Rolling the Dice

The White Sox took a gamble over the winter by signing 27-year old Cuban exile Jose Abreu to a six-year, $68-million contract.  So far, it looks to be a steal for the Sox.  Abreu has set records for the most homers (10) and rbi’s (32) by a rookie in the first month of the season.

The Cubs tried to do the same thing with Kosuke Fukudome when they signed him to a four-year, $48 million deal in 2008.  That one was a bust, and one the White Sox were lucky to avoid.  They wanted the Japanese outfielder, but he wanted to be the first Japanese player on the team he signed with; thank you, Tadahito Iguchi, for choosing the Sox in 2005.  The point here is that teams gamble on talent all the time.

Except, that is, if the talent belongs to a female.  If just a fraction of the money spent on free-agent busts went into developing women baseball players, Cooperstown would be a lot more interesting place to visit a few years down the line.       

Oh, and rain has washed out the last three games of my daughter’s college career.

Sendoff

Sendoff

Our daughter was not a happy camper the twenty-four hours before Senior Day.  Sometimes, it’s best just to let them be.

In high school, Senior Day hardly fazed Clare because she knew it wasn’t going to be her last.  Four years later, all she can do is look back, like the time Coach had her sacrifice freshman year in a 1-0 game against Carthage; we needed a sweep against Carthage to make the CCIW tournament.  Clare got the bunt down, and we lost anyhow; in her first at-bat the second game, against the same pitcher, she homered.  That’s one of the things I remember.  Lord knows what Clare has been going over.

Maybe I’m wrong to say Senior Day is all backward looking.  Senior softball players can see the future, and it doesn’t have much softball in it.  Anyone can play 16-inch, but to play 12-inch (or baseball) well requires practice, and who has the time come graduation?  I have no idea how college-done athletes make the transition into everyday life.  I guess we’ll see.

The good news is that no one in the Bukowski family had a breakdown during the ceremonies.  Mother, father and daughter stood at the pitcher’s circle while the p.a. announcer read off the career stats—most homeruns in a season and a career, second-most career rbi’s and extra-base hits.  Those last two are within reach, or would have been had Mother Nature cooperated.  Oh, well.

Clare had a sizable cheering section—my sister and brother-in-law, roommates and people out of her past.  Tom Eukovich, her high school coach, came because he’s a secular saint, and so did three teammates from freshmen and sophomore years.  They were the ones shouting “Clare!  Bear!” rather than “Boo-kow-ski!”  It must be hard to go back to the old field but Genesis, Julie and Rosie did it for a friend:  Bluejays forever.    

We hosted Millikin University, a school with an absolutely atrocious home field; I swear gophers go there to practice tunneling.  And the dugouts are more of a pillbox with the machine guns taken out.  Players have to get in and out via a narrow stairway at one end; the stairs, at least in the visitors’ dugout, are no more than sagging wooden planks.  Four times in two years Clare’s Bluejays have visited, and not once did they come away with a win.  This is what you call payback time.

In the first game, Clare was nervous but still managed an rbi single (eight away from a new record) in an 11-6 win.  Game two she started off with a triple and finished in the seventh with a double off the right-field fence, scoring what proved to be the winning runs.  She is now six away from a new record.  I’m not sure which is the bigger delusion, that the weather will let us play the last three games on our schedule or that we’ll get a miraculous at-large NCAA bid.  But with that double I can dream.  

Surprise!

Let me count the reasons for not wanting to play the University of Chicago Maroons (what a name) Friday.  For openers, they’re 23-5 on the season, close to an NCAA at-large bid, and we’ve gone all of 3-11 against them since the dawn of the new millennium.  On top of that, it was senior day in Hyde Park for four starters.  So, our chances ranged between slim and none.  Guess what?  Slim took two, by scores of 2-1 and 6-2.

Again, Elmhurst’s defense is enough to drive me to wonder; the Bluejays turned two double plays in each game, with the last two as rare as a Cubs’ winning season.  I have never in my softball life seen an around-the-horn double play, from third to short to first, let alone one from first base to second, with a tag necessary to complete the play.  But we did it, not to mention scoring two of the ugliest runs ever in the top of the seventh of game one, on a bases-loaded walk and an error.  Did I mention that we held on for a change?  That was followed by lots of hitting in game two.

Clare had a strange day, with two hits, a walk and a run.  Too bad the wind took such a dislike to her.  First, it probably blew a home run foul.  Then, it kept blowing balls away from her in right field.  No damage, though, and Clare even managed to turn one of the hits into an outfield assist.

After the game, my daughter let me in on a secret:  If everything had gone the way she’d dreamed, Friday would’ve been her senior day, too.  “I always wanted to go to the U of C,” Clare told me through a fog of dollar signs.  “But the coach never looked at me at exposure tournaments, no matter what I did.”   Well, that means we get to postpone the inevitable another two days.  For that and pocketbook reasons, I’m grateful.

Flashbacks and Faith

Wednesday against Wheaton felt like old times, playing a conference foe with something on the line.  Wheaton won’t be going to the CCIW tournament next weekend, either.  Thank you, Clare.

In game one, we were down to our last out in a 3-0 game with two runners on and Clare up.  The first pitch she launched in the vicinity of the space station, over 250 feet, which in softball qualifies as Frank Howard-like.  It’s not that my daughter hits homeruns all the time, it’s just that she looks so normal (outside of the biceps and shoulders) and hits them so far.  But never fear, we managed to lose the game in extra innings, starting with two out and nobody on base.

In game two, we score a run in the first, but Clare strikes out on a two-strike changeup.  The second inning, we score a run, but our leadoff hitter Meg strikes out on a two-strike changeup.  Meg and Clare then compare notes before heading to the outfield.  Third inning, Clare’s up with a runner on, and she has two strikes on her.  Here comes the change, and there it goes a very long way.  Elmhurst wins 6-2, and everybody forms a prayer circle before going home.

We do this because Wheaton is an evangelical Protestant school and the alma mater of Billy Graham.  I don’t like us praying with them because ten years ago Wheaton fired a professor who had the temerity to convert to Catholicism.  If we’re not good enough to employ, we shouldn’t be good enough to pray with.  On this at least, my daughter agrees.       

Past and Present

There was next to no reason to stay in the present tense at Benedictine University yesterday.  The opposition conducted yet another clinic, including—wait for it—a walk-off win in extra innings; better yet, we were ahead by a run, with two out and nobody on.  Clare collected one hit on the day.  She also took a pitch off her front thigh, payback, I think, for our pitcher hitting one of their players.

God bless my daughter for the way she’s handling adversity.  As captain, she told the team after their second loss, “We have eight games left.  It’ll either go hard or easy, depending on us.”  She was particularly upset because of all the energy that went to waste in game two.  Clare told me before heading to the team bus, “Winning is what keeps the energy up.”  If she in fact does turn to coaching, these past few weeks will serve as a great lesson in how not to do things.

What kills me is the infield defense.  Things are going so bad right now we’re disproving the idea that good defense wins ballgames.  Last season, we had more errors at the corners than rbi’s; that’s totally changed.  Yesterday, I watched two different players at third base combine for fifteen chances all day without an error, and still we lose.  The best overall defense I’ve seen in four years, and still we lose.  Two years ago when we went to the CCIW tournament, we committed a whopping 71 errors.  Going into yesterday's game, we had 25.

No, better to drift off to 2006 and the first time we visited Benedictine’s home field in the boondocks of Lisle, Illinois; this was when Jennie Finch and the Chicago Bandits called the field home.  The grandstands were packed with fathers and daughters, the one pointing out things to copy, the other watching and dreaming.  We stayed for autographs after the game.  Clare was so happy, unlike now.

And I remember corn growing the other side of Maple Avenue.  That’s gone now, too.

Transitions

The memories and emotions come as they will; I try not to fight them.  Clare could be eight, or eighteen, in t-ball or travel.  Whatever, she’s always hitting, and I’m always there, watching.

I have no right to demand that it go on indefinitely; the aches and pains aren’t mine any more than the knee or shoulder wrapped with ice.  I merely watched while my child played.  It was an altogether satisfying way to pass the time for fifteen years.  Yes, it’s criminal how time flies by.

Of course, I did more than watch.  There was some coaching and yelling along with expectations:  You will do this, you will persevere.  That will form an indelible part of our relationship.  But, if I’m smart, all the yelling and tough-guy tactics will be retired because they have no place in an adult relationship. 

On the other hand, I did bring Clare into this world, and I can take her out if she does anything stupid, like move to New York or fail to utilize her God-given talents.  I mean, what’s a father for if not making sure his kid does well—and right—in the world?  

Words Fail Me--

But what would a blog be without them?  I mean, what is there to say about our third conference loss by a walk-off homerun?  It happened yesterday in the first game at Augustana.  After that, the results of the nightcap were pretty much a foregone conclusion.

That left father and daughter more or less beside themselves; Clare would not get to end her career in the postseason.  Instead, we talked, about what she could still accomplish and why Elmhurst always seems to fall short.

Clare put it like this.  “All the good teams have pitchers they can bring in as soon as we start hitting, and they can keep doing it until they find someone to shut us down.”  She’s right.  Illinois Wesleyan has five pitchers, Augustana six and Carthage an unbelievable eight.  We carry two starters along with an emergency pitcher.  “And if they can hit our starter, they get to keep on hitting.”

Augustana has incredible athletic facilities for a school of 2500 students.  Either Ken Anderson put the school on the map when he quarterbacked the Bengals to the Super Bowl in 1982, or Augustana already had a field and support facilities to die for.  Either way, Augustana softball in particular benefits from what I call the paradox of good fortune:  The more the team wins (four CCIW championships and five NCAA appearances in the past ten years), the more good players want to go there, even if it lessens the chance of their starting.

They were interested in Clare, but she picked Elmhurst for the simple fact they badly needed a power hitter.  The good news is she started all four years; the bad news is we went to the postseason only once in that span of time.  She also met the person who looks likely to become my son-in-law.

Right now, Clare is planning on going to graduate school in sports administration, then it’s on to a job where she can apply what she’s learned on and off the field.  If they’re smart, Elmhurst will hire her to help bring the paradox home.