Chicago and baseball in the movies
From Ferris Bueller catching a foul ball on the North side, to Julia Roberts serving drinks on the South side, Chicago and baseball seem to go together in the movies. And why not? Baseball in this town pre-dates the movies, and the city that can be all things to all people on-screen can surely put a few baseball tales on celluloid. Some of these tales you may already know, and some you may not. But with baseball set to make an appearance on Oscar night, it’s worth taking a trip through Chicago’s baseball past.
The Blues Brothers may be the quintessential movie filmed in Chicago, and in one of the scenes Elwood admits he put down his address as 1060 West Addison Street. Have any other ballpark addresses ever turned up in a movie? I can’t think of any.
The Naked Gun, which was the first of a series of movies based on the old TV show Police Squad, has a Wrigley Field reference that, unless you’re looking for it, might be missed. At the opening of the baseball scene, which is essentially the final part of the movie, a voiceover indicates that the Queen will be attending a baseball game in Los Angeles (the Angels were playing the Mariners, if it matters). But as the voiceover is heard, the camera pans across Wrigley Field instead. Watch for it and you’ll see. And former White Sox and Cubs player Jay Johnstone is the first player to bat in the game, too.
Rookie of the Year, which was filmed in Chicago in the 1990s, was ostensibly about the Cubs, but has a connection to the South Side, as well. I know this because I was at the game when they filmed some of the movie’s final scenes. The Cubs were supposed to go to New York to play the Mets, but apparently there was no budget for New York filming, and so Comiskey Park (the second version) stood in for “New York.”
Major League, a film that was all about the Cleveland Indians, has a scene that was filmed in the Chicago area. In the scene where Jake (played by Tom Berenger) and Lynn (Rene Russo) are talking in the library, the scene begins in the Special Collections department of Northwestern’s Deering Library, and continues into the reading room, where Lynn goes through a door and ends the scene. Having worked at that library, I can tell you that she actually went into a little-used storage area, but one that at least served a purpose for that scene.
Field of Dreams, the last baseball movie to be nominated for Best Picture, has a Chicago angle, as well. Don’t know what that is? Think about what team Joe Jackson played for, and maybe it will come to you.
I don’t think that Moneyball, Brad Pitt, or Jonah Hill will win Oscars this year, but the fact that they’re nominated in the first place suggests that baseball movies are alive and well.
Everyone’s in camp now
The Cubs apparently now have all their players in spring training, so the start of the season keeps getting closer.
I offered my opinions on the Cubs this year for a Cardinals site, and they were published today. I was assuming at the time that the Brewers would be without Ryan Braun for the first 50 games of the season, but I didn’t see his suspension being overturned, either.
The only thing I’ll say about that situation, having listened to what Braun said today, is that the “collector” who let Braun’s sample, and others, sit for 44 hours before taking them in to Fed Ex shouldn’t have his job any longer. But it’s over with, and now it’s time to move on.
Some of my writing will appear in other places online soon. I’ll provide links as soon as I can.
The name was a clue
The story of Roberto Hernandez, who for more than a decade was known as “Fausto Carmona,” is more interesting to me this evening than the Ryan Braun story. Today’s ruling has declawed the testing procedure, and means that the juice will probably be coming back to baseball. Is somebody now going to hit 60 home runs this season? I wouldn’t bet against it.
But back to “Carmona” for a moment. The Indians may or may not have him back this season, but the revelation that Hernandez is actually three years older than “Carmona” was thought to be can’t be welcome news in Cleveland. I’d say this season, if he pitches, will be Hernandez’ last one with the Tribe, since the team has options on him for 2013 and 2014. Think of the upcoming season as his going away tour, two seasons before he would have liked it to occur.
I took out a pen and indicated on the back of the above card that “Fausto Carmona” is really just an imaginary construct. The card was a lie, just like Hernandez’ entire life has been since about 1990. The Faustian bargain that Hernandez made was designed to acquire the most valuable currency that any player has–time. Three extra years in a baseball career could have meant millions of extra dollars in “Carmona’s” pocket. Millions more than he has already made, that is.
Similar questions about Albert Pujols’ age have also been raised by some, and they will only intensify in the wake of the “Carmona” revelation. The Onion-style parody Cubs newspaper The Heckler also got into the act on Alfonso Soriano, in a light-hearted way. But the truth of the matter is that identities can be created to hide a player’s real age, and the incentives for doing so–millions and millions of dollars’ worth of incentives–virtually guarantee that this will continue to go on in the future. And “Carmona” just proves–whether we wanted to admit this or not–that it has been going on for some time already.
The Linsanity of it all
It appears that the NBA, Jeremy Lin, and several other parties are trying to claim the word “Linsanity” as their own private trademark. It’s a question of whether the rights to this term should belong to the Lindividual, or to the Linstitution that employs him. And it would be Lincorrect to assume that this is a Linconsequential issue.
The Linability of a person or corporation to generate Lincome from a play on words would be a grave Linjustice. It would be highly Linappropriate to deny a player the right to profit from such a Lincomparable outpouring of Linterest in one player.
This Linadequacy of the court system to protect this player’s rights is most Linexcusable. Hopefully, all sides can come to an agreement that provides proper financial Lincentives, and prevents any Lindecent use of the name of such a Linternationally known figure.
More Linformation will be passed along, just as soon as it is received in this Linsignificant corner of the Linternet.
An experiment you can eat
My hometown of Springfield, Illinois is known for a few things besides Abraham Lincoln. It’s about the only place in the world where you can get a horseshoe sandwich, which is basically bread and meat and french fries and cheese sauce. It’s also home to a restaurant, the Cozy Dog Inn, that claims to have invented the corndog. That’s a tough one to verify, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.
But there’s another claim that maybe isn’t so widely known. Springfield, by virtue of a proclamation by the Illinois legislature, is the “Chilli capital of the civilized world.” There must have been quite a chilli cook-off held to determine that prize. I wish I could tell you we had chilli in the lunchroom every day in school, but that wasn’t the case. And the spelling of the word with two ells in the middle is to recognize Illinois, I think.
There are two kinds of people I think I would instinctively stay away from. One group is the bigots, of any form or fashion, and the other group is those who follow chilli recipes printed on the packets of seasoning that you can buy in the store. The ones that say “Brown one pound of ground beef, add seasonings and a can of beans, and serve.” Anyone who lacks the imagination to make a pot of chilli for themselves isn’t the kind of person I could be around for too long.
Tonight’s dinner contains dark kidney beans, black beans, pinto beans, chili beans (spelled with one “l”), diced tomatoes, sauteed onions, red pepper, yellow peppers, celery, corn, ground turkey (with Ash Wednesday apologies to the observant Catholics), seasoned salt, garlic powder, cumin, chili powder, green onions, garlic lovers’ salsa (since I didn’t have any actual garlic), adobo seasoning, green chiles, and probably ten other ingredients that I can’t think of right now.
Making a pot of chilli is all about experimentation, and every batch turns out different from the time before. And I haven’t yet made a pot of chilli so bad that I, and those around me, can’t eat it. Which is what we’re going to do right now. Pass the shredded cheese!
What did I want to do with my life?
A number of years ago, my parents were moving from one house to another when they decided to pack up their reminders of me. Old pictures, yearbooks, report cards, and things I had either never seen or had blocked out of my memory were stuffed into a box and handed off to me. At least they didn’t throw it all away.
I was looking for some fresh sheets to put on my bed yesterday, when I saw the old box. I went over to it, and on the top was something that I must have completely missed back in the mid-1980s. It was a vocational assessment that came from a place called National Computer Systems in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Of course, the “computer” end of it would probably give us all a good laugh if we could see it today. Things have come a long way on the technology side.
The report I received–or that my parents apparently received–indicates that I was most interested in adventure, writing, politics, law, and public speaking, and that I was least interested in teaching and domestic arts (whatever those are). The irony is that I later went to graduate school and taught in the classroom for five years. That just shows how much attention I paid (or didn’t pay) to this report.
The most fascinating thing about this report from a generation ago is the “Occupational Scales” section. There are dozens of potential occupations listed, such as police officer, farmer, computer programmer, and pharmacist. For each occupation, there is a “Female normed scale” and a “Male normed scale,” which are generally different from each other. For example, my responses on whatever test they gave to me suggest that, were I a female, I would be likely to want to be an Army officer. As a male, though, my answers indicated a considerably lower interest in the same career.
There must have been some reason why NCS did this–we all did things in the 80s that seem strange now–but to suggest my interest in a job field was directly tied to my gender seems strange to me today. But an even bigger issue can be found with vocations such as “skilled crafts.”
The higher the number for the normed scores are, the further to the right the asterisk appears on their range. But the absence of any female-normed score for “skilled crafts”–replaced instead by a pre-printed “N/A”–suggests a determination by NCS that no female would ever consider a career in the skilled crafts. Whatever the “skilled crafts” are, my classmates who happened to be female weren’t given a score to predict their interest (or lack thereof) in this field.
In addition to “skilled crafts,” females were also steered away from being vocational agricultural teachers, investment fund managers, and agribusiness managers. Males, on the other hand, were steered away from being dental hygienists, Home Economics teachers, secretaries, and dental assistants.
Even if I wasn’t interested in being any of those things (or very much else, at that age), the notion that I wouldn’t want to do them just because I’m a male probably would have bounced right off my 17-year old brain. But now, a generation later, that way of thinking seems as outdated as a typewriter, carbon paper, and white-out. And that has to be considered a good thing.
The possibilities are endless
Today I was running an errand in the suburbs, delivering some girl scout cookies, and I passed a Goodwill store. I always go into stores like this, looking for some old books (and if you’ve ever been here before, you already know the topic I look for the most) or maybe an interesting coffee mug or something like that. But today I found something different, something cheaper than a book and probably more useful for the fidgeting that I do all during the day. I got myself a slightly-worn, but still perfectly respectable, official Major League Baseball, for the bargain price of 99 cents, plus tax.
After I paid for the ball and returned to my car, I started thinking about the ball itself. Without it, there is no game. The pitcher has nothing to throw to the batter. The game loses all meaning. The players lose their livelihood, and fans like me don’t have anything to focus our attentions on. We would replace it with something else, certainly, but we wouldn’t enjoy it nearly as much as we do baseball.
So what was this ball’s story? With Commissioner Selig’s signature on it, it can’t be all that old. Maybe it was fouled out of play in Comerica Park a few years ago. Or maybe it was tossed into the stands between innings of a game in Coors Field. Or maybe (and I think this is far more likely than the other possibilities), it was little Jimmy’s’ birthday present, and he played catch with it once or twice before losing it in the back of his family’s garage. It doesn’t matter what the truth really is, because it feels the same in my hands, anyway.
So what story will I tell anyone in my office who wants to know about where it came from? I suppose it depends on what mood I’m in that day. But you–the reader of this blog who will probably never lay eyes on the ball in the real world–will know the truth. And sometimes the truth is just no match for a really good story.
Every day brings us closer to when the games actually mean something, and posts like this one can fill in the spaces until then. And if you’re reading this before April 5, 2012, I’m glad I could help, in some small way.
Bring on the tournament
The college basketball season isn’t over yet, but another couple of weeks should bring the end of the regular season, and then will come the conference tournaments, followed by that wonderful four-day orgy of college hoops, when everyone has their brackets at the ready, and tries to keep up with their picks as it all plays out on television. We aren’t there yet, but it’s coming soon enough.
The end of that weekend means that the games will continue on, but the second weekend isn’t the same as the first. There’s still four straight days of college hoops, but there isn’t the wall-to-wall basketball feeling that there is on the first weekend.
And then comes the week-long buildup to the Final Four and then the college championship game. The NCAA gets it right with the tournament: it raises public interest, makes a lot of money, and actually does what the BCS does not do by allowing all teams the chance to settle things on the court.
And the best part of this process has nothing to do with basketball. When it’s all over on April 2, and one team has cut down the nets in New Orleans and has been crowned as the new national champion, the baseball season will be just about to get underway. And then sports can really start to mean something again.
The right thing is not to hate
I can count the things that I love on both hands and still have fingers left over. It isn’t that there’s no love in my heart–it’s actually quite the opposite. I love some things so strongly that the rest of the world has to get along with being liked or–more likely–ignored and/or tolerated. There are also a few things I dislike (but it gives me no joy to say that) and an even smaller number of things that I hate.
None of what I’m saying here relates to people in any way. People can reciprocate love back to you, while inanimate things cannot do this. If I say that I love to write–and I do–it is with the understanding that writing doesn’t care for me and never will. Who I love and what I love are as different as night and day.
The things that I love don’t have to be automatically loved by the people that I love. I would never try to suggest that if I love something, someone that I love should love that thing, too. That’s not love; it’s closer to control than anything else.
But by the same token, if someone that I love happens to hate something that I love, it wouldn’t cause me to stop loving whatever that thing is. I might feel worse about loving whatever that thing is–or perhaps I would even wonder what it is that that person sees that I don’t see–but I wouldn’t let anyone’s hatred dissuade me from something that I love.
I say all of this, as a departure from the type of thing that I usually write here, because today I allowed my hatred for some inanimate thing to get the better of me. I started to rail against this, in the company of people that I love, and who love the thing that I hate. I immediately felt bad about doing this, so I asked myself what was the point of professing hatred toward something that they love.
Was I trying to rid the ones I love of something that they love, just because I hate that same thing? Would it be a good thing, if that were to happen? The answers to these questions weren’t comfortable things to consider, but the questions still had to be asked.
I spent the rest of the day looking inside myself, and examining my own value system. Let’s say that I love apples (I don’t, but it’s a good place to start with this). If somebody that I love hates apples, and tries to tell me how terrible apples are, do I then stop eating apples? And if so, does this mean that my love for apples should be wiped away, simply because that person doesn’t like apples? And why did I love apples in the first place, if they’re so terrible? What was I missing during all the years that I did love apples?
I decided, after turning these things over in my mind, that there needs to be more love in the world, rather than less. Trying to dissuade those that I love from anything that they love is the wrong thing to do. I don’t need to love what they love, but I can see myself moving the focus of my hatred away from hate and at least toward tolerance. And I hope that the ones I love will understand that.
With that philosophical stuff resolved, or at least examined in more detail than usual, I can get back to writing about more meaningless stuff the next time around. Thanks for indulging me on this.
Pitchers and catchers reported today
It’s officially spring training, now that the pitchers and catchers have reported to the Cubs’ facilities in Arizona. Position players are coming in next week.
Burt Hooton was a Cubs pitcher who seemed destined for greatness. He made his big league debut in 1971, without spending a single day in the minor leagues. No Cubs player has done this in the four decades since then. And, on the second day of the 1972 season, he threw a no-hitter against the Phillies in Wrigley Field. Somehow, though, Hooton had a losing record for the 1972, 1973, and 1974 seasons. He was dealt away to Los Angeles early in the 1975 season, where he would later pitch in three World Series–all against the Yankees–and win a championship with the team in 1981.
He pitched his final season with the Texas Rangers in 1985, and he is currently the pitching coach for the Triple-A affiliate of the Houston Astros. Looking at his career, it can be said that being traded to Los Angeles clearly helped his career. It was actually the inverse of Rick Sutcliffe‘s experience with the Cubs and a trade.
And so the 2012 season–which is still more than a month away from officially starting–has passed its first milestone. More will be coming in the days ahead.
