stuff, as Sox GM Rick Hahn surely knows.  Anyone care to recall James Shields for Fernando Tatis Jr.?

If this is a playoff-contending team, let manager Rick Renteria and his staff show it.  Instead of adding hitting and/or pitching at the cost of young talent (see Tatis, above), put the pressure on Don Cooper and Frank Menechino to produce that talent through their knowledge of pitching and hitting, respectively.  Every trade-deadline deal constitutes an admission that an organization miscalculated, that they’re not good enough as constituted.  In that case, how will they ever be good enough to win a championship unless they steal away another Gehrig or Koufax?

Not too long ago, the Sox had a marketing campaign centered around the notion that Ricky’s boys don’t quit.  OK, then let’s see what Renteria can do with a team that has some really good players on it before we risk trading away another Tatis or adding an albatross of a contract a la Dunn, Shields or LaRoche.

Personally, spring training can’t come soon enough.

Don Larsen

Ironically, I didn’t know who Don Larsen was until the end of his career, which happened to be a cup of coffee with the Cubs in 1967.  I was four-and-two-months when Larsen pitched his perfect game for the Yankees against the Dodgers in the 1956 World Series and a not-yet baseball fan when Larsen spent a half-season with the White Sox in 1961.  But as a 14-year old, I was impressed to read about this North Side reliever who’d once achieved perfection.

All ballplayers from the 1950s and earlier look the same to me, which is to say neither young nor old.  Larsen was 27 when he went into the record books.  Any photos of me at that age show someone so much younger.  Maybe it was the booze that Larsen was said to drink too much of, or black-and-white film vs. color. 

Or maybe ballplayers achieve a patina of immortality or timelessness once enough years and decades go by.  Our descendants may feel the same seeing pictures of long-ago 27-year olds.