Nothing lives forever, except maybe in the ball fields of our memories

There are times it seems that Chicago White Sox fans will forevermore live off the memories of 2005, while Chicago Cubs fans are a determined batch to make us all think of 2016 as the GREATEST SEASON OF ALL TIME!!!, what with the World Series they actually managed to win that year.
 

'05 Sox now permanently in past

Yet nothing lasts forever. Both of those baseball seasons are most definitely in the past.

AND EVEN THOUGH some of us would like to have our memories overcome reality, we have to admit that while the championship flags will forevermore be displayed in Chicago, the winning is over.

At least for those of us who focus our attention on what is happening now.

I couldn’t help but be amused by the announcement that Kyle Schwarber, the Chicago Cubs hitter whose return from injury at season’s end gave the team a boost that may well be the factor in them beating Cleveland and winning the World Series, is going back to the minor leagues.

While Tadahito Iguchi, the second baseman from Japan whose four-year stint playing baseball in the United States included his performance with the World Series-winning Sox (making him the first Japanese-born ballplayer on a U.S. championship team), is on his way out of baseball.

AS THINGS TURNED out, Iguchi’s U.S. baseball career also included stints with the Philadelphia Phillies and San Diego Padres before he returned to Japan – where he resumed playing ball for the past decade.

 

'16 level of play a thing of the past?

He’s now with the Lotte Marines in Japan’s Pacific League, and in fact at age 42 is now the oldest player in the league. As things turned out, his joint Japan/U.S. career saw him get more than 2,000 base hits – making him one of only seven players to achieve that goal.

He’s a Japanese ballplayer who got a taste of U.S. baseball. Although to those of us in Chicago who enjoyed the first local team to win a World Series in this century, he’ll forever be more.

He’s virtually an honorary Chicagoan – that’s what happens when you become a crucial part of a local championship team whose importance goes beyond the .278 batting average with 15 home runs and 15 stolen bases he garnered that year.

 

Can Kyle rejuvenate the way 'Mick' did?

TO THE CHICAGO Sout’ Side, he’s as big a name as Ichiro Suzuki – the Japanese star ballplayer who has been playing in this country for 17 seasons now and may well become the first ballplayer to get elected to the Halls of Fame celebrating baseball that exist in both countries.

But Iguchi is now gone, making him the final member of that ’05 White Sox team who was still going to the ballpark to play baseball and getting paid for the privilege. 2005 may be 12 years in the past, but it feels even longer away in the distance.

Then, there’s Schwarber, who got hurt early in 2016, recovered in time for the playoffs and World Series, and had the batting average over .400 and managed to get on base 10 of the 20 times he batted in the World Series.

But that was last year – as much a part of the past as that of Iguchi boosting the White Sox to victory. For 2017, he had a batting average of .171 and had struck out some 29 percent of the times he came to the plate.

THAT BATTING AVERAGE is worse than that of the famed Mario Mendoza, the 1970s-80s infielder who hit .215 for a career, and is considered to be the standard for how bad a hitter you can be PROVIDED you have other positive characteristics.

 

How bad can you hit/still play in Comiskey Park?

Not that it means Schwarber is finished in baseball – even though he’s now a member of the Iowa Cubs of the Pacific Coast League. I’m sure Cubs baseball people are hoping he becomes the equivalent of Mickey Mantle – who during his own rookie season of 1951 was sent back to the minor leagues by the New York Yankees following a slow start.

A couple of months of hot hitting (,361 batting average, 11 home runs and 50 runs batted in) and he returned to New York for 18 more years of Hall of Fame-quality play.

So what’s it going to be – Schwarber is the equivalent of “the Mick?” Or further evidence that talk of the Cubs’ dynasty was premature and that ’16 is just as much a memory as 2005?

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EXTRA: A “brain fart?” All too honest

I have to give the Chicago Tribune some credit. It’s not every newspaper that’s willing to admit to an error, then admit that the cause of the error was a “brain fart.”

But that’s what happened Tuesday when the alleged World’s Greatest Newspaper gave us an error that garnered national attention amongst baseball fans – the Baseball Think Factory website, among others, picked up on it.

IT WAS IN the “Almanac” feature the newspaper publishes every day; giving us a list of events that happened on that particular date in several past years.

For Monday, Aug. 13, they reminded us that New York Yankees great Mickey Mantle died on that date in 1995. And in a caption of an old file photograph of Mantle as a ballplayer (one whose talented ballclubs relegated many White Sox teams of that era to second place), they told us he was 93 at the time.

Actually, he was 63.

A finger hit the wrong key on the keyboard (“six” and “nine” aren’t that far apart, particularly if one can type at a quick pace). When copy-read, probably by someone who didn’t know enough baseball to realize the concept of Mantle surviving until age 93 was ludicrous, it was able to slip past and into the published paper.

EDITOR MARGARET HOLT, in an explanation published Tuesday in the newspaper, said that a copy editor provided a written explanation for the error that described it as a “brain fart.”

I’d like to mock the Tribune for such an error. Except that I have to confess to having made similar gaffes as a reporter-type person. In fact, one such gaffe I made about one month ago while writing for a different newspaper falls into the same category.

In that story, I quoted a public official very accurately. Yet for some reason, I typed into the story the name of a completely different public official, all throughout the story.

I didn’t think he was that other public official. It was just a gaffe – one that I didn’t catch until I bought the newspaper the next morning. It immediately jumped out at me on the printed page, and it is one that I still feel ridiculous about. I think I described it to my editor as a "brain cramp," but it was all too similar.

BY COMPARISON, A “6” being turned into a “9” is relatively miniscule.

And I have to admit the Tribune probably deserves some praise.

Because this kind of error would have been all-too-easy to cover up with one of those one-sentence corrections buried in a blurb on an inside page. The kind that most people wouldn’t have even noticed as they scanned through the newspaper, let alone while doing searches of the newspaper’s web site.

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