The Chris Moeller Archives

Clubhouseschooling

When I was a boy, I would sometimes visit my father at work. My brother and I would get off the school bus in the small village of Newhall, Iowa, and ride our bikes from our grandparents' house over to the grain elevator, where he was the manager. At one point, he gave us each a shovel and we pushed around wet corn over the period of a few days and I lost a year off my life. That short-term shoveling assignment carries the distinction of being the only three or four times in my life to this date that I literally punched a time card. (Though, for the last ten years, I’ve done so on a computer.) “Pay Chris by the hour,” he used to say, “Pay Aaron by the job.” No, I made that part up. I think what he actually said was, “Stop crying.”

My father’s job was not as fun as Drake LaRoche’s father’s job. His old job, I guess that would be. Adam LaRoche quit the Chicago White Sox baseball organization last week after the team’s vice president, Kenny Williams, reportedly told him that his teenage son was around the club too much. Not some of the time, mind you. Not a lot of the time. All the time.

It’s March. Shouldn’t Drake LaRoche be in school, you ask? There’s an easy explanation that you may have already guessed. The boy is home-schooled, or more accurately, "selectively schooled." Adam told this to the Washington Post three years ago when Drake was 11, "We're not big on school. I told my wife, 'He's going to learn a lot more useful information in the clubhouse than he will the classroom.'" The kid spent nearly all of last year traveling with the team, the first season LaRoche spent with the White Sox. The veteran first baseman, who hit a paltry .207 for the team in 2015, says that he signed with Chicago’s South Siders a year ago exactly because management told him his son could be a constant presence in the locker room. That was the basic agreement with LaRoche's previous club, the Washington Nationals.

It’s all very bizarre. Bizarre because one of LaRoche’s teammates, outfielder Adam Eaton, has now referred to the 14-year-old kid as “a great leader.” Huh? If that's true, that team desperately needs a Molina brother. All-Star pitcher Chris Sale has been the most publicly-supportive of his former teammate. He made the statement to the media that “the wrong guy left,” a slap at Williams, and then reportedly kicked the executive out of a team meeting after berating him in front of the other players. This behavior is shocking in its audacity. Williams is Sale’s boss. Granted, Sale has more good will built up by his on-field performance than LaRoche, and Williams probably makes less money than does his star pitcher. Doubly interesting it is because Williams is one of the very few African-Americans serving in the front office of a Major League Baseball club currently. The paucity of such has been a major scandal in the sport for decades. The three players listed earlier in this paragraph are all white.

Williams' less-than-regal reputation is a peculiarity to me. When Yale-educated Theo Epstein, grandchild of a Hollywood screenwriter, constructed the team that broke the Boston Red Sox’ 86-year championship drought in 2004, he was immediately declared a genius and commentators suggested the inevitability of his Hall-of-Fame induction even before he had reached the age of 40. When Williams, a former Major League player educated at Stanford, constructed the team that broke the Chicago White Sox’ 88-year championship drought in 2005, America yawned. A decade later, promoted to vice president within the same front office, Williams’ employees feel the personal security to make shady comments about him to the media and dress him down in front of each other. Few others have brought race into this story. Now I have. Race, where a distinction can be identified, is always a factor. Let's not pretend that white millionaires are comfortable having black men tell them what to do. LaRoche chose to quit rather than to do so.

The supposed promise by the team is, at this point, a ‘he said, he said.’ The Players Association says it is “monitoring the situation.” LaRoche claims it's written on paper. If it is, why isn't he staying on to fight? If the White Sox truly did tell LaRoche that his son could be around all the time, my guess it that it's not written down, at least the part about it being all the time. If LaRoche’s boss lied to him, then I have only this to say to him: Welcome to America. Perhaps the original arrangement became suddenly-- or gradually-- untenable. If the boy spent the entirety of last year in the White Sox clubhouse (one in which he was issued a full uniform by the club bearing his name and his father’s number), then obviously that might have been the tacit agreement, but there must have been complaints. I would have complained. When my colleagues bring their newborns into the office, my first comment is always “let’s see the visitor's security badge.”

LaRoche’s pals were quick to come to his side. Those that would have opposed the presence of a teenager in such a reputedly crass environment, and those that likely would have complained to the front office, are not going to be quick to claim credit. (Jimmy Rollins, anyone?) A good boss takes the heat for everybody else, and I strongly suspect that’s what Williams is doing.

Baseball’s controversies just keep getting sillier. This one, in fact, might be the most “baseball”-like dust-up to date. It’s a multi-billion dollar business that possesses the most remarkable innocence fetish. The real world seems to be lining up almost universally behind the team on this issue, and we should be comforted by that fact. It turns out that nobody else’s job allows an employee’s child to be underfoot 100% of the time. LaRoche giving back $13 million by walking away is a great financial deal for the club and its fans. It was a bit much to pay for one season of a .207 hitter, even if he is Super Dad. The cancellation of so much salary is what makes the story such click-bait on the internet. As sportscaster Bomani Jones said yesterday on the radio, “Drake LaRoche’s dad is different than my dad.” Will Leitch drew notice to the distinction that Adam's not hanging out with his son in the clubhouse, he's raising him there.

Adam LaRoche has proven himself now to be a different breed of man. No doubt about it. During the offseason, he pals around with the Robertsons of Duck Dynasty fame. A couple years ago he started growing out a beard that would now allow him to fit in at their family picnics. He's adamant about teaching his child about "the real world," yet thinks that gets accomplished by keeping him away from school and the presence of his peers. (Curiously, Drake's older sister, Montana, does get to go to school.) He has clearly succeeded in teaching his son a string of life lessons during this spring training season of 2016. One of them is certainly a good one: there are more important things on this earth than money. Another, though, is that, if you don't get preferential treatment, you quit. And still a third is that, you're a celebrity now, boy. We can only hope that one more lesson picked up by both father and son is that workplaces, especially locker rooms, are not day care facilities. Even in schools, teachers have an area where the kids are not allowed, and even in Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner goes to sit in the bleachers, not on the bench, when his father takes the field with the White Sox legends.

posted by CM @ 12:25 PM