If You Can't Say Something Nice....

We were checking the mums at a garden store when Clare called with the news—Adam Dunn is gone, traded to the A’s!  And so ends an era.

In one month short of four seasons with the White Sox, Dunn never hit better than .220 or collected 100 rbi’s.  In his first three seasons, Dunn put up strikeout totals of 177, 222 (!) and 189.  Then there was the matter of personality.  The man was all Alfred E. Neuman.  What, me worry?  It never seemed that Dunn did, or cared.

Part of it was personality, and part of it was a defense response, I’m sure.  Either way, Sox fans had to be worried when they read in the paper that Dunn wanted to be a mentor to younger players.  I mean, what was he going to do, tell them not to worry?  You don’t want a player to press, but you do want a player to be aware of the consequences of failure.  Clare certainly was every year she played baseball or softball.  She was the kid who wanted a chance and then never let go once she got it.  To her and to me, Adam Dunn was an alien from a distant galaxy by way of Houston Texas.  Dunn and the Astrodome, a perfect match.

I think the Cubs have something to do with the Sox making two moves this weekend, dumping both Dunn and the defensively challenged Alejandro De Aza (who lost a ball in the sun at Yankee Stadium last weekend.  De Aza stared up at the sun a second time before throwing the ball back to the infield.)  The North Siders are starting to bring up their much-heralded rookies, who may or may not help them break the 100-year-plus curse.  Regardless, the Cubs are going to dominate the sports section come next February, and the White Sox had better be prepared.

These two moves are a start.

The Cost of Doing Business

Yesterday, the city of Chicago held a parade for the Jackie Robinson West team, U.S. Little League champions.  There was a nice rally downtown at Millennium Park along with heartfelt sentiments expressed by the likes of the Cubs’ Theo Epstein and the Sox Kenny Williams.

Epstein told the Sun-Times that the baseball establishment needs to “ask the question how we can get young kids playing baseball again, especially in the inner city.”  The answer is, it can’t to any real extent.

In 1981, African-American players comprised 18.7 of major-league rosters; today, the figure stands at 8.3 percent.  What happened?  Basically, baseball changed its way of doing business at the same time the nature of youth sports changed.  To listen to Epstein and Williams is to hear nostalgia for the old days of kids playing the game in summer from dawn to dusk; ex-Sox player Harold Baines actually said that’s what he did growing up.  Things were different indeed in the time before free agency.

For example, as a 14-year old in 1967 I could buy a general admission ticket to a Sox game for $2, which would come out to just under $14 adjusted for inflation.  In 1981, the same ticket would have cost me $3, or $7.13 today; in other words, the cost of a ticket actually declined.  Consider what that means.

Kids could play the game and then go see their heroes on a regular basis without plunging their families into debt.  That’s just not possible anymore.  Yes, the White Sox have $7 seats in what they call the “upper corners,” but these are among the worst seats in professional sports.  It’s like Clare said about the game she went to for summer camp—you don’t even feel that you’re there.  When I was paying that $2-3, I headed straight for the left field foul pole and usually found a seat within the first three or four rows.  For all intents and purposes, I could’ve shaken hands with Tommie Agee or Ken Berry.

Now, baseball is a hyper big business, while the fan-player connection fostered by low ticket prices has been severed.  At the same time, the advent of travel sports has strained family budgets.  With Clare in travel softball, we barely had enough money for household expenses, let alone anything for a ballgame or two.  And, if money was tight for us, what’s it like in the inner city?  I’d like to know how many major-league games the Jackie Robinson kids have been to the past couple of years.

All sports are expensive, but no one complains about the cost of football or basketball tickets.  Baseball is held to a different standard as the first if not current national pastime.  It’d be nice if Jackie Robinson West could bring back the old days.  I just don’t see how.     

Roster Moves

Well, cell phones work from Indiana, which is always good news.  Clare called yesterday afternoon to tell me the White Sox sent Jordan Danks back to the minors.  An above average outfielder who might hit fifteen homeruns if someone gave him 500 at-bats, Danks and players like him are all but non-existent on big-league rosters.  Thank you, Tony La Russa.

Once upon a time, teams carried players who could come off the bench to play late-inning defense, pinch hit and/or pinch run.  This was in the era of ten-man pitching staffs.  Then along came La Russa with his lefty-lefty, righty-righty matchups.  Something has to give on a 25-player roster, and it ended up being the jack-of-all-trades like Jordan Danks.  But, hey, this weekend the Sox will have a Tony La Russa bobblehead giveaway.

With luck, before long a team will make news by going back to the future with a ten-pitcher staff and six-player bench.  After some manager steals a few wins with his extra bench players, the competition will look to copy his success.  And the legacy of Tony La Russa will undergo a downsizing that has been too long in coming.

Ghosts

I hate September, and any part of August that brushes up against it.  Growing up, I dreaded school starting, which is kind of funny for someone who went to get a Ph.D. 

For me, September always meant new classmates, new anxieties, like would I ever get off of Team Four in softball?  (Think “The Leper Colony” in Twelve O’Clock High.)  By October I had enough answers to know what to expect for the rest of the school year.  I valued unpleasant routine over uncertainty.  

Then grade school led to high school; a big September there, when I learned that it was better not to go to the john in E Wing.  And high school to college.  I didn’t even know about A/B stops on the subway; it was a good thing all trains stopped at DePaul University.  And college led to graduate school, where they forgot to tell me when school started, in part because they forgot I was enrolled for that Ph.D.

I drove Clare to school five days a week, for ten years starting in junior kindergarten.  That stopped in the September of freshman year high school, and I felt lost.  I did OK shipping her off to Elmhurst for college.  It was only a half-hour away, and I had four years of softball to look forward to.

Yesterday, we moved Clare into her apartment at Valparaiso University, where she’s going for a master’s in sports’ administration.  The house is empty now, save for memories ruined by one September or another. 

South Side Pride

I was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, so I had to be pulling for the Jackie Robinson West team in today’s U.S. Little League World Series title game against Las Vegas/Nevada.  For once, the underdog won.

I looked at the Chicago team and saw a bunch of kids, all different sizes, but kids nonetheless.  I looked at the Las Vegas team and saw a bunch of Bryce Harper wannabes.  That’s not their fault, I know; parents and coaches pushed to make the team what it was.  Still, I had flashbacks to travel ball, where the only thing better than having money is having more money.  The Chicago team nickel and dimed its way to a budget.  Las Vegas probably used a nice, thick roll of c-notes.

Las Vegas scored three runs in the top of the first and got all cocky, and I hate that.  Wait until the game is over, then celebrate, which is exactly what the Jackie Robinson team did.  Earlier in the week, one of their players showboated around the bases after hitting a homerun.  The coach made him go back and apologize to the opposing team.

That, my friends, is how you’re supposed to play the game.

Growth Chart

The New York Times has covered Mo’ne Davis to the point I wondered if they were more interested in the symbol than the child, so Wednesday’s story came as a surprise.  It focused more on health than sports.

Right now, 13-year old girls have a developmental advantage over their male counterparts.  But the odds are Davis won’t grow much taller than her present 5’4”.  If so, it’s unlikely we’ll be hearing much about her on the baseball diamond two or three years from now.

But as one of the experts in the story pointed out, she could still end up throwing a 90-mile an hour fastball.  And if not her, then another girl, maybe a six-footer we’ve never heard of from International Falls or Bisbee.  What the Little League World Series has shown above all is the existence of an audience ready to root for the next Jackie Robinson, if only baseball would exert itself to find her.

Mo’ne Davis met Rob Manfred, the next baseball commissioner, earlier this week.  I wonder what she told him.  I wonder if he listened.

Where Have You Gone, Norman Rockwell?

 The Little League World Series has moved from Norman Rockwell to ESPN Live, with instant replay.  Is that necessarily a good thing?

Yes, pitcher Mo’ne Davis getting on the cover of Sports Illustrated could really help girls in baseball, or not.  All of a sudden, this thirteen-year old is dealing with a world of media attention; older athletes have wilted under less pressure.  What happens if and when Davis stumbles?  I mean, even Sandy Koufax and Jennie Finch had their off days on the mound.  Or what happens if Davis does well next year but doesn’t return to Williamsport?  Will somebody stick a mic in her face to ask how she feels?

What it comes down to for me is reading rather than watching.  I want to read about Davis and the Jackie Robinson team from Chicago, but I don’t want to watch them on TV.  Why?  Because THEY’RE 13 YEARS OLD!  No one outside of family and friends should be watching.  To put kids on television like this turns them into nothing more than so much programming to help fill up a Monday night.

When Clare was in sixth grade, I coached her in a fall-ball league.  We had a pitcher who belonged in the Little League Hall of Fame.  The kid’s fastball knocked the mitt off the first two boys who tried to catch him, and he ended up striking out 27 of the 29 batters he faced that autumn.  ESPN and Sports Illustrated here we come, or so he and his father thought.  But I knew not to call.

The kid loved to pitch batting practice, if only to humiliate teammates.  Of the 12-13 players I had, only one could make solid contact off of him.  Yup, it was Clare.  That told me something about both the boy and the girl.  One went on to play in college while the other wasn’t even the best pitcher on his high school team.  Failure happens all the time in sports.

And an exploitive media can only make it worse.