Chicago the site of the Trump ‘chicken dance,' and also paid protesters?

I get that President Donald J. Trump is p-o’ed with the thousands of people who decided they had nothing better to do Saturday than participate in rallies to complain that the president is too cowardly to make public his income tax returns.

Even his rant that the “election’s over” is predictable, if not terribly clever or witty.

BUT THERE’S SOMETHING just ever so pathetic about Trump’s insistence that there were “paid” people showing up to create the image of an American populace that doesn’t think highly of our newly-elected (he’s still in his first 100 days of office) president.

I know personally I learned of the rallies being held across the country off a website that encouraged people to go (I didn’t). Those included the Daley Plaza rally that attracted a few thousand individuals in its own right, along with rallies in the outer suburbs of Naperville and Chesterton, Ind., that drew a few hundred.

But there wasn’t anything indicating any form of compensation for anyone who showed up. It might have been more accurate for the Trumpites to argue these people need to “get a life,” (dancing in front of a giant, inflatable chicken erected outside the Trump Tower in Chicago) rather than they’re being bribed.

Particularly since there is evidence that Trump, during his campaign, goosed up the size of his own supportive crowds with some cash payments. Could it be that Trump is like one-time baseball manager Billy Martin, who assumed the whole world was out to get him and concocted strategies based off what he thought everyone else was doing to him?

IF TRUE, IT is sad. It is sorry. It is lame.

It is truly evidence of someone who needs to get a life, particularly since as he himself put it, he “won” the 2016 presidential election, and ought to enjoy the position’s perks – rather than concocting conspiracies against himself.

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Who in their right mind wants to be the police superintendent in Chicago?

Rahm (left), the tyrant mayor?

I have to wonder about anyone who winds up being in charge of the Chicago Police Department in the near future.

It is a thankless job for which everything that goes wrong will be blamed on you. And there likely won’t be anything that goes right that you can take credit for.

YOU’D BE WALKING into a situation in which there is the potential for record levels of violent activity to take place this year.

George, the baseball equivalent to Rahm?

What will make it worse is that the violent activity will be contained to select neighborhoods – making it extremely easy for much of Chicago to ignore its existence altogether.

And as for those poor souls who live in those violent neighborhoods, they’re going to be the base of people who will be watching your every move and are already preparing themselves for the vocal campaign to denounce you as Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s puppet cop and to demand your ouster from office.

You also have as a boss a man who’s the political equivalent of George M. Steinbrenner – the late owner of the New York Yankees known for his erratic temperament that would fire people at a moment’s notice; which resulted in the iconic baseball team going through a decade of mediocrity-to-suckiness. Is that Chicago’s fate?

Martin became Steinbrenner's whipping boy as manager

THE ONLY REAL question is if Emanuel is Steinbrenner, who is the political equivalent of Billy Martin – the Yankees manager whom Steinbrenner hired and fired five times; and probably would have hired and fired yet again had he not been killed in a Christmas Day auto accident.

In short, I don’t envy the situation now faced by Eddie Johnson, the man who is now interim superintendent of the Chicago Police Department.

The man whom the Chicago Police Board will have to figure out a way to recommend to Emanuel so that he can officially give him the top cop job on a permanent basis.

The question, of course, is what kind of sucker would allow themselves to be used by the Chicago Police Department as a possible superintendent, just so the police board can offer up three names to allow Emanuel to pick Johnson and reject the other two.

Would Johnson let Emanuel treat him similarly?

OF COURSE, WE shouldn’t presume that Johnson would be a lock on getting the permanent post.

Let’s not forget that when the police board originally came up with three candidates for the superintendent’s post, Emanuel favored among them Cedric Alexander of Cobb County, Ga. – as in suburban Atlanta.

Depending on whose report one wants to believe, Emanuel either offered the job to Alexander or was on the verge of doing so when he rescinded the offer. It seems that Alexander talked too much before the appointment could formally be announced.

Who’s to say that Johnson won’t somehow find a way to peeve Emanuel during his time as interim superintendent – thereby ensuring a need to find yet someone else? Could it turn out that the Chicago police superintendent position becomes one that no self-respecting law enforcement official would think of taking?
 

Truly independent? Or absurd like Billy & George?

BESIDES, IT WILL come back to the rate of violence. I have often pointed out the fact that back in the late 1980s Chicago had a homicide rate that approached nearly 1,000 dead people per year. We’re at about half that rate now.

Although I’m sure to the 500 or so people who are killed and to their families, that is high enough to be intolerable.

As it is, the DNAInfo.com site for Chicago reported Tuesday about the 775 people shot thus far in 2016 – 80 percent more than the number of people shot (although not necessarily killed) during the first three months of 2015. Will the summer heat we’ll soon be receiving wind up giving that figure a record-setting jolt?
 

It only makes me wonder what kind of perks the police superintendent post provides in order to make it worth anyone seriously considering.

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Is Ozzie a prototype 21st Century mgr?

We’re definitely in a new era. Technology is overtaking our society and turning it into something completely nonsensical. Even on the baseball diamond.

Chicago White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen didn’t run the team during Friday’s game against the Baltimore Orioles, nor will be on Saturday night.

THAT IS THE two-game suspension he received from Major League Baseball officials after being ejected from Wednesday night’s 3-1 loss to the New York Yankees. The umpire who kicked Ozzie out of the game says the manager used profanity while speaking to him.

It is typical that a manager who gets kicked out of a game gets some sort of penalty from league officials. But the reason this particular ejection is gaining national attention is because of what Ozzie did AFTER the ejection.

The “old school” manager would have tried hiding in the shadows of the tunnel connecting the dugout to the clubhouse, possibly feeding crude signals to whichever coach becomes acting manager in the real manager’s absence to try to impact the game’s direction.

The old school manager with a temper might go to the clubhouse and inflict some serious damage.

SO WHAT DID Ozzie do?

He went on-line. Specifically, he used his Twitter account to send out a couple of messages to the people who follow his “tweets” (which are mostly read by “twits,” but that is a subject for another day’s discussion).

In their official statement, Major League Baseball officials said they had a problem with Guillen sending out messages while the game was still in progress Wednesday night.

Perhaps they think he was sending out signals that could have influenced the outcome of the ballgame (which was a Mark Buehrle pitching performance wasted by weak hitting from the White Sox)?

I DON’T GET it. Particularly since after reading Guillen’s Twitter account to see what the offending “tweets” were, I’d have to say they were downright trivial. I’m actually more offended at how grammatically awful and poorly spelled they were.

His initial Twitter reaction to being ejected was to type out, “This one going to cost me a lot money this is patetic.” That’s literally what he wrote.

He followed up that message with a later statement saying, “Today a tough guy show up a yankee stadium.”

That is what Major League Baseball construes as a violation of “social media policy and other regulations regarding the use of electronic equipment during the course of a game.”

I CAN’T HELP but think of the baseball managers from when I was young construing such a response as timid, if not downright sissy-ish. I can’t envision the late Billy Martin typing a tweet on Twitter (or if he tried, it would be so foul and obscene that he’d likely be facing prosecution by some law enforcement type for disseminating profane language and thought). I wonder at times what our city’s sports scene would have become back in ’78 if Yankees owner George Steinbrenner had followed through on his mid-season whim and traded “manager” Martin to the White Sox (for Sox manager Bob Lemon, and how surreal both of those hard-drinkers would have found this latest controversy to be?

But back to the present.

Ozzie’s initial response was to use his Twitter account to acknowledge that he was going to be in trouble for getting ejected – on account of the fact that his fiery temperament is such that his every action gets exaggerated.

As for his use of the word “patetic” to describe his upcoming punishment, I’d say what is pathetic is that he couldn’t spell “pathetic,” particularly since the so-called big advantage of computer keyboards as opposed to typewriters is that it is easy to fix one’s typographical errors.

THERE IS NEVER a reason for a typo, except for one’s literary laziness.

It actually makes me respect Chicago Cubs manager Mike Quade just a bit more for telling the Chicago Tribune, “I will never get in trouble tweeting, twittering, tweetering, I can’t even say it, because I will never do it,” Quade said. “I don’t have the time, energy or know-how, and I’m real happy about that.”

Some people are going to argue that trying to ignore Twitter is wrong because too many people are on it and that it is somehow snobby (if not elitist) to refuse to communicate in 140-character bursts of thought.

After reading through Guillen’s tweet-ed thoughts from the past few days, I can’t say that I missed out on anything by not reading these in “real” time.

UNLESS YOU REALLY want to believe Guillen’s observation from Monday that, “New York no good restaurant open late.”

For all I know, that statement could wind up offending New Yorkers – who really like to think they’re the “city that never sleeps” and that you can find anything, at any hour.

It certainly is more intriguing than Guillen’s weblog, where his latest posting is of a picture of himself with mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel.

Which may well mean that Guillen is the prototypical baseball manager of the 21^st Century, capable of using the latest technology to spew his thoughts. Just think of what Casey Stengel and his “Stengel-ese” would have been like if given to us in 140-character bursts of garble?

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We’ll have to root for John, instead of Santo, for local Hall of Fame outcome

The pickings are slim for those of us with an interest in Chicago baseball when it comes to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., which on Monday announces whether or not there will be any new members when induction ceremonies are held next summer.

Under the mechanisms being used by the Hall of Fame these days, this election for veterans who didn’t make the cut by the sportswriters is for considering ballplayers from the 1980s and 1970s. Ballplayers from the 1960s (Ron Santo’s era) will come up next year.

SO FOR THOSE people who are looking to Monday’s results for a Chicago connection; there’s only one. We’re going to have to root, root, root for Tommy John – the pitcher who was a rookie in the final days of the JFK administration, and didn’t hang up his spikes until the era of George Bush, the elder.

Most people remember John from his time pitching in the late 1970s for the Los Angeles Dodgers, although his time with the New York Yankees also caught the public attention.

It’s almost an after-thought that John was once a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox – from 1965 to 1971, to be exact,.

John wasn’t a bad pitcher in Chicago. In terms of winning percentage, his worst record came in 1970. But that was a dreadful White Sox team that managed to lose 100 ballgames. He was a good player on a crummy team.

IN 1967, A year when the White Sox were in the final throes of their winning “Go Go” era, he had a record of 10 wins and 13 losses with an earned run average of 2.47, with 47 walks and 110 strikeouts. He also was the White Sox’ representative to the American League all-star team in 1968.

Not bad, but not spectacular. Certainly nothing that would give us the impression that this was a career destined for baseball’s version of immortality (a bronze plaque hanging in a museum in upstate New York).

If anything, John’s greatest accomplishment for Chicago baseball was his departure. He and infielder Steve Huntz were traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers following the 1971 season for a bad-attitude ballplayer the Dodgers were eager to get rid of.

Dick Allen only went on to have a phenomenal season in 1972, arguably the best (leading the American League in home runs, runs batted in and also managing a .308 batting average of his career, as he nearly led the White Sox to a division title that season. John leaving Chicago gave the White Sox the ’72 American League most valuable player.

IF IT WERE just a matter of the statistics, Allen would be the Hall of Fame candidate, and John would be an afterthought – despite the 288 victories he achieved during his 26 seasons as a major league pitcher.

The key to understanding John’s significance is to realize that through 1974, he only had 125 career wins. That was the season he suffered a tear in a ligament of the elbow of his left arm – the one he pitched with. That kind of injury was a career-killer. By all rights, John should have been washed up at that point.

But John, desperate to stay in baseball as a player, allowed himself to be the “guinea pig,” so to speak, for what was then an untried surgical theory by which the torn ligament was replaced with one from another part of his body (in John’s case, they took it from his right elbow).

It was thought that John had 1-100 odds of ever pitching in a game again. But he came back in 1976, established himself as a reliable pitcher, and was a significant part of those Dodger teams that won National League championships in 1977 and 1978, along with a Yankees pennant winner in 1981.

HE ALSO WAS the evidence that the one-time athletic career killer could be overcome with surgery.

I know some people say the native of Terre Haute, Ind., deserves to be inducted into the Hall of Fame on that ground alone – his career had a significant influence in the expansion of sports medicine. I must admit to being skeptical on that ground.

If baseball wants to honor someone for that, why not honor the surgeon who came up with the theory, then made it work on John’s career. Dr. Frank Jobe for the Hall of Fame is something I could see.

John? Eh. It wouldn’t offend my baseball sensibility if he gets in. But I’m not sure he will. My guess is that New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner is the one guy who gets in, although if I had a say, I could be persuaded to support the managerial career of Billy Martin.

WHICH LIKELY MEANS we’re going to have to accept that the Hall of Fame is considering an era of baseball history when the “significant” Chicago ballplayers were guys like Larry Biittner and Harry Chappas.

Those two give me a headache just thinking about them. We’ll just have to wait until next year when Santo gets his next chance. And maybe, by some chance, they’ll also give some consideration to Minnie Minoso.

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