Well, it's certainly been a long time coming. The COVID-19 pandemic washed out all the book-signing events Ron Blomberg and I were supposed to do last year for The Captain & Me: On and Off the Field with Thurman Munson, and various other challenges have prevented Ron and I from getting together since then — with the upshot being that the opportunities to purchase copies of the book signed by the both of us have been pretty much non-existent.
UNTIL NOW...
Yes, folks, that's right — for a limited time only (that is, until I run out of copies), I will be selling first-edition hardcovers of "The Captain & Me" signed by both Ron and myself. The cost is $50 per copy, shipping and handling included. (That offer is for customers in the US only; if you want me to ship the book to you in Canada or overseas, let me know and I'll try and figure out what your additional cost will be.)
You can purchase the copies from me via Venmo (@Dan-Epstein-15) or PayPal (dockfidrych@gmail.com). Please include your shipping address in the transaction info, as well as the name of whomever you would like the book to be signed to. Makes a great gift for any Yankees fan, or any 70s baseball fan in general!
Act now while supplies last! All sales proceeds will go to the HELP DAN MOVE TO NEW YORK FUND, which I hope you all will agree is a worthy cause...
Three weeks ago, I called up legendary whiskey distiller Dave Pickerell, to interview him for Revolver magazine about his role in creating Metallica's new Blackened whiskey. While I didn't really know what to expect, the voice on the other end was far more youthful- and enthusiastic-sounding than I would have expected from someone who'd been a major player in the adult beverage business for decades. He was also incredibly humble about his success, and full of positive perspective about his life and career
"It wasn’t all me," he told me. "It was a lot of people giving me things I didn’t deserve. So the best I can do is live a life that glorifies those people. Because without them, I’d be a burger flipper at McDonald’s. But somehow it happened. Somebody asked me just the other day, 'Hey, you’re getting up there — have you thought about retirement?' And I said, 'Well, the concept of retirement is that you have to go to work first. And I’m not sure I’m gonna do that! [laughs] In a perfect world, I’d die in the saddle.'"
Alas, and indeed, Dave did just that — he passed away unexpectedly last week at the age of 70, while attending the annual WhiskyFest in San Francisco. Revolver ran our chat today in his honor, which you can read HERE. Rest in Peace, Dave — I'll raise a glass in your honor.
I am incredibly thrilled to accept The Baseball Reliquary's invitation to deliver the Keynote Address for their 20th annual Shrine of the Eternals Induction Day, which will be held Sunday, July 22nd at the Pasadena Central Library. This year's inductees include legendary White Sox organist Nancy Faust and White Sox/Dodgers/Yankees/Angels pitcher Tommy John, both of whom will be in attendance.
The Baseball Reliquary is a nonprofit, educational organization dedicated to fostering an appreciation of American art and culture through the context of baseball history — so it should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me or has read my baseball books that I've a big fan of the organization and its mission for a long time. (I mean, their collections include Dock Ellis's infamous CURLERS, people!)
Previous inductees to the Reliquary's Shrine of the Eternals include such personal heroes as Dock Ellis, Dick Allen, Mark "The Bird" Fidrych, Bill "Spaceman" Lee, Luis Tiant and Jim "Mudcat" Grant, so it will be a huge honor for me to speak at this year's induction ceremonies, especially since Nancy Faust, Tommy John and fellow 2018 inductee Rusty Staub all played such formative roles in my early baseball fandom.
The induction (which is free and open to all) will be held almost three years to the day since Katie and I moved from Chicago to Los Angeles, and I can think of no better excuse to return to Southern California for a few days. If you love baseball and live in SoCal, please mark your calendars for this fantastic event!
When I moved with my mom and sister to Chicago from Los Angeles at the tail end of 1979, I knew little about the Windy City beyond which sports teams called it home. But there were two things that I was certain would happen once I set foot in Chicago: 1) I would become a White Sox fan, and 2) WLUP (a.k.a. "The Loop") would be "my" radio station.
These two things were, of course, inextricably linked via the infamous "Disco Demolition" promotion at Comiskey Park during the summer of 1979, wherein WLUP DJ Steve Dahl blew up a mountain of disco records in the outfield between the halves of a double header, and hundreds of wasted rock fans swarmed the field to celebrate. The controversial event put Dahl and the radio station on the national map, and put them squarely on my radar, as well — even though I was seven hundred miles away (spending part of my summer vacation with my grandparents in Tuscaloosa, Alabama) at the time.
I loved disco music, but I also had to admit that the market had become completely over-saturated with songs for and/or about dancing, the majority of them several notches in quality below what I considered to be the "good stuff" (Chic, Bee Gees, Sylvester, Donna Summer); and having already become completely cynical about the way the American public dutifully gobbled up any trend that People magazine or 20/20 told them was hip and happening, I found it refreshing to observe what appeared to be a consumer rebellion against the "product" foisted upon them by the record business. (That said "rebellion" had a racist and possibly homophobic undercurrent to it was entirely lost on me at the time.) And as a 13 year-old boy with an adolescent male's intrinsic attraction to all things rowdy and radical, I watched the TV news footage of the Disco Demolition riot and desperately wished that I could have been there to witness all the fuck-shit-upping in person.
My musical tastes were also shifting and changing, with the intense rapidity that only seems to occur when you're in your teens. Brilliant power pop singles like Bram Tchaikovsky's "Girl of My Dreams," Sniff N' the Tears' "Driver's Seat" and Blondie's "Dreaming" were pulling me away from disco as the summer of 1979 turned to fall; and at the same time, the hard rock sounds of KMET-FM were increasingly distracting me from the Top 40 stations on Southern California's AM dial. As if my obsession with Strat-O-Matic Baseball wasn't sufficiently nerdy enough, I'd started playing Dungeons & Dragons with a couple of school pals, and the stuff KMET typically played — Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, Queen, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd — had a heavier, more mysterious vibe that offered a better soundtrack for orc-slaying than anything on KHJ-AM or Ten-Q.
KMET also broadcast The Dr. Demento Show every Sunday night, and the good Doctor regularly played "Do You Think I'm Disco" and "Ayatollah," two novelty tunes (based on Rod Stewart's "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy" and the Knack's "My Sharona," respectively) recorded by Steve Dahl with his backing band Teenage Radiation. So by the time we were ready to leave L.A. that December, my ears had basically become completely primed for what WLUP had to offer — namely, Dahl (and his co-host Garry Meier) hilariously pushing the bounds of comedic taste in the morning, and heavy AOR action the rest of the day. While my nascent White Sox fandom would never really flourish, despite my great affection for Bill Veeck (that uninspiring 1980 Sox squad was a long way down the road from the glory of the 1977 South Side Hitmen, and Comiskey Park turned out to be a pain in the ass to get to from our apartment on the Near North Side), The Loop was there for me from the first time I turned on my clock radio in my new bedroom. And it was everything I wanted it to be.
And much more, really. Within the first week of regular listening, the station turned me on to AC/DC, UFO, Thin Lizzy, Rush, ZZ Top, April Wine, Angel City (a.k.a. The Angels), Montrose and Rainbow, to name several bands whose existence I'd been (at best) only dimly aware of before moving to Chicago. WLUP dug deeper into aforementioned Led Zep, Tull, Queen, Purple and Floyd catalogs than KMET ever did, while also serving up proggier stuff like Yes, ELP and Peter Gabriel-era Genesis and more straight-up rock fare like the Who, Heart, Aerosmith, Foghat, Bad Company, Humble Pie, Robin Trower, Joe Walsh, Bob Seger and Bruce Springsteen, much of which was pretty new to me, as well. And not just these artists' hits, but deep cuts as well — especially if you tuned in later on in the evening.
After decades of ossified "classic rock" programming, where "Free Bird" is inevitably followed by "Won't Get Fooled Again" and "Stairway to Heaven," it's kind of hard to convey just how exciting and eye-opening this all seemed at the time; I felt like I'd gotten a free ticket to a far cooler world than the one I actually inhabited, and every week I seemed to hear something else that opened up new dimensions in my musical universe. Come the spring of 1980, The Loop would be the station that hipped me to Def Leppard's first album, On Through the Night, as well as Van Halen's Women and Children First, Pete Townshend's Empty Glass, and Judas Priest's British Steel, all of which I still love to this day. And while the station pushed "local boys" Styx, REO Speedwagon and Survivor way too hard for my taste, they made up for it with endless spins of Cheap Trick deep cuts — I swear I must have heard them play every single song off Heaven Tonight and Dream Police at one time or another in the spring of 1980...
Cheap Trick really were the consummate Loop band, circa 1980, in that they embodied a musical world in which hard-driving, arena-ready guitar rock could happily co-exist with sharp, crunchy, catchy-as-all-hell power pop. Because along with all the bong-rattling sounds mentioned above, WLUP program director Sky Daniels kept the New Wave-friendly likes of Tom Petty, Blondie, Pretenders, Pat Benatar, the Romantics, the B-52s, Flying Lizards, the Clash, the Ramones, Todd Rundgren (and Utopia), Elvis Costello, Graham Parker, Joe Jackson, and even the syntho-futurist sounds of Gary Numan's "Cars" in regular rotation. Off Broadway, a brilliant power pop band out of nearby Oak Park, had a massive local hit at the time with the song "Stay In Time," but The Loop also gave regular spins to three other killer tracks — "Full Moon Turn My Head Around and Around," "Bully Bully" and "Bad Indication" — from On, the band's debut album.
My ears were wide-open to all of this, but even at the time I sensed it was an unusual mixture. I have a vivid memory from that spring of walking down Michigan Avenue on a Saturday morning, on my way to the animation class I was taking at the Art Institute, and seeing three scary-looking, denim-clad stoner dudes in their late teens walking towards me, one of them carrying a giant boom box. As they got closer, I noticed that the radio was completely covered with Loop stickers, and that it was blasting "Back of My Hand" by British band the Jags — which was being played on WLUP at that moment. These were exactly the kind of guys who, back in L.A., would have called me "Devo" for wearing short hair and a skinny tie, and threatened to kick my ass unless I could name at least four songs off of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. But on this morning, we just gave each other a friendly grunt of "The Loop!" over the sprightly tune of a track that was essentially Costello-lite; after all, if The Loop was playing it, it had to be cool, right?
That was the kind of cultural impact The Loop had in those days, at least among rock listeners in Chicago; I would estimate that at around 75 percent of the things I talked about at school with my friends that spring were based on what we'd heard on The Loop. (Most of the other 25 percent had to do with either embattled Mayor Jane Byrne and convicted serial killer John Wayne Gacy, both of whom were also subjects of Teenage Radiation parodies.) We would sometimes even go to Steve & Garry's early-morning "Breakfast Club" broadcasts from the Carnegie Theater (which was only a few blocks away from Ogden, where I attended the second half of eighth grade), or hang out after school around the elevator banks of the John Hancock Building, where WLUP's studio and offices were located, in hopes of catching Steve Dahl on his way home — and despite his stature as the premiere radio bad boy of the day, he was incredibly pleasant to us the few times we actually met him. When we went to Chicagofest '80 that August at Navy Pier, the Loop booth was probably the most popular attraction outside of the live music stages; it was completely swarmed by long-haired guys and gals wearing faded plaid flannel shirts over black t-shirts that read, "The Loop FM 98 — Where Chicago Rocks". It was like a tribe, one which I felt stoked and proud to belong to.
So it's kind of amazing, in retrospect, to look back and realize that I was pretty much "done" with The Loop by fall of 1981. Part of it had to do with WLUP's unexpected firing of Steve & Garry that February, which made mornings a lot less fun and cast a pall over the station as a whole; but a bigger part of it had to do with the changes that were happening in the rock landscape, as well as in my own head. When I first started listening to the station, the perfect rock dreamworld that WLUP presented and represented seemed magically infinite, like it was going to keep expanding (and rocking!) forever; in reality, it was on the verge of running out of gas. By the end of 1980, John Lennon was dead, Led Zeppelin was done, Queen had gone funky, Pink Floyd was on post-Wall hiatus, and UFO, Thin Lizzy and most of the other Loop mainstays were reaching the point of diminished artistic returns. The brief, Knack-fueled industry vogue for "skinny tie" bands had also cratered, which meant that most of the New Wave-associated acts that once dotted the playlist were now persona non grata. WLUP filled the void with the platinum-selling likes of REO Speedwagon's Hi Infidelity, Styx's Paradise Theater, Phil Collins' Face Value, the Who's Face Dances, Journey's Escape and Foreigner's 4, all of which were grisly enough on their own but profoundly depressing when taken in toto. I instinctively knew I was going to need something angrier and more interesting to help me survive the Reagan years, so I eventually gravitated down the dial to WXRT, which at least played the likes of the Clash, Costello, Parker, Ramones, etc., even if you had to sit through shitloads of Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell to get to them...
Nevertheless, I have to admit that I felt some sadness when I heard the news that WLUP was bought out by a Christian broadcasting group and will, for the first time since its inception in 1977, cease to play rock music. I can't say that I've even listened to the station in 25 years, and I certainly spent much of the decade before that actively avoiding (and even mocking) it. But that first year-and-a-half of Loop listening completely changed my life — it made me care about music on a much deeper level than I ever had before, and made me want to play (and write about) it — and the news of WLUP's demise reminds me of how lucky and grateful I am that I got to experience the station during its early peak, at a time in my life where I was completely receptive to what it was layin' down. It's like hearing about the death of a ballplayer whom I passionately rooted for as a kid, or of a former best friend whom I hadn't heard from in 35 years; my current life won't be impacted at all by WLUP's absence, and yet respect must still be paid for the difference that it made. Thanks for rocking me, WLUP.
There's so much to be said in the wake of Hugh Hefner's passing, both about Hef himself and the cultural impact (positive and otherwise) of his most famous magazine. But I'm not going to get into any of that here...
No, I think the best way to observe Hef's death is to watch (or at least acknowledge the existence of) this sublimely ridiculous network TV special from the Thanksgiving Weekend of 1979. I myself have no memory of its broadcast, though it certainly would have been right in my 13 year-old wheelhouse at the time. And good lord, look at that cast: Richard Dawson! The Village People! Chuck Mangione! Wayland Flowers and Madame!
And then, of course, there's added "bonuses" like Dawson's recurring bit with ill-fated Playmate Dorothy Stratten, and celebrity walk-ons like James Caan, Marjoe Gortner, Jim Brown, Ruth Buzzi, Robert Culp and Patty Hearst. Honestly, the only way they could have made this more quintessentially "1979" was to have Dave "The Cobra" Parker and the rest of the "We Are Family" Pirates snorting coke in the Playboy Mansion Grotto...
Speaking of "We Are Family," this TV special serves as not only a fascinating (as well as titillating and occasionally nauseating) time capsule from the, er, tail end of the 1970s — the commercials alone are worth the price of admission — but it also serves as something of a riposte to those pro- and anti-disco factions who would claim that July 1979's Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park was what "killed" disco music and culture.
Four months after that legendary/infamous event, disco was clearly still considered commercially potent enough for ABC to broadcast a roller disco special with the Village People as guest stars; at the same time, if this bloated, vapid and coked-up mess accurately reflects where disco culture was at (or at least how mainstream America was perceiving it) by late '79, it clearly would have croaked soon enough on its own, without any help from antagonistic (and opportunistic) rock DJs like Steve Dahl. I loved disco now, as I loved it then — but pop culture trends go in waves, and disco's wave had already crested by the time Disco Demolition kicked it in the skin-tight satin pants.
In any case, you can watch the whole mind-boggling thing here at the amazing Archive.Org site, or dig it in more bite-sized chunks via the following YouTube clips:
Rest in peace, Hef. No one can say you didn't enjoy your time on Earth.
This Saturday, March 4, my friend Joe Bonomo — one of my favorite writers — and I will be doing a reading at The Book Cellar in Chicago's Lincoln Square. Joe's got an excellent new book of essays out called Field Recordings From The Inside, which he'll be reading from; I'll be reading from a new work in progress — a chapter from what I hope will be my next book project. Unlike Big Hair and Plastic Grass and Stars and Strikes (both of which will be available for purchase at the Book Cellar), this one will be more personal, as well as more music-oriented... and the chapter I'll be reading from involves the elegant gentleman pictured above.
Two great writers + one great independent bookstore (where you can also buy wine and beer by the glass, btw) = a swell time. The event starts at 6 p.m., and the Book Cellar is located at 4736 N. Lincoln Ave. in Chicago. For more info, call the store at 773-293-2665. Hope to see some of youse there!
Also, as long as I've got your attention, here's a few of my favorite pieces from the last couple of months...
And finally, I'm still very much in the market for a full-time editorial or digital content job. If you're reading this and know of any available position in Chicago that requires a great editor, writer or content manager, please give me a shout...
The holiday season is once again upon us, and along with it the scramble to find the perfect gifts for the ones we love.
Well, if you've got a baseball fan on your Xmas list, why not get them a hardcover first-edition of my book Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of 1976, autographed and personalized by the author himself?
That's right, folks — just send me $30 via PayPal (see link below), and I'll send you a copy of my critically-acclaimed journey into the heart of the Spirit of '76. The Big Red Machine, Billy Martin's Yankees, Mark "The Bird" Fidrych, Charlie Finley's fire sale, Oscar Gamble's haircut, Bill Veeck's wooden leg, the White Sox shorts, Phillies Fever, Ted Turner's Ostrich races, the first free agent re-entry draft — it's all here, along with Salem witches, Jimmy Carter, the nationwide Bicentennial celebration, the Ramones' first album, Frampton Comes Alive, Taxi Driver, Rocky and (of course) The Bad News Bears, along so many other crazy things that made 1976 such a memorable and important year, both for major league baseball and the USA as a whole.
The $30 covers shipping and handling (offer only applies to the continental US, so contact me for shipping rates if you're in Alaska, Hawaii or other countries); be sure to let me know your giftee's favorite 70s team or player when you're checking out via the PayPal link, and I will find a way to work that information into the signature.
I only have a limited amount of these hardcovers left, so act like Mickey "Mick the Quick" Rivers and snap 'em up while you can!
On Monday, August 8, I'll be doing my only Chicago-area book-signing for the paperback edition of Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of '76 , in conjunction with a rare 35mm showing of one of the biggest film hits of 1976 (not to mention the greatest baseball film ever made): The Bad News Bears.
This joyous event will take place at Chicago's legendary Music Box Theater, located at 3733 N. Southport Ave. in Chicago. I will be co-hosting the event with WGN radio's Nick Digilio, and copies of Stars and Strikes will be available for sale in the lobby via those fine folks at The Book Cellar, my favorite local indie bookstore. Tickets for the screening are $12, or $9 if you're already a member. The actual screening begins at 7 pm, and will be followed by a discussion of the film led by Nick and myself.
If you've already read Stars and Strikes, then you know how much this film means to me; the one-two punch of The Bad News Bears and the sudden emergence of spectacular Tigers rookie Mark "The Bird" Fidrych went a long way towards making ten-year-old Dan transfer his obsession with war comics and G.I. Joe dolls to all things baseball-related. If it wasn't for the Bears and the Bird, my life might have taken a much different path, and I almost certainly wouldn't have written Stars and Strikes or Big Hair and Plastic Grass many years down the road. So it's a huge honor to be able to present this wonderful film — whose slyly subversive script still holds up remarkably well 40 years later — on a big screen.
There are no Cubs or White Sox games scheduled that night — so if you're in or near Chicago, I hope you'll come out and say hey. Buttermaker would have wanted it that way, man...
It's been said that a baseball game will always show you something that you've never seen before. The most memorable part of last night's Tigers-White Sox game at U.S. Cellular Field was certainly unique, though neither I nor any of the other 32,527 fans in attendance were actually able to witness it.
I refer, of course, to Chris Sale's pre-game uniform-slashing incident, in which the Sox ace — apparently troubled by the prospect of having to pitch in the evening's collared throwbacks from the second Bill Veeck era — did his best Jason Voorhees impression on the team's '76-style uniforms, resulting in a scratched start and a five-game suspension from the front office.
This, in itself, would have been enough weirdness for one evening at the ballpark. In all my years of loving, researching and writing about baseball, I've never even heard of a player throwing this kind of a tantrum over the uniform he was supposed to wear. Certainly, there were members of the 1963 Kansas City A's and the 1969 Seattle Pilots — to name two early adopters of colorful uniforms which flouted the bland "home whites/road grays" tradition — who were significantly less than happy about the fashion statements that their teams were making.
“There was a lot of grousing about the uniforms," wrote Pilots hurler Jim Bouton in Ball Four. "I guess because we’re the Pilots we have to have captain’s uniforms. They have stripes on the sleeve, scrambled eggs on the [bill] of the cap and blue socks with yellow stripes. Also there are blue and yellow stripes down the sides of the pants. We look like goddamn clowns.”
Still, Bouton and his Pilots teammates went ahead and wore their "captain's uniforms" (at least until until Bud Selig and his cronies stole the Pilots from Seattle and moved them to Milwaukee) without incident. Ditto for the 1976 White Sox, whose Veeck-designed uniforms — truly the most unique unis of baseball's most fashion-forward era — were being celebrated last night.
The '76 Sox wore uniforms featuring collared jerseys that were meant to be worn un-tucked; Veeck believed that this unusual look would give his players players more comfort and flexibility in the field. White Sox utility man Jack Brohamer (more on him in a sec) told me last year that the '76 uniforms "made it look like we were in jail," but the players still went along with the concept, even during the three games that August when Veeck asked them to take the field in short pants.
Obviously, as the author of Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of '76, I have a special fondness for those '76 White Sox uniforms; while I can completely understand someone else's aesthetic aversion to them, they are so iconic, so emblematic of the welcome whimsy that Bill Veeck brought to the game, that they practically transcend criticism at this point. They're like the visual equivalent of Peter Frampton's talk-box solo on "Show Me The Way" — goofy as all hell, yet also guaranteed to transport me back to one of the happiest summers of my life in a nanosecond.
Which is why, along with the fact that our beloved Detroit Tigers were in town, that my wife and I went with some friends to "The Cell" last night. Not only were the White Sox giving away '76 throwback jerseys to the first 20,000 fans who showed up — which unfortunately turned out to be sullied by the Xfinity logo on one of the sleeves — but the team was also going to take the field in the full '76 throwbacks, as well. Or so we thought...
We arrived in time to catch the tail-end of the Tigers' batting practice, and while I was a little disappointed to see that the Tigers were wearing their usual road uniforms instead of 1976 road throwbacks, I know that visiting teams don't always get on board with their opponents' promotions. I was further disappointed a few minutes later to learn via Twitter that Chris Sale had been scratched from his scheduled start; he is, after all, one of the best starting pitchers of the past few years, and you always want to see the top guys in the game do their thing, even if it means additional challenges for the team you're rooting for. But there's been a lot of talk in recent days about the White Sox trading Sale to a contending team, and it seemed like maybe this was the team's (albeit clumsy) excuse to keep him out of action and free of harm before they had the chance to deal him.
But then, when the White Sox finally took the field after a minor rain delay wearing their early 80s "Winning Ugly" throwbacks instead of the '76 ones, I felt kind of ripped off. Don't get me wrong — I am fond of those uniforms, as well, but that's really not what I'd paid to see. Figuring that this must have been some kind of screw-up on the part of the team, I tweeted out the following joke:
At least, I thought it was a joke. But an hour or so later, when I got a text from a friend saying, "I want one of the cut-up throwbacks! Can't believe Sale did that!," I checked social media and realized that Sale had indeed blown a fuse over uniforms — only, it was the '76 ones that he didn't want to wear...
There was a strange energy (or maybe lack thereof) to the game itself. No longer facing one of the game's best lefties, the Tigers should have been able to tee off against a succession of bullpen arms led by Matt Albers, the beefy journeyman reliever who'd already pitched the previous two nights, but it was not to be. Numerous scoring opportunities were squandered; and while Miguel Cabrera and Nick Castellanos did knock in two of the Tigers' three runs, Cabrera, Castellanos, Ian Kinsler and Victor Martinez went a combined 2-for-14. Only Cameron "Extra Cheese" Maybin seemed completely impervious to the evening's oppressive humidity, going 2-for-3 with a walk, two stolen bases and two runs scored. I love that guy; the Tigers would be in a far worse position right now without Kinsler and Maybin at the top of their lineup.
The game was also delayed by three thunderstorms, two of which (including the final one, which caused the 3-3 contest to be postponed until today) were the most insane I'd ever witnessed at a ballpark. We'd somehow lucked into buying field-level tickets that were actually under the mezzanine overhang, so we were able to watch the torrential downpours and sky-piercing lightning flashes in relative comfort, and (mostly) avoid the crowds that were slowly shuffling "zombie apocalypse" style through the packed concessions areas. We also spent a lot of time watching the jumbotron on the centerfield scoreboard, where they were flashing a lot of 1970s Sox pics and trivia, and at least one major gaffe:
Yeah, Jack Brohamer was the only White Sox player to hit a home run while wearing short pants. But it happened in 1976 — you know, the year that the White Sox were supposed to be paying tribute to, until Chris Sale freaked the fuck out? — not 1979. (The Sox didn't even wear shorts in 1979, fer chrissakes.) Well, at least they got Jack's name right; I found out later that my friend Michael was at the game, and his family put up a birthday message to him on the jumbotron in the eighth inning, but the Sox put the message up with the wrong middle name...
Speaking of screw-ups, an interesting, er, wrinkle to the Sale slash-fest emerged today in this article by Jon Heyman:
Wait, what? The throwbacks were made out of "heavy wool"?!? Either Heyman's reporting is inaccurate — today's throwback uniforms typically come in the same lightweight synthetic blends as the regulation unis — or the White Sox are absolutely insane. Why would you make throwback uniforms out of wool, especially when the originals that you're throwing back to were made out of lightweight poly?
But maybe that's just how it's all going at The Cell these days. There's been weird energy around the White Sox since the bizarre Adam LaRoche incident in spring training — which you'll also recall Sale unnecessarily losing his shit over — and they've seemed pretty unfocused since their 17-8 hot start in April. Maybe it is indeed time to fire Robin Ventura and/or Kenny Williams, and deal off Sale and anyone else they can get some choice prospects for, and just start over. And, at the very least, maybe it's time for Sale to reconsider his priorities. I'll leave the last word here to my friend and colleague, Cardboard Gods author Josh Wilker, who summed the whole fiasco up quite nicely, and invoked my favorite White Sox pitcher in the process:
The man pictured above is Mike LaCoss, former hurler for the Reds, Astros, Royals and Giants from 1978-91. Last week, I had the pleasure of guesting on Trip To The Mound, a podcast Mike does with Roy Giovannoni for the iBaseball channel. I was "there" to talk about Stars and Strikes (now out in paperback!), but our wide-ranging talk wound up covering everything from sabermetrics to thrash metal — and I also got to pick Mike's brain a bit about his experiences with the Big Red Machine. Go HERE to listen to the whole thing...
Also, for those of you who can't get enough of my yakkin', I did two radio appearances last week with some old friends: Rich Kimball of WZON in Bangor, Maine, and Ray Steele of WIBC in Indianapolis. Both gents really know their baseball, and I am immensely grateful for their enormously supportive of my books through the years. Go HERE to listen to my chat with Rich, which includes some Lemmy- and Strat-O-Matic-related tangents; and go HERE to hear my chat with Ray, in which we talk about Mark Fidrych, Dick Allen, and whether or not you'd rather have Bill Veeck or Ted Turner as the owner of your favorite baseball team.
Dan Epstein is the author of Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging '70s and Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of '76, both published by Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press. He writes about baseball, music and other cultural obsessions for a variety of outlets and publications. He lives in Greensboro, NC, and is available for speaking engagements.