A Year and a Day

A year ago yesterday, I walked my daughter down the aisle and then told the reception audience how that day marked the ninth anniversary of Clare hitting five homeruns at a travel tournament.  Yesterday, we were both in downstate Carbondale to celebrate a relative’s wedding.  Of course, I reminded Clare that it was now ten years since she’d put on that offensive show in Joliet.

 

It takes around five hours to drive from Chicago to southern Illinois.  Not one softball or baseball diamond we passed on either day was in use; that’s worrisome.  The White Sox called up Dylan Cease, who’ll start on Wednesday; that’s exciting.  I learned the news driving home.  My daughter called my wife, who put her on speaker phone.  I guess you could say we’re a family of serious baseball fans.

Random Thoughts

I wonder if there’s a correlation between how a fan felt about the 1992 U.S. Olympic “Dream Team” in basketball and ballplayers celebrating homeruns.  I didn’t particularly like the Dream Team, and I certainly don’t like the celebrating.

 

As for the Olympics, start off with the fact that it was never a fair fight, Michael Jordan and friends against mere mortals.  The Olympic ideal at one point was rooted in an athlete’s amateur status, Soviet Union and satellites excepted.  That’s what made beating the Russians in hockey in 1960 and 1980 so much fun, our amateurs upset their de facto professionals.  To me, the Dream Team was a bunch of Americans acting like Soviets on the world stage.  As for bat flips and whatnot, well, this is an old dog unwilling to go with that new trick.

 

All of which leads to the U.S. women’s team in the World Cup.  To me, they’re acting too much like the Dream Team.  Celebrating every goal in a 13-0 blowout of Thailand?  Really?  I get wanting to be seen as an equal to male athletes.  I didn’t know that meant acting like male athletes at their worst.

 

Good and Bad, Happy and Sad

We had dinner with our daughter and her husband last night, which is to say the self-designated Palka Sleuth was on the trail.  “He didn’t start for Charlotte tonight.  Do you think he’s been called up?” asked my one and only child.

 

Check and see if the opposing pitcher was a righty or lefty, I told her.  “Righty.”  Is Matt Skole, another lefty power hitter for Charlotte, starting?  “Yes.”  Then I’d say Palka is being recalled.  And about a half hour ago, it became official.  In case I missed it, Clare called with the news.

 

Great for Daniel Palka.  He took the demotion back in April without making a scene and now has hit his way back.  Palka both got and deserved a second chance.  Now he has to do something with it.  The White Sox don’t care how popular he is with fans; they want immediate results, the more the better because they’re not invested in him the way they are with players they’ve drafted.  Tomorrow, I have to go to a wedding in the southern tip of Illinois.  My daughter is going, too, so the two of us will be sitting at a reception checking Game Day to check on our boy’s progress.

 

The Sox also brought up—purchased the contract of—33-year old left-handed pitcher Ross Detwiler, who has a career mark of 23-42 to go with a 4.36 ERA.  In other words, the organization is not developing young pitchers ready for the majors.  No doubt they’re all too busy checking boxes to learn how to pitch effectively.

 

But we can always hope for lightning in a bottle. 

 

Wavelength

Wavelength

 

I can’t listen to baseball on the radio anymore.  For a while now, it freezes me up.  I’m serious.  I can be driving in the car, and Ed Farmer or Darrin Jackson is describing the action, and that’s all I hear, as opposed, to say, the guy in back of me pounding down on his horn.  For better or worse, I am now at a point in my life where I prefer to watch the game on TV, the sound mostly off.  Turn the sound off the radio, and, well, you get the point.

 

Yesterday, though, I had to drive with the Sox-Sox, Chicago-Boston game on.  I was going to lunch with two of my oldest friends, and they’re not the type to humor a person, even if it is his car.  So, I got to listen to the eighth inning, when the White Sox defense combined with the relief pitching to turn a two-run lead into a one-run deficit.  But at no time did I wrap the car around a lamppost, then or in the ninth inning when manager Rick Renteria called for the hit and run with Leury Garcia, only there was no hit from Yolmer Sanchez; Garcia out at second.  Again, no driving the car into a lamppost.  Then Sanchez singled and, wouldn’t you know it, we arrive at our destination, a place so hip they wouldn’t think of having a TV turned to the Sox game.

 

Somewhere between the poutine and the main course, my one friend got a text the Chicago Sox had won; the two-run homer by Jose Abreu that followed Sanchez’s single I didn’t get to hear on the radio.  Oh, well, you take the good with the bad.  The White Sox don’t drop three in Boston, but they finally decide to drop Yonder Alonso from the roster.  [As I write these words, my daughter calls from work with the news.  These are indeed happy times for one White Sox family.]  That means Alonso final at-bat with the White Sox will be a pinch-hit double play in the eighth inning.  How sadly appropriate.

.

“Do I dare think it?” Clare asked over the phone.  Palka back in the bigs?  We can only hope.  If the White Sox can rectify one mistake, maybe they’ll go for two.  Anything is possible in a rebuild.     

Mission Accomplished

Last week, the White Sox were hovering around .500, and skipper Rick Renteria didn’t want his players to lose their focus on the task at hand, which is a rebuild.  If the team were to break .500, how could the front office maintain the fiction that it was too early for moves to get into the postseason?  Well, mission accomplished.

 

Right now, the Sox are five under and have a good shot at nine under by the end of the weekend; that should be enough cold water to put things back in order.  Only one problem, though.  Bad things have a way of happening when you mix in mediocre—and I’m being charitable here—pitching with your position prospects.  Yes, it’s what I call the Shields Effect for how Charlie Tilson got injured chasing down balls hit against then-Sox starter James Shields.

 

This year, Eloy Jimenez injured himself banging into a fence trying to catch crap thrown by Carlos Rodon.  Now, you can add shortstop Tim Anderson to the list.  Last night, the White Sox decided to go with starter-by-committee, a sure sign that there isn’t much pitching talent in the minors, Dylan Cease excepted, and we all know he’s busy checking his boxes.  How fun it must be for Anderson, Jimenez, Jose Abreu and Yoan Moncada to watch the likes of Juan Minaya and Jose Ruiz turn a lead into a deficit at Fenway.  Or not.

 

Anyway, Ruiz had just given up a double and two-run homer in the fifth inning when J.D. Martinez hit a ball in the hole that Anderson reached and got to first with an off-balance throw.  But wet infield dirt made for treacherous footing and led to an ankle sprain.  Maybe it was inevitable.  Or maybe if Ruiz was the power pitcher general manager Rick Hahn thinks he is, he would have retired the side on two punchouts and a popup.  We’ll never know.

 

Theoretically, injuries can turn into opportunities, and the White Sox could call up a prospect like Danny Mendick or Nick Madrigal.  Then again, they may not be done checking their boxes.

Coach

Clare first went to her hitting coach the summer between eighth grade and high school.  She’d fallen into a rut, game after game of hitting the ball back to the pitcher, and one of the dads on the travel team suggested she go to the same hitting coach his daughter used.  My daughter fell in love with the idea of an hour’s worth of uninterrupted batting practice.  I tried not to sour on the idea of having to pay $60 an hour for someone else to pitch my kid.

 

Truth be told, Clare and Coach formed a bond that lasted through college.  The first three years of high school, she pretty much did things on her own, outside of what her varsity and travel coaches preached.  Senior year, though, she wanted back with Coach and even offered to help pay for lessons.  So, back she went.

 

They talked about “visualizing” at-bats, “power loads” and the “power triangle.”  I had little idea what any of it meant, but, given the number of homeruns my daughter hit over the next five years, I had little reason to complain.  Then Clare graduated, and, suddenly, there was no need of a hitting coach.  Coach had mentioned at one point how he might branch off on his own and wanted to hire Clare as an assistant.  Now, that would have been interesting.

 

Several years ago, Coach had a family tragedy that put the world of athletic wins and losses into perspective.  And now a son of his has hit a homerun in the NCAA D-I Baseball World Series.  Clare couldn’t be happier for her old coach.  Maybe she even visualized doing the very same thing herself.

Tapping the Brakes

Oh, we wouldn’t want the White Sox to get ahead of themselves with their rebuild, now would we?  Things were apparently getting out of hand last week after Eloy Jimenez hit a ninth-inning homerun to beat the Cubs and move the South Siders to within one game of .500.  According to yesterday’s Tribune, that’s when manager Rick Renteria stepped in to slow things down.

 

“I have to defuse [expectations] a little bit, trying not to get these guys too pumped up, allow them to stay focused on the job they need to do between the lines.  And I hope that makes sense.”  It really doesn’t matter one way or the other.  Renteria is a good company man doing what the front office tells him to.  If general manager Rick Hahn didn’t write those words, Renteria did a spot-on impersonation.

 

How exactly do you keep a team from getting ahead of itself?  Why, you start Odrisamer Despaigne and play Yonder Alonso against the Rangers in Texas, that’s how.  Despaigne, he of the 0-2 record and 9.45 ERA in three starts, was staked to a 4-0, first-inning lead, only to give it all back by the third inning in a game the Sox lost, 6-5.   Despaigne called giving up the lead “unacceptable.”  No kidding.

 

As for Alonso, he’s living proof that the Sox will never admit to an error in acquiring a player (See: Adam Dunn).  He’s making $8 million this year, with a $9 million option for next season.  The buyout will cost the Sox $1 million, a bargain given that Alonso is hitting .178 with 53 strikeouts in 214 at-bats.  It only seems that he’s hit into that many double plays.

 

Yesterday, Alonso made a two-out error in the second inning that preceded a two-run homer.  Then, in the top of the eighth innings, runners in scoring position with one out and the Sox down by a run, Renteria kept the left-handed hitting Alonso to face lefty reliever Brett Martin.  Texas was playing the infield back, conceding the tying run.  No matter.  Alonso struck out on a 2-2 pitch.  Oh, and he hit into a double play in an eventual 7-4 Sox loss.

 

So, that’s how you keep a team from getting ahead of itself.  Again, I blame this all on my daughter.  If she had found a way to keep playing softball, I’d have something better to do than watch this “rebuild.”  Remember to dot that I.