What Goes Around...

Outside, the weather is November frightful, raw, cold and wet.  In a way, I feel good about that.  Finally, high school and college football players can see what it’s like to play spring sports in the Midwest.

Today might be too wet for softball, or not.  If I live to be a hundred and they bury me in Death Valley, my body will still be shivering from that game Clare played freshman year at Judson University.  There was enough water in right field for regular barge traffic, I swear.  And nothing like starting a doubleheader, with March barely in the rearview mirror, at 5 PM.  By the time the second game was over, 40 degrees would’ve felt warm.

This spring/fall weather of November, then, is a staple during the Illinois state high school playoffs.  Technically, yesterday’s Prep Bowl doesn’t count; it’s more of a grudge match rooted in the animosity that Chicago Catholic and public schools once had for one another.  Lo and behold, my alma mater St. Laurence (a suburban school that now qualifies for the Bowl because, well, rules change) won the Bowl yesterday in a 35-34 squeaker against Simeon.  Too bad it was just cold and gray.  Drizzle can really help cement memories.

In which case, it must’ve rained most of my four years at St. Laurence.  As God is my witness, the football coach recruited players in the corridors between classes.  “Hey, kid, you got a pulse?  Why don’t you try out for the team?”  I got asked once early sophomore year while waiting for an admission slip to my second-period class.  I made sure never to miss the bus again after that day.  There was no telling if I could decline such an invitation twice and live to tell the tale.

I went to a few games freshman year and a lot of games senior year.  Early my freshman year of college, somebody I knew from St. Laurence stopped by the house to see if I wanted to go a game with him.  I’d moved on, he hadn’t.  No, I said, offering some kind of excuse.  And that was the last I saw of Stan, going on fifty years now.

But here I am, looking out the window to see weather that reminds me of my daughter in spring and my life an eternity ago.  It must be all that turkey I ate on Thursday.

A Slow Death

Like I said, I went to bed Wednesday before the end of the Bulls-Warriors game on the West Coast.  Naturally, there was no score in yesterday’s print edition.  No, I’m supposed to go to Trib website for that.  If this is the future, somebody fit the Trib for its coffin.

Today, two days after the game was played, the print edition ran an AP story while the online edition went with coverage from the Mercury News, which is a Trib property.  My point is that the Trib didn’t bother to send a beat reporter to travel with the team; fans who cared enough could read about the game from a Warriors’ beat writer.  No, thank you.

Once upon a time, the Trib had a foreign desk and Washington bureau.  Oh, and a full sports’ section.  But those days are long gone.  

Abandon Ship

I checked on the score of the Bulls’ game on the West Coast last night before going to bed; it was tied at 69 in the third quarter against the Warriors, the worst team in the NBA at 3-15.  Check that.  The Warriors are now 4-15 after beating the visitors from Chi-town by a score of 104-90.  Short of divine intervention, the 6-13 Bulls are headed to another lost season.  If you’ll pardon the holiday pun, it’s time to pull the plug on this turkey.

The team rebuild is going nowhere in its third year.  That should mean bye-bye to Gar Forman, the GM who collected the “talent”; coach Jim Boylen, who talks a far better game than he executes from the sideline; and the players.  I’d start with the core.

Yes, guard Zach LaVine is a scoring machine; he’s also a black hole on offense.  The ball goes in to LaVine, and it hardly ever comes out.  The man is also a cypher on defense, which, to his credit, Boylen has called him out on.  As for the other key piece of the rebuild, Lauri Markkanen is seven feet of pure Jello.  Markkanen looked good as a rookie two years ago.  Now, he just looks lost.

The good news is that both Reinsdorfs are reportedly unhappy with the lack of progress shown on the court; finally, father and son appear to be fed up.  Heads will roll, as they should, but that doesn’t mean anything will get better because there seems to be karma at work here.  Those six championship teams led by Michael Jordan were great beyond measure.  Now, the mediocrity (or worse) has to be the same.

Death by Gibber

              Much if not all of what is killing baseball can be found in this sentence I ran across in a story that mentioned Yolmer Sanchez in today’s The Athletic: “The best defensive rating of any American League second baseman may not be enough to cancel out a woeful 74 wRC+ offensive figure in 2019.”  Say what? 

 Oh, “weighted runs created plus.”  That really rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?  This is what analytics does, reduce players down to an equation (and you should see the one that produces wRC+).  Casey at the Bat?  Why, wRC+.  The Sultan of Swat?  Only if sRC+ says so.  And Yolmer Sanchez?  The lazy money’s on wRC+.

Baseball is in danger of turning scouting and coaching over to the equation crowd.  There is no way on God’s good earth that wRC+ can measure what a player like Sanchez brings to a team.  You want to know what organizations will do the best in this benighted age of analytics?

The ones that never lose touch of the human element in the game, that’s who.

Strictly Business

Lead the NL in passed balls for three out of the last six seasons, and get yourself a nice $73-million contract.  Win the AL Gold Glove at second base, and get yourself released.  Such is the business of baseball, with Yasmani Grandal coming to the White Sox and Yolmer Sanchez most likely leaving.

There is a possibility, however remote, that Yolmer will resign with the Sox, though at a lower figure than the $6.2 million he was projected to make in arbitration.  All it will take is no team offering anything close to that figure; the Sox not being jerks in their offer; and Sanchez preferring the known to the unknown.  The 12-year old in me hopes something along those lines will happen.

Ditto my boy Daniel Palka, who deserves a break after going through what can only be described as baseball hell.  Palka hit 27 homeruns as a rookie in 2018 vs. 2 last season; and let’s not forget the .107 BA, though I’m sure Daniel would like to.  The Sox removed Palka from the 40-man roster last week and outrighted him to Triple-A Charlotte.  No doubt, some team will offer Palka an invite to spring training, maybe even the Sox.

I mean, a 12-year old can hope.

By the Numbers

Maybe White Sox fans are unhappy by nature; much of what I have to say about the team would seem to point in that direction.  Or maybe baseball fans are just GM wannabes.  Or both.

Anyway, I ran across a number of complaints online last week after the Sox signed first baseman Jose Abreu to a three-year, $50 million deal.  The Twitterverse complained that Abreu’s WAR the past few years didn’t justify the move and his signing would impede the development of top prospect Andrew Vaughn, also a first baseman.  Holy Rick Hahn.

Abreu isn’t the only player in town to run afoul of the analytics crowd.  Among others is Cubs’ catcher Willson Contreras, for his poor framing skills.  To frame or not to frame, that is the question, and anyone who doesn’t gets run out of town.  Also joining Contreras in the poor-framing club is James McCann.  Buy these two bums a one-way ticket to Podunk, or so the analytics would dictate.

Leadership?  Can’t measure it, so it doesn’t exist.  Clutch hitting?  Can’t attach a number to it, so it can’t matter.  Calls a great game?  Not if he can’t frame pitches.  And on it goes, until someone puts analytics in its place.

That would be me, if only I ran a team.

When Lightning Strikes Twice

Well, that certainly didn’t take long.  No sooner had I given my considered opinion on the Cubs hiring Rachel Folden as a rookie-league hitting coach, the Yankees follow suit with the hire of Rachel Balkovec as a hitting instructor in their minor league system.  And for the second time in two days I find myself offering two, as opposed to three, cheers.

The 32-year old Balkovec has a master’s degree in kinesiology (which Clare has her bachelor’s in) and another master’s in something the NYT called “human movement sciences.”  Somehow, I doubt if that involves a “see ball, hit ball” approach.

Meanwhile, Folden was quoted in today’s Tribune saying, “A good, efficient swing is a good, efficient swing, no matter what sport [softball or baseball] you’re playing.  I don’t think there’s a difference.  How you approach might be a little different, just based on who is throwing that day and just like it is in baseball.  But I don’t think there is anything that needs to be taught differently.  Efficiency is efficiency.”  Except when it isn’t.

The background of both these new baseball hires and Folden’s comments especially remind me of what a hundred years ago was called “scientific baseball,” a philosophy whereby players were pretty much expected to go by the book every time: always bunt the runner along, always look to steal, always think squeeze with a runner on third.  This isn’t scientific as much as it is robotic.  Or maybe you say “efficient.”

To me, the ideal MLB pitching or hitting instructor has career stats to back up a particular coaching approach.  Obviously, women don’t and can’t have this “cred” until they get to play in the big leagues (though it would be interesting to see if any MLB team would let Jennie Finch or Jessica Mendoza apply their softball expertise to baseball).  Consciously or not, Foldon and Balkovec are approaching their new jobs the way Walt Hriniak did.  Don’t remember Hriniak?

Well, once upon a time, from the mid-80s to the mid-90s, he was the acknowledged hitting guru of major league baseball.  As hitting coach for the Red Sox (four years) and White Sox (seven years), Hriniak taught an approach that among other facets featured the top hand coming off the bat at the end of a swing.  Carl Yastrzemski, Wade Boggs and Frank Thomas loved Hriniak, Ted Williams didn’t.  (Sammy Sosa may or may not have been traded by the White Sox to the Cubs in part because he refused to follow the Hriniak method).  Did Hriniak turn Yaz, Boggs and Thomas into HOFers?  You can argue that question until the cows come home.  It is worth noting the Sox brought back Hriniak to work with Michael Jordan, he of the career .202 minor-league batting average.

I definitely want to see women in major league baseball; my daughter would be a perfect fit.  But I also think there’s a danger of turning hitting instruction into pseudo-science.  I’ll always contend that Bill Robinson had the right idea as a hitting coach.  As a hitter, Robinson was a bust until the age of 30, after which point he collected most of his career 166 homeruns and 641 RBIs.  As a coach, Robinson believed, “A good hitting instructor is able to mold his teachings to the individual.  If a guy stands on his head, you perfect that.”

That approach allows for a Tony Batista, Mike Easler or Kevin Youklis.  I doubt the drive for efficiency will allow for much of anything beyond robot hitters.