Category: Chicago

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The Wreck of Old No. 11

As I write, Thom is on an Amtrak train back home from Oregon for his holiday break. The train, the Coast Starlight, arrived in Eugene early yesterday evening from Seattle, already two and a half hours late. Amtrak’s “schedule” says the southbound Starlight should arrive in Emeryville, just down the track from Berkeley, at 8:10 in the morning. We’re several hours past that. Where’s the train? Still more than a hundred miles away, laboring down the valley somewhere north of Sacramento. Amtrak’s website says the train is now due in at 2:08 p.m., 5 hours and 58 minutes late. That’s a fantasy, since the run got to its last stop 6 hours and 46 minutes overdue.

I don’t mean to beat up on Amtrak (aka the quasi-private National Railroad Passenger Corporation). It’s not news that its long-distance trains can’t keep to a schedule. The Department of Transportation’s fiscal 2004 summary of Amtrak’s performance shows the Coast Starlight makes it to the end of the run when the schedule says it will 22.3 percent of the time. The figure for the Sunset Limited, which operates between Los Angeles and Orlando, is 4.3 percent (4.3 percent! Riding an on-time run on that train would be like winning the lottery). Only the shorter routes, like the Capitols in California, the Hiawathas (Chicago-Milwaukee) and the fast intercity runs on the East Coast have on-time rates higher than 70 percent.

Amtrak doesn’t really try to hide this. Its website cautions that if you’re booking a trip on the Coast Starlight or California Zephyr (Chicago-Emeryville) you might want to “plan for the possibility of delays due to freight traffic, track work “or other operating conditions.” This points to a widely cited Amtrak problem: that it’s treated as a second-class service by the companies that actually own the rails it uses. At the same time, though, Amtrak persists in describing rail travel as a wonder not to be missed. The timetable for the Coast Starlight urges you to “discover one of Amtrak’s most awe-inspiring travel experiences.” Of course, there’s more than one way you can read that.

Another well-known part of the Amtrak story is its perennial deep deficit. The Department of Transportation offers a statistic on each line’s loss per passenger. Generally (and predictably), the shorter, more heavily traveled routes — the ones mentioned above that tend to be on schedule sometimes — show the smallest per-passenger loss. The longer the trip, the bigger the loss and necessary public subsidy. Not that there’s anything wrong with transportation subsidies — we wouldn’t have roads, airports or seaports without them. But if you’re underwriting a $466 per passenger loss (the fiscal 2004 figure for the Sunset Limited; the number for the Coast Starlight is $152), you expect to get a little something in return; a meaningful estimate of when the trains arrive and depart would be a start.

I’ve always loved trains, or at least the idea of trains, and have taken a few long trips starting with my first visit to California from Illinois in 1973. The appeal to me of traveling by rail is pretty much the one Amtrak is trying to sell: You get to see the country close up instead of blasting over it in an aluminum tube. But it’s one thing to support a service that’s basically necessary, or if not necessary, more or less efficient; it’s another to pay for something that’s essentially broken and doesn’t appear to have any prospect for getting better the way things are being run now.

So something’s got to change: Do whatever needs to be done and pay whatever needs to be paid to improve service and make it reliable (fat chance; Amtrak has only grudging support from Congress). Or stop pretending you run the long-distance trains on a schedule: just tell passengers you’re pretty sure you can get them where they’re going eventually and to enjoy the scenery. Or let private operators take the lines and see if there’s any way they can both provide service and make them pay, or at least lose less. Or just let the trains go and shove everyone on to buses and planes.

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Sunset, November 13

Sunset in a neighbor’s window. It was beautiful out here today. Probably close to 70. Clear and dry and except for the short daylight, no clue what time of year it might be, except a nice one. Thanks to the fact the 49ers were playing the Bears today in Chicago, I got to see the contrast with back-there weather. In the first quarter, the temperature was 49 and falling, and it was blowing so hard (gusting over 50 mph, I think)  it seemed hard for the players to predict what would happen to the ball from second to second as it sailed through the air. The wind turned a game between two pretty bad teams into a decent entertainment. Important from the native Chicagoan’s point of view: The Bears won.

Sunset

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L, for Lydell

If Lydell’s birthday were the Super Bowl, today’s edition would be the one played between numbers XLIX and LI. Not sure what the line is on the game, or what the over/under is, or even what I mean exactly by slinging that football-betting terminology, but: Happy 50th, Lydell. Back in Normal, who woulda thunk it?

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Obligatory White Sox Post 3

They may not be my team, and I may never have set foot in their ill-begotten “new” ballpark, but the White Sox did something tonight that no Chicago ballclub, of either the National or American variety, has done since the first Mayor Daley was a teen on the South Side and getting ready to make his mark in the world as part of a street gang. I’ll skip that historical side trip, for now. Anyway, it’s a sweet moment in a vicarious way.

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All About Pants

Pantswhitesox

The last time a Chicago team won three straight in a World Series before last night was 1907, when the Cubs swept the Tigers 4-zip in a five-game set (you could look it up). If the White Sox go on to win the championship — take nothing for granted, sports fans — the name of manager Ozzie Guillen will be forever joined to that of Pants Rowland.

Sox cognoscenti — Lydell, I expect that’s you — will recognize the name of the South Side nine’s last title-winning manager. First, this is just more proof of the oft-lamented fact that the quality and color of baseball nicknames is in a sad state of decline. The ’17 Sox were loaded, moniker-wise. In addition to Pants, they had Shoeless Joe, Shano, Buck, Happy, Chick, Nemo, Swede, Ziggy, Birdie, Lefty, Red, Reb, and Knuckles. This year: Hmmm. They’ve got El Duque. And The (Non-Playing) Big Hurt. Other than that, a bunch of Dustins, A.J.s, Scotts and Jermaines — though mixed with non-nickname handles like Timo, Tadahito, Pablo and Raul that would never have been on a 1917 big league roster.

But let’s get back to Pants. According to one online account, the tag dated from his Iowa boyhood: "Rowland started in baseball at age nine, where he earned his nickname, ‘pants,’ from base-running antics while wearing his father’s overalls at games of the Dubuque Ninth Street Blues." Eventually, he became a minor league manager in Peoria. Then, perhaps because his services came cheap, a quality highly valued by Sox owner Charles Comiskey, he wound up in Chicago for four years; he was bounced a year after winning the Series. After that, he became an American League umpire and later president of the Pacific Coast League. Given the high quality of PCL talent and the rapid growth of the league’s franchise cities, his dream, apparently, was to establish a new major league on the coast.

He died in 1969, age 91, in Chicago. This Associated Press obit from The New York Times has the story. Both the subject and the way it’s handled are throwbacks.

(Photo above: Sox hurler Eddie "Knuckles" Cicotte, left, and manager Pants Rowland, c. 1915-18. From George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. Reproduction No.: LC-USZ62-133664.)

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Can’t We All Just Get Along?

By “we,” of course I’m talking about Cubs and White Sox fans. My friend Randy, a former lad of the Chicago suburbs, now a judge in the wilds of western Idaho, called after Game 2 of the World Series last night. At first I thought he was just getting in touch after a very long time to say hi. But he had something else on his mind. As a Sox fan, he wanted to gloat to a Cubs fan about his team’s victory. I disappointed him, I hope, because 1) I’d never root against Chicago (unless the Sox are playing the A’s, my adopted hometown team) and 2) Houston, as the putative hometown of the Bush dynasty, must not prevail.

But even without Houston’s involvement, it’s never been an article of my Cubs faith that I need to hate the Sox; it’s also not part of that faith that I have to like the Cubs, either, though I find myself pulling for them on the rare occasion they play games to care about.

Randy says that he became a convinced Sox fan at age 7, when they went to the World Series. He says he knows all the stats from the team that year, and sleeps with a Sherm Lollar replica athletic supporter under his pillow. Randy’s account made me think about when it was I decided I was a Cubs fan.

Growing up, we rooted for both teams and went to games at both ballparks, and I never heard that my Cubs fan dad had any trepidation walking through the turnstiles at Comiskey Park. I followed the Sox and liked them. They were my mom’s family’s team. They had good-bordering-on-great years in the early and mid-’60s, finishing second in ’63, ’64 and ’65 and going into the last five games of the ’67 season tied for the lead in a close race with Boston, Minnesota, and Detroit. They didn’t manage to win even one despite playing the the last five against the ninth- and tenth-place teams.

The same year, 1967, was the year that the Cubs awoke from a 20-year nap. They’d lost more than 100 games the previous year. They had some mature talent in their lineup (Banks, Williams, and Santo) and had added some good younger players (Kessinger, Beckert, Hundley) along with some decent pitching (Jenkins, Holtzman, Hands and Niekro). Suddenly they were contending. They had an incredible run in June, winning 23 of 27 or something, and went into the All-Star break tied with the Cardinals for first. They faded, but people had started to expect things from them.

I was 13. Impressionable. And maybe I’m a front-runner, too, because after that I was a Cubs fan; 1969, the year of their huge fold and the Mets’ huge run, was just over the horizon; but by then it was too late to back out — I actually cared. And besides, the Sox also-ran dynasty had run its course after ’67, and the folks down at 35th and Shields got a chance to see up close what Cubs fans already instinctively recognized: a loser.

So: Cubs fan, but not overly proud to say it. Hate the Sox? No. To the extent I work up that kind of bile over sports any more, I reserve my bitterness and revulsion for the preciousness surrounding the San Francisco Giants. Used to sort of like them, though.

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Obligatory White Sox Post 2

Faithful Correspondent Lydell yesterday pointed out some interesting online mercantile activity involving White Sox tickets. The team’s Web ticket exchange had a bunch of Game 2 seats for sale. Top price, when I looked: Just under $10,000 per seat. There’s a lot more serious cash out there — heirloom jewelry being sold off, ancient mattresses getting raided for Grandpa’s rainy-day savings, big lines of credit getting tapped — than I ever imagined. The Sox ticket exchange says all the listed tickets are gone. But check out Chicago Craigslist: Someone offering tickets for the Houston games at anywhere from $1,900 to $2,300 a seat. (And on the other end of the spectrum: A buyer offering to pick up tickets for face value — the range is $125 to $185, which sounds almost modest — generously pointing out that tonight’s predicted rain would kill the scalpers’ market.)

By way of perspective, the eight Sox players indicted for throwing the 1919 Series were reportedly bribed something like $5,000 to $10,000 each.

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Obligatory White Sox Post

One sort of obvious statistical things I haven’t heard the broadcast guys talk about is the long roll the White Sox are on. Going back to the last week of the regular season, they’re now 13 out of 14, the only loss coming at home to the Angels in the first game of the second round. The run includes a sweep of the Indians, who had looked like they might be ready to overtake the Sox; a sweep of the Red Sox in the first round; and the 4-1 rout of the Angels. All this from a team that had gone into free fall after the first week of September (losing 10 of 14 at one point and with a record of 7-12 for the 19 games before they learned how to win again).

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Pop: The Legend Continues

My sister Ann called from Chicago this morning, and just hearing her so early meant there was news, maybe bad news, about my dad.

In the middle of the night, he had chest pains. Not wanting to disturb anyone — neither Ann, who lives three blocks away and would have been at his place in a split second if he called; nor neighbors; nor paramedics — he climbed the stairs from his apartment, walked out to his car, and drove himself halfway across the city to the hospital where his doctor practices and presented himself at the emergency room. Ann was quick to say he was OK and reminded me that a few years ago he had chest pains and they turned out to be unrelated to any heart problem. So I was relieved and resigned myself to waiting to hear what the hospital tests showed.

Ann called back late in the afternoon. She and my brother Chris had spent the day at the hospital with Dad. The tests showed a 75 percent blockage in one heart artery, and the cardiac people did an immediate angioplasty (ran a little balloon through a blood vessel in his groin up to the heart to clear out the blockage). “Technically, they say he did have a minor heart attack,” Ann said. The procedure he had was not pain free, and he was pretty much immobilized afterwards and put on what sounded like a host of drugs — blood thinners and sedatives and godknowswhatall.

So let’s roll the tape back to this morning. Here’s my dad, six weeks after his 84th birthday. He sits up in the middle of the night with chest pains. And does what, again? Drives himself to the hospital. Halfway across the city. And not to be dismissive of fine Illinois metropoli like Rockford, Springfield and Rantoul, but this is not Rockford, Springfield or Rantoul he was driving halfway across, but Chicago, city of broad shoulders and big dimensions. What an adventure. I wish I’d been there to see the looks in the ER when he strolled in.

“He’s getting no end of grief from everyone who hears about the drive,” Ann said. He’s probably loving it, too. It just proves it’s never too late to add to the legend. If Mom was taking this in from some after-life bleacher seats — she’d prefer those to the boxes, though she’d like the boxes just fine — I’m sure she got a kick out out of my dad’s pluck.

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More Futility, More of the Time

I spotted this statement on CBSSportsline.com last night, and thought, “Wrong!”

“The 46-year gap between Series appearances is the longest in major-league history.”

Any Chicagoan knows there’s a team that has gone longer, much longer, without getting into the World Series: The Cubs. The story was attributed to wire reports. I imagined that the site’s editors were under email bombardment from fans pointing out the mistake. But then I heard the same sentence read on CBS radio news this morning. I went back to the CBSSportsline story. And it had changed. It now reads:

“The Chicago Cubs would end up with an even longer one, if they ever get back — their last NL pennant was in 1945.”

The second sentence, despite its breach of common sense, does make the first sentence true. Now that the Sox are back in the World Series, the temporal dimensions of their Fall Classic drought are known. The Cubs might go another 100 years before they play in the series — or 12 months. So who knows the length of their Series gap?

But that second sentence is the product of labarious, if not twisted, newsroom thinking that seeks to correct an error by qualifying it while ignoring a larger point. The important issue here (“important” in quotes) isn’t the gap — it’s the length of time a team has played without getting to the World Series. The White Sox went a very long time. The Cubs have gone even longer, whether they ever make it back or not.