STILL DREAMING

                If you read the sports pages for more than the scores you might have come across an article about Curie High School of Chicago a couple of weeks ago. It seems that the school’s basketball team, which had posted a 24-win, 1-loss season and won the city’s Public League championship, had the trophy taken away, and its wins turned into losses, because it had played the entire campaign with seven (!) of its 12 players academically ineligible.

               

                From there the story only got stranger. According to news accounts the ineligibility was uncovered not by the Southwest Side school but by an anonymous phone call to the city’s school administration.  That body completed its investigation the day the team was to play in the championship game, but instead of blowing the whistle immediately it let the contest go on, because, well, the tickets had been sold and the TV cameras were in place and it didn’t want to spoil the party.

               

               Further news coverage revealed that city teams were supposed to submit eligibility lists before each game, but the practice had lapsed from disuse.  It also turned out that the eligibility issue might have been avoided if the school had submitted “individual study plans” for the underachieving seven, attesting that they couldn’t handle high school work and needed special help, but nobody had thought to do that.

                An additional layer of lunacy was attained when the Illinois High School Association, the state’s governing body, stepped in to declare that the seven could play in state-tournament qualifying rounds because their grades, while under the “C” average the city requires, made them eligible under its more-lenient rules. But then it looked again and ruled out two starters, and Curie was eliminated in the first round of state play, its season going into the record books at an inglorious 0-26.

                Public and journalistic reaction to the unfolding tale mostly was one of outrage—over the school-officials’ actions that stripped away Curie’s victories and title. Like many things these days the issue had a racial twist (team photos show that 11 of the 12 players are identifiably black), and Jesse Jackson, who lives in Chicago, was quick to leap to the lads’ defense. “[They] didn’t break any rules; adults didn’t do their work,” he declared. 

                “These kids aren’t in gangs. They’re not engaged in violence,” he added, making the curious assertion that in this day and age the absence of vice should be regarded as a virtue.

                As the days went by and the blogosphere went into action, a few voices were heard to say that, maybe, the laggard seven would have been better off spending less time on their shooting and dribbling and more with their schoolbooks. People with good memories might recall the Rev. Mr. Jackson making a similar point decades ago when he proposed “learn baby, learn” as a counterpoint to the “burn baby, burn” mantra that was fueling the urban violence of the late 1960s and early ‘70s. 

                But while the world is older than it was then, apparently it’s not smarter when it comes to getting high-school jocks to view their talents in the context of a broader life plan.  The upshot is that for too many the visions of athletic wealth and glory—the “Hoop Dreams” of the widely viewed 1994 movie documentary of that name—is a snare and a delusion, steering kids away from more promising paths for the like-getting-hit-by-lightning chance for a National Basketball Association career.

                Indeed, if anything the disconnect between athletics and education is wider than it used to be, and our nation’s colleges are complicit in the development. I refer to their reaction to the NBA’s dictum of 2005 that it would henceforth draft only players who were at least 19 years old and out of high school for a year.

 The league did that because it had grown weary of taking the gamble involved in drafting kids right out of high school. That was understandable for an entity that exists to present entertainment and profit therefrom.  The colleges have (or should have) other, loftier aims, but opted to accommodate the NBA by setting aside classroom space for young men who intend merely to double-park in academe before getting on with their “real” lives. Thus, we have the “one-and-done” phenomenon that has become the main topic of conversation during every NCAA basketball tournament since the rule went into effect.

Interestingly, the Curie team was led by Cliff Alexander, a 6-foot-9 center who, as one of the top-half-dozen recruiting prospects in his class, is a prime “one-and-done” prospect, and whose signing- day nod to the U of Kansas was televised nationally.  The names of the players whom the city and state declared ineligible weren’t made public, so it’s not known if Alexander’s was among them. This was an instance where protecting the privacy of some tarred all.

Hoop dreamers might get a dose of reality if they use their computers to learn about the later lives of William Gates and Arthur Agee, the two Chicago high-school prospects featured in the “Hoop Dreams” film. Gates’ prowess earned him a scholarship to Marquette, where he played but did not star. He got no closer to the NBA than a tryout camp and spent almost a decade in sporadic employment before getting a divinity degree and becoming pastor of a South Side church.

 Agee played in junior college and at Arkansas State and likewise bounced from job to job after his college days, apparently degreeless. His latest venture is a clothing company called “Hoop Dreams” which offers t-shirts for sale on-line. He also gives talks to youth groups in which he tries “to help kids to understand that their role models shouldn’t be professional athletes but their parents at home.”

That’s good advice if the parents really are at home, and on the job. Too many aren’t.

               

               

                

PACKING IT IN

                Some years ago I was in Las Vegas to write about a boxing match and staying in a hotel just off the city’s Strip. Sugar Ray Leonard, then-recently retired from the ring and doing a TV stint, was in the same hotel. One morning around 10 I left on my pre-fight reporting rounds and saw him on the place’s tennis courts, hitting balls spit out by a machine. He was still out there when I returned four hours later, causing me to conclude that he was seriously bored and not likely to stay retired for long. Sure enough, after a couple of months he announced his intention to fight again.

             

            The recollection was stirred by Derek Jeter’s recent announcement that he’d be leaving the baseball fields at the end of the season just ahead. Jeter has had about the perfect baseball career, with lots of hits (3,316), World Series rings (five) and individual honors in his 19 big-league seasons so far. He’s also survived the New York news-media cauldron without being scalded, no small feat for a single man with a reportedly active social life.

It would be nice to say that the Yankee hero is going out on top, but it wouldn’t be true. He could have done that after breaking an ankle in the playoffs of his remarkable 2012 season, in which he challenged for Most Valuable Player honors at age 38, but he returned for what would be an injury-plagued 2013 during which he appeared in just 17 games, and probably will do only part-time duty this time around.  The fact that he was paid $17 million last season and is due to receive $12 million in this one—on top of the more than $200 million he’d previously earned-- no doubt figured into his calculations.  Hey, a guy’s got to pay the rent.

Quitting at the peak of one’s game is an ideal in sports, but it’s rarely realized. I can think of only four men who’ve done it—Rocky Marciano, Jim Brown, Sandy Koufax and Pete Sampras-- and Koufax deserves an asterisk because while he won 27 games and had a 1.73 earned run average as an L.A. Dodger in 1966, the last year he played, the great lefty’s pitching elbow was so sore he had to scratch his left ear with his right hand for many years thereafter. 

The truth is that most athletes struggle to continue as long as they can in their sports, at any level. Contrary to popular belief, big-time pros on average have short careers, ranging from about 3 1/2 years in the National Football League to about 5 years in Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association, and the baseball minors and their hoops counterparts abroad are littered with ex-big leaguers trying to hang on for another season, and another.

 Even some of the greats aren’t immune to the “keep on keepin’ on” syndrome. The above-mentioned Leonard abandoned and returned to his brutal sport three or four times depending on how you counted, and Michael Jordan twice “retired” from the Chicago Bulls (in 1993 and ’98) but had to give basketball one more try with the woebegone Washington Wizards (2001-03) before hanging it up for good. I’d bet that he’d give it another shot if the phone rang today.

The money the big-timers make these days is mighty motivation for sticking around as long as possible, but the reluctance to leave the sporting life preceded that. Ask an old jock what he misses most about his playing days and he’ll probably tell you it’s the camaraderie he enjoyed with his fellow athletes, but the loss of applause and status certainly are other reasons. Perhaps more important, playing either team or individual sports means sticking to strict regimens of workouts, practices, games and travel, and while active jocks might chafe under their requirements they usually miss them when they’re gone.  The question “What shall I do today?” is one most of us quickly learn to answer for ourselves, but for many ex-athletes it’s confounding.

Athletes usually are on their way out by their mid-30s, the time when most people’s careers are gaining steam. That puts them weirdly out of synch with their contemporaries. The idea of going back to school to continue the educations sports careers interrupted can be off-putting for a similar reason; would you like to sit in classes daily with people about half your age?

Given today’s salary levels for even fledgling major-leaguers (baseball’s minimum annual salary is $500,000, the NFL’s is $420,000), one would think that a few years in the bigs would set up someone for life, but, sadly, that’s often not the case. Young jocks tend to be unsophisticated financially and, thus, easy marks for dubious get-richer-quicker schemes. Wishing to be good guys, they’re often eager to share their good fortune with friends and relatives, a ruinous practice when indulged in to excess. And—oh, yeah—they tend to spend big, with the Mercedes dealer their first stop after their initial bank deposit.

In a way, athletes might have had it better in the old (pre-1975) days, before the salary explosion. Most jocks then understood that the game-playing would be brief, and planned accordingly. I once did a piece on Sonny Hertzberg, an early NBA star (1946-51) who, as an executive with the Wall Street firm of Bear Stearns, conducted league-sponsored investment classes for later-day NBAers. “Everybody in my day had an off-season job or sideline because we knew we’d have to go out and earn a living sooner or later,” he told me in 2001. “It may sound funny but I think we had fewer fears about our futures than players now do.”

   

BATTLEBALL

                My first paying job in journalism was at age 19 with the Champaign-Urbana Courier in the home cities of the University of Illinois, where I was a student. I received $1.25 an hour to cover the Champaign High School teams. I felt myself richly rewarded, the sum being more than adequate to pay for gas for my ‘53 Ford, movies and almost-nightly trips to the Chuck Wagon, my diner of choice. Life was good.

                

               One of my first “enterprise” features came in 1958, my second year on the job. In a football game that season, a player on the CHS team kicked a field goal, about a 20-yarder. The feat was so unusual I asked around to see if anyone could remember the last time it had been done locally. No one could with certainty. I searched the paper’s ragged files and found that a field goal had been kicked against the school four or five years earlier but that no Champaign lad had done it during that period. I already knew that even kicked points-after-touchdown were rare at the high-school level, so using the FG as a point of departure my piece investigated the sad state of the placekicking art. I recall it being well received.

                Of late, of course, every decent-sized high school has a good kicker, and the specialty has blossomed fully in the colleges and pros. Indeed, one of football’s seminal events was the day in 1961 that a young Pete Gogolak kicked a 41-yard field goal for Cornell University using the “soccer-style” movement he’d learned on the pitches of his native Hungary.  By adding hip torque to leg strength, the technique vastly increased kickers’ range and accuracy. Its later development by Gogolak and others at the pro level revolutionized the game.

                Now a counter-revolution is stirring, led by the National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell, of all people. As last season wound down he noted aloud that kicked points-after-touchdown in the league had become so monotonously successful that they might better be eliminated, replaced by the awarding of seven points for a TD or giving the scoring team the option of going for two points with a play from scrimmage while forfeiting a point for failure. Since the commish’s musings are taken as seriously as Chairman Mao’s once were, league officials can be expected to consider the change before next season commences.

                To that I say fine, but why stop at examining just extra points? I’ve long held that football would be a better game without the foot, one with no kicking at all, punting as well as placekicking. You could start each game by putting the ball at midfield, lining up a player from each team on the 40s and letting them race and claw for possession. The winner’s team would possess the spheroid until it goes four-downs-and-out or scores a touchdown. Then the other guys would give it a go from the point of surrender or from its own 30-yard line after a TD, back and forth until time expires, with the usual quarter- and half-time breaks.

                Extra points would be regular plays from the 2 1/2-yard line, just like they’re sometimes done now. Field goals are copouts and dull to boot (they’re either good or they’re not), and no big loss. No punting would enhance the importance of every play and make fourth-down plays—the game’s most exciting—more frequent.  With no way out under the rules, coaches would have to shed the play-calling conservatism that soddens the present-day game. It’d be a true 100-yard war without quarter. Call it “Battleball” and let the boys go at it!

                I’m sure your eyes are rolling by now, but steady them if you can. If eliminating kicked extra points is justifiable by their frequency of success (99.something% in recent years), field goals haven’t been far behind.  In the years immediately before 1974,  when NFL goal post were placed at the back of the end zone and their widths narrowed to 18 ½ feet, field goals were good roughly 50% of the time. Now the overall success rate is at about 85% and climbing.

Field goals of 50 yards or more were rare in the 1960s and ‘70s but last season they were good about 65% of the time. Six of the 14 NFL FGs of 60-yards or more were kicked in the last three seasons, including Matt Prater’s 2013 record 64-yarder. At the rate things are going, any team that reaches midfield soon will be in scoring range, offering reward for slight achievement. Is this the sort of lesson we should be teaching our children?

              NFL kickoffs already have come in for deemphasis, with player safety the objective. In 2011 the league moved the kickoff spot up five yards to the 35-yard line; in consequence, the number of touchbacks rose to about 44% last season from about 16% the season before the change. The complete absence of the play, with its high-velocity collisions, only could aid the league’s effort to reduce concussions and other serious injuries.   

Taking the foot out of football would have other beneficial results. One would be to eliminate kickers, specialists who fit into the game about as well would Chihuahuas at a convention of Dobermans. With few exceptions kickers are pale, frail guys whose lives seem at risk every time they make contact with the big-bodied types who staff most of the other positions. If not for the money, most probably would be glad to be elsewhere.

                

                Finally, by calling the sport “Battleball,” the U.S. could join the rest of the world to whom “football” means the real game of the foot. That would erase the name “soccer” (derived from the old term AsSOCiation Football), one of the ugliest words around.

Addition by subtraction! Who could ask for more?

               

                 

               

               

                 

WORDS TO LIVE BY

                Old people love to give advice, and since I turn age 76 tomorrow, and thus qualify firmly as old, I am indulging myself with what follows.  Stick with me and your life will improve, or your money back.

--Smile when another car passes you on the road because you never want to be the fastest guy out there.

--When someone is tailgating you slow down gradually by taking your foot off the accelerator. The jerk will go around you and bother someone else.

--In your first visit to any Italian restaurant, order lasagna. If it’s not good don’t return because it’s unlikely that the place will make anything else well, either.

--If you’re writing anything that could get you into trouble, hold it overnight before sending.

--Be grateful if you’re happy in the water because swimming is the best exercise. It provides a full-body workout without stressing your frame.

--Netflix is the best company. It offers 100,000-odd movie or TV titles, its delivery system is seamless and you can keep the discs as long as you like. Plus, when you need to call, an American will answer.

--If I had my life to live over I’d pay more attention in foreign-language classes and take better care of my teeth.

--Wear as few clothes as possible. I like Arizona because I can get away with shorts, t-shirts and sandals nine months of the year.

--When your wife calls you “sweetheart” you can be pretty sure something else is coming.

--The only way to know what’s going on is to read the New York Times. You may not agree with its editorials but it’s the only U.S. newspaper that covers the world.

--Playing the horses makes you an expert on your own failings, but the knowledge does you little good.

--If you have a choice, get in the line with the fewest women.

--Don’t expect star athletes to be outstanding (or even upstanding) human beings. Most have been spoiled since early childhood and behave accordingly.

--Professional sports teams are businesses and make most decisions with an eye to the bottom line. Remember that before you give one your heart.

--Credit cards are a great deal if you can pay your balances in full every month. That way you get a free loan with every purchase. Otherwise you might as well be borrowing from the Mafia.

--The more any program strives for “fairness” the more complicated and less workable it becomes. I’m thinking specifically of Obamacare and the NFL’s TV-review system.

--When someone prefaces a remark with “with all due respect” or “no offense meant,” you know you’re going to be dissed.

-- Anyone who holds up big companies as efficiency models for government probably never worked in a big company.

--I don’t carry a cell phone and don’t feel a lack. Very few calls can’t be returned an hour or even a day later.  (Yes, I’m retired, but I worked without one for close to 50 years.)

--The best seats in any baseball park are behind home plate, from where the action spreads out before you and you can see what the pitchers are throwing. Surprisingly, they’re often among the cheapest and easiest to get. My favorite ones in the upper deck at Chase Field in Phoenix usually sell for $16 per, about one-fifth of what some people downstairs are paying for inferior views.

--The best seat for any football game is in front of your TV set.

--If one of your elected representatives does something you really don’t like, let him or her know about it. It probably won’t make a difference but will make you feel better.

--I rarely sign up for anything where I pay up front and must hustle to receive the benefits. Disneyland makes big money from that system.

--Brussel sprouts are the best vegetables. If you don’t like them you probably aren’t cooking them right; cut in half and fried in butter is one good way.

--If you can see retirement coming, line up a few things to keep you busy when the days arrive. Just vegging out can get old fast.

--Relatedly, if you’re retired and have two errands to run, don’t do both the same day.

--Try to enjoy whatever you do because that’s the only reward you’re likely to get.

--Advice is much easier to give than to take.

OLYMPICS PUTINESCA

                The International Olympic Committee, the snooty gang that stages summer and winter world-sports extravaganzas at four-year intervals, is nothing if not predictable. Those guys never have met a dictatorship they didn’t not only like but also trip over themselves to support. To the Olympic motto of citius, altius, fortius (“faster, higher, stronger” for those who don’t speak Latin) should be added a forth word, for whatever the old Romans called despotism. Nero, Caligula, Commodus—the IOC would have jumped into bed with any of them.

           

              The 2014 Winter Os begin Feb. 7 in Sochi, Russia, under the auspices of that put-upon land’s latest political strong man, Vladimir Putin. Yes, the gulags are gone and political dissidents no longer are dispatched with bullets to the brain in the basement of the Lubyanka Building, but anyone disputing pale-browed Vlad had better keep his or her bag packed for a prison trip, sometimes after being beaten on the street by thugs who never are caught. The ex-KGB operative learned his lessons well enough to be able to run things in the old way without the old, collectivist rhetoric.

                Olympia’s dictators’ waltz began with the award of both the 1936 winter and summer Games to Nazi Germany. The other members of the original Axis of Evil were similarly blessed, Imperial Japan with the summer and winter Games of 1940 and Fascist Italy with the 1944 winter fest, although those events were cancelled by the war those nations helped start. Closer to present times, the Soviet Union got to host the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow and the dour committee that runs China welcomed the world to the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing. Idi Amin’s Uganda might have gotten a nod had he stuck around long enough.

                The IOC’s real motto is politics shmolitics, as long as the trains run on time. It’s easier for it to deal with a guy—or small handful of guys—than with the messy cast of characters any democracy presents. Build venues lickety split? Sweep the Olympic area of people who might make tourists uncomfortable?  Clean the air, if only for a couple of weeks? Put a dozen cops on every street for 100 miles around? Poof, it’s done, and let the Games begin.

                Putin has gone all out for the production aimed at showcasing his “new” Russia and himself, spending a reported $50 billion on stadiums and infrastructure. That’s a record for any Olympics and an impressive sum even if many of those dollars did wind up in the pockets of his cronies.  Lately he’s tried to get on the world’s good side by having his ministers say soothing words about easing enforcement of Russia’s anti-gay laws for the duration, and he’s opened his dungeons a crack, releasing the ex-billionaire critic Mikhail Khodorkovsy and the all-girl band Pussy Riot, which in 2012 scandalized Moscovites with an impromptu punk-rock show in a cathedral.  But hey, with a name like Pussy Riot it’s a miracle the police let them off the Metro.

                What Putin’s billions will buy remains to be seen as O-day approaches. Sochi was an odd Winter Games choice because the Black Sea city is best known as a subtropical summer resort with average day-time February high temperature of around 50, so keeping the snow and ice cold might be a bigger problem than keeping spectators warm.   

                The main run-up to the Games, the traditional Olympic torch relay, was more comic than epic, casting doubt on the efficacy of Russian technology (surprise!). Manufactured in Siberia by a company called KrasMash, which ordinarily makes ballistic missiles, the torches went out a dozen times by confirmed count and 50 or so times reportedly, one having to be relit by a guard’s cigarette lighter. Three times torch fuel spilled onto carriers’ clothing and caught fire. One poor torch bearer—a 73-year-old coach—staggered away and died of a heart attack moments after his brief stint.

                As always, the quality of sport in the Winter Games also shouldn’t be taken for granted. These WOs will consist of 98 events in 15 sports—many with small constituencies-- against more than 300 events in 26 sports in the Summer Games. Television dictates that each span 17 days and three weekends, so the dirty little secret of the WOs is that on many days not much is on the card.

                The O bosses have padded the schedule in their usual way, by adding events that really are variations of existing ones, like the three-legged and sack races of company picnics. Letting women do dumb things men do, such as ski jumping, put one more event on the tube, and pirating various daredevil stunts from ESPN’s X-Games added several more. The main suspense in these centers not on who’ll win but on whether contestants will land feet or head first.

                There will be “team” figure skating, which doesn’t involve teams but the usual individual and pairs performances with the scores added together. The question of whether figure skating is a sport goes undebated at O time. If it is, so is ballet.

                Races mostly are singles or pairs against the clock, with the real drama being in the tick tick ticking in (usually) the lower right-hand corner of your TV screen. Hans Brinker would have been dismayed. Then there’s bobsledding, a 90-mph carnival ride in a $50,000 sled with a gold medal (not a brass ring) as the prize, or luge, which is bobsledding with no protective chassis.

                Look out below, but as they say, sometimes you win and sometimes you luge. 

               

               

                 

               

                 

                  

                               

               

               

                

IN THE TANK

                In late October, just before the start of the National Basketball Association season, the Phoenix Suns traded their best big man, Marcin Gortat, and three other players to the Washington Wizards for a conditional No. 1 draft choice and Emeka Okafor, a once-good center whose herniated neck disk meant he probably wouldn’t play this season and might not again. The Suns theretofore had been reckoned as laggards with a potential of maybe 20 victories in their 82-game card. Afterward that estimate seemed optimistic.

               

                Instead of anguished wails the move engendered popular and journalistic approval in the desert metropolis. That’s because the team had accumulated four possible first-round picks in the supposed-to-be-loaded 2014 draft, and its anticipated worst or near-worst regular-season record would give it a good shot at Jabari Parker or Andrew Wiggins, the projected cream of that crop.  Ryan McDonough, the Suns’ young general manager, was hailed as a genius for his act of roster destruction.

                Funny thing, though, some of the young and/or miscellaneous players the Suns collected to mind the store this season turned out to be pretty good, and at year’s end their 19-11 won-lost mark was sixth-best in the league’s western half, well above draft-lottery status. If they continue that way they’ll have to grind out further improvement laboriously rather than through a single-draft splash.

                The situation highlights a paradox that usually goes unremarked in sports. While intentionally losing any single game is deemed disgraceful if not illegal, it’s quite all right—even praiseworthy—for an organization to set itself up to lose a season of games, or more. The practice is called “tanking” and it’s as much a part of big-time pro scene as bloated salaries and ear-splitting game-break entertainments. It makes sense because of the “worst goes first” amateur-player drafts that all our professional leagues employ to give bottom teams a leg up toward redemption.

                Except when an Andrew Luck is available, worst-goes-first works better in small-roster basketball than in big-roster football. It worked so well in basketball that in 1985 the NBA acted to counter blatant tanking by abolishing the top-pick coin flip between its two conference cellar dwellers in favor of a 14-team lottery that’s so complicated actuaries have trouble understanding it.

 The NBA lottery sometimes yields odd results-- in 2008 the Chicago Bulls, with only the ninth-worst record and a 1.7% chance, drew the long straw and Derrick Rose. Further, top picks turn into busts often enough (Kwame Brown, Greg Oden and, apparently, last year’s prize Anthony Bennett) to give pause to the most cocksure general managers.  But the 25% shot that goes to the team with the worst mark is nonetheless worth trying for, and, annually, several always do.

With the Suns out of the running, the NBA’s race to the bottom now is being led by the Milwaukee Bucks and Utah Jazz. Both were decent last year (the Bucks went 38-44, the Jazz 43-39), but each cleared its roster of useful players in off-season preparation for a dive.

 Interestingly, though, they may face competition from a couple of teams that started the campaign with title aspirations. The above-mentioned Bulls, again faced with the season-long injury loss of the above-mentioned Rose, are being urged to dump other veteran stars Luol Deng and Carlos Boozer in order to jockey for a better draft position, and the Brooklyn (nee New Jersey) Nets, who impatiently added old Boston Celtics’ Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce to vie for supremacy in the East, now find themselves old all around and wondering where their next fix will come from.  A clamorous press in each of those clubs’ home cities does not shy from use of the “t” word.

More interesting, I think, is the fact that big-time sports’ shining recent examples of, uh, creative losing come not from basketball but from baseball, the sport in which futurecasting is the most iffy. That’s because it typically does not get its best young prospects primed by the feedlots of academe but must develop them themselves, with little certainty of reward.

The baseball model was established in 2006 by the Washington Nationals under the veteran executive Stan Kasten. To put it baldly, Kasten’s plan (he even called it “The Plan”) was for his historically ailing franchise to be really lousy for as many years as it was required to build a farm system that could sustain title contention. It took five seasons of between 89 and 103 losses (2006-2010), but the team eventually accumulated enough high-draft-pick standouts such as Ryan Zimmerman, Stephen Strasberg and Bryce Harper to enable it to compete in better company.

Kasten’s present-day disciple is the Chicago Cubs’ Theo Epstein. Hired in 2011 to accomplish the Herculean task of reviving a team whose record of futility impresses even Buddhist monks, Epstein, the one-time Boston boy wonder, has eschewed half measures, remorselessly purging his roster of any veteran who might be worth a prospect in return. The upshot has been two terrible seasons and a third at hand, with who knows how many more looming beyond that.

  True to his Hebraic roots, Epstein is like Moses, determined to have his minions wander through the desert until no one with the old, slavish mentality remains to enter the Promised Land.

 That sounds better than tanking it, don’t you think?

  

               

               

               

               

                

A FULL GLASS

                Electors for the Baseball Hall of Fame can choose up to 10 recently active players for induction out of the 35 or so on our ballots, but in my 17 years of voting I can’t recall choosing more than seven in any one year. Keeping in mind that the Hall is for the greats, not the very goods, helps me focus in that regard.

This year, though, I’ll be picking 10, and my problem hasn’t been who to add but whom not to. It’s the richest candidate list in memory and could yield as many as four inductees, although the requirement that a player be named by 75% of the voters is a steep one.

It’s been a while—since 1991—that as many as three players were elected in the same year by the current or ex sportswriters, and in some years the number has been zero. That happened last year, and we scribes were castigated for spoiling the July induction party in Cooperstown, New York, where the Hall is situated.

 The affair went on as scheduled, and hung three new plaques by vote of one of the veterans’ committees that also decide such things, but the fact that the inductees (umpire Hank O’Day, team owner Jacob Ruppert and 19^th-century catcher James “Deacon” White) had been dead a total of 226 years put a bit of a damper on the proceedings. Why the Hall continues to induct players no living person has seen perform is something I can’t understand.

We’ve all seen this year’s ballot first timers, and a great group it is. Heading it are two-thirds of the best baseball-playing golf threesome ever—Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine. (The third was John Smoltz, who’ll be up for election next year.) Another newcomer is Frank Thomas, the Chicago White Sox’s all-time best hitter save for Shoeless Joe. I’ll be voting enthusiastically for all three.

Maddux and Glavine anchored the pitching staff that made the Atlanta Braves the National League’s best team in the 1990s, albeit one that won only a single World Series, in 1995. Pitching these days is dominated by 6-foot-6 types who can throw a strawberry through a battleship, but Maddux and Glavine are especially praiseworthy in my book because they’re ordinary-sized guys who got by on skill and guile. Maddux is a sure bet to get in—his 355 career wins are eighth-most all-time and his 3,371 strikeouts rank 10^th—but Glavine’s 305 wins weren’t far behind in that most-important category. Between them they won six Cy Young Awards (Maddux had four, Glavine two) and further distinguished themselves with bat (Glavine) and glove (Maddux). Both also are (or were) near-scratch golfers, and I hope they’ll be playing a celebratory round in Cooperstown on induction weekend.

Thomas is a longer shot to win election, partly because some voters are sniffy about designated hitters, which he was for part of his career, but his numbers are of Hall quality. His 521 home runs rank 18^th all-time, his 1,704 RBIs are 22^nd and his 1,667 walks are 10^th, and he won two American League MVP awards, in 1993 and ’94. His star would be brighter if his best year (1994) hadn’t been cut short by the strike that cancelled that year’s last six weeks and World Series and left the White Sox in first place in their division. The big fella was batting .353 with 38 home runs and 101 ribbies in that one, and his figures might have been monumental if the last 50 or so games had been played.

The other seven players I’m naming I’ve named before and see no reason not to again.  I’m rooting hardest for Jack Morris to win election because he’s in his 15^th and last year on the sportswriters’ ballot. Last year he fell just short with a 67.7% vote, and it wouldn’t take much more to put him over the top this time.

  It’s beyond me why Morris doesn’t have a plaque already. He was a horse of a starting pitcher, with 254 career victories and 175 complete games, and a big-game performer with few peers. He threw two complete-game World Series wins for the 1984 champion Detroit Tigers and went 2-0 for the Minnesota Twins in the 1991 event. His seventh-game, 10-inning shutout in that one, versus the Braves, capped the best Series I covered.

I’ll be voting for Craig Biggio, the former Houston Astros’ hero who topped the “magical” 3,000-hit mark (with 3,060) in 20 seasons, during which he played catcher and second base. I can’t think of another player who manned both those demanding positions ably. He got a 68.2% vote last year and also needs just a small boost to prevail.

I’m not sniffy about DHs and I’ll be voting for Edgar Martinez, the best ever in the slot. Baseball’s annual Outstanding Designated Hitter Award is named for him. I’ll check the box for Mike Piazza, the best-hitting catcher of his era; the relief pitcher Lee Smith, who ranks third in all-time saves; Alan Trammell, a fine shortstop over a 20-year career; and the pitcher Curt Schilling, who topped the career 3,000-strikeouts mark and whose post-season record (11-2 with a 2.23 ERA in 19 starts) is second to none. That’s 10, isn’t it?

The ballot is so full I didn’t have room for a couple of players I otherwise might have favored. First-time nominee Mike Mussina had 270 pitching victories and a .638 winning percentage that’s sixth among starters with at least 250 victories. Tim Raines was a whirling Dervish on the bases and hit very well, too. Another time, maybe.

Once again I didn’t vote for three players whose otherwise-Hall-worthy careers have a chemical odor. Evidence shows that Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa tainted their feats with steroids use, and while nobody is erasing their records, or demanding a refund of their enormous salaries, the Hall properly remains out of their reach, as their poor showings in their first ballot appearances last year showed (Clemens topped the three at 37.6%).

As I noted last year, in baseball there are two kinds of cheating. It’s one thing for a fielder who traps a fly ball to raise it in triumph as though he’d caught it, but quite another to cold-bloodedly ponder risks and rewards and choose to break the rules by juicing up, as Bonds, Clemens and Sosa apparently did. They’ve had their rewards and their bill is now due.