The fellow in the photo above is a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox, Mike Clevinger. He is not without talent. He started his career with the Cleveland Guardians, but he wore out his welcome when he broke the rules by going out to dinner with teammate Zach Plesac during the Covid shutdown. His teammates were not close to amused—OK, they were really annoyed, and Cleveland traded his arrogant ass to San Diego, and now, after a year of richly-deserved elbow surgery, he has ended up with the White Sox.
Clevinger has been under a seven-month investigation by Major League Baseball for domestic violence accusations by his ex-girlfriend, Olivia Winestead, with whom he has a baby. In a radio interview on February 15, Ms. Winestead pled her case: he needs drug rehab and anger management, but she doesn’t want to destroy his career, as she’s financially dependent on him now. She sounded credible and sympathetic.
According to her, among other things he threw a cud of tobacco at their child. Class act.
Clevinger, however, has threatened the radio station with legal action.
The White Sox, those lovable mugs, have shrugged their shoulders and indicated that the domestic violence investigation is in the hands of Major League Baseball, and they’ll await the outcome.
Uh huh. Meanwhile they’re hoping that the investigation stretches out long enough, like till the All-Star break, anyway.
By the way, he also has another girlfriend, Monica Ceraolo, with whom he has at least two children—believe it or not, I can’t find a definitive accounting. There may be three.
To get to the point: from when I was very young, I used to see men who looked old and street-smart and tough. They scared me. I wondered how they acquired that look, and I contemplated what constituted the look. My dad, who had a very young face, was not one of them. My brother and I have had youngish faces, too, well into our 50’s.
I think Mike Clevinger has that scary look. He has kind of a big head and large features: just look at that picture. I think he looks older than his age (guess; I’ll state it at the end). This man is way much younger than I am, but, when I look at that face, that head, I feel younger and much less…potent? I guess? Not in charge? Not at all scary?
When I was 15, I pitched on an all-star team that played in a tournament in Hollywood, Florida. I don’t know how we acquired this coach. Let’s call him Sal. He may have been Italian, as he looked it, and Hollywood was crazy with Italians. He was big-framed, not fat, but with heavy shoulders and arms. His skin was dark, with dark eyes, and dark curly hair. His face was crammed with features: long straight nose, thick lips, strong chin. Those eyes could look right through you.
He had big, thick fingers, like all baseball players have—except me. I have small hands, and my fingers are skinny and now bent with arthritis. How I would have loved to have been born with the fingers of today’s pitchers! If I’d had fingers like that I could have made a ball sit up and sing any song in any key.
We had another coach, whose last name was Lefebvre, which I recall because a major league player, Jim, had that name. Lefebvre was the real coach of this team: knowledgeable, motivating, optimistic, challenging. It was rumored that he’d risen high in the Cardinals’ organization as a catcher till a thrown bat shattered his right elbow. We kids could only imagine such a tragedy.
He’s the only coach who ever prodded me to throw my best stuff. They actually had Todd Davis and me throw on the sidelines before the championship game of that Hollywood tournament. They told us to pitch our best, and they’d choose the one they thought gave us the best chance to win. That was me. We won, 2-1, in one of the best games I ever pitched.
Thanks, Coach Lefebvre! His kindness and empathy and optimism really picked a kid up.
Back to coach Sal. He was cynical and quiet and just sort of hanging around. .He was always saying things around us that would get a coach put in jail today: “She was one of those voluptuous types, you know?” And one that he obviously thought was a terrific joke: “My wife is married but I’m not.”
That this was in South Florida in 1971 only explains but doesn’t excuse him.
So here’s the part that engages me: Obviously when I was 15, this guy seemed like he came from another, wiser, street-smart world that I could only guess about. Yet I don’t even know if he knew anything about baseball; Lefebvre made all the decisions.
Sal was only coaching us through this four or five game tournament. Where did he come from? What did he do? I’d never seen him before, and he didn’t exactly fit in with our parents. What kind of late 60’s je m’en foutisme allowed our parents to accept this stranger so readily? Unless that was a deal made behind our backs, which would have been unlikely to happen, if only because they were 60's parents and disengaged. Rather than being the helicopter parents of today, they were more like Hindenburg parents.
Sal had a stillness to him. He didn’t gesture. He wasn’t loud. He didn’t engage with the parents. He was the sort of man always to have his muscled arms crossed with a Styrofoam cup of coffee in one thick hand.
And now? I feel the same way about these young men with their big heads and features. I believe that even though they are 30 years younger, they are all older than I am and much more street-smart. I am afraid to engage them in business. I can’t trust them. I may objectively be smarter, but I don’t believe it.
There’s another kind of person who doesn’t have a big head or frightening features. He’s just smarter than I am, and he understands how the world works better than I do. The best example is my boss at AIG, Robert.
Robert isn’t physically commanding, like Sal, but he has a presence, a real charisma. You know when he’s in the room. He projects power. I don’t know whether Sal was quick-witted, but that defines Robert. His face was young, smiling, mischievous, nothing like Sal’s dull glower.
After Robert arrived, a few months after me, I watched him talk to people and talked to him myself. I don’t have any idea how I got this sense, but I knew that I could never out-fox him, out-politic him, and my only hope at remaining in my job would be to fall to my knees, kiss his ring, and vow to take a bullet for him.
It worked out. He exiled me way down the hall where he couldn’t see what crazy schemes the marketing people were into behind my back. He was very kind to me, especially as he was the boss and I still sometimes insisted on getting mad and engaging him in shouting matches using inventive forms of the F word. Somehow he never fired me!
Here’s the difference: Robert had a kind of irony about him that I never sensed with Sal. On the recommendation of a paint-store owner, Robert had hired some guy to build kitchen cabinets for him, paid him some money up front, the job had been started, and then the guy disappeared and wasn’t susceptible to phone calls.
In his office one day, Robert relayed this story, and then said, “I’m going to go back to that paint store, have you and Walma [another employee] walk on both sides of me, grab a couple of gallons of paint, and go up to this guy, and I’ll say, ‘You have to tell me where to find this guy. You recommended him to me, and now I can’t find him, and I paid him money.’”
Robert shrugged, and then pointed down to indicate our hypothetical paint cans. “’Otherwise, I have tell you, I can’t control these guys, I don’t know what they’re going to do.”’
OK, first, I could never come up with a story like that. Also, Walma was about 70, and I was a little weak fellow, so the plot is typical of Robert’s sense of irony. But that he could even envision such a scene implies a world well beyond my own—a world of big men with big faces and big fingers. How did Robert learn that world?
Unlike Sal, Robert was full of hand gestures, often of the dismissive, shoving-things-to-the-side, fuggedaboutit sort. He was always in motion, energetic where Sal was lethargic. He and our COO, Jim Bambrick, would meet in the hall, insult each other, and point fingers at each other’s chest, all in fun. I never had the sense that Sal was fun.
But that’s the difference, one can perceive what Robert is about, what he will require, what one shouldn’t do.
I wouldn’t have wanted to deal with Coach Sal. As much as he seemed harmless, there was an edge. Somehow his short-sleeved polo shirts, tight around his biceps, sent a message.
Why am I such a wimp? I’m afraid of Mike Clevinger? He who maybe beats up on women and throws tobacco cud at his kid (allegedly)? None of that would ever occur to me. And never to Robert.
It’s times like this that I wish I could have another talk with my dad, gone now 40 years. A veteran of the Depression, wounded in World War II, obtaining his doctorate in record time, fighting faculty fights. He wouldn’t have any idea what I was talking about, having nearly been killed by German guns and then being afraid of no one.
I can still see him confronting a little league baseball coach who accused me of sticking my head over the plate to get hit—like that would ever have occurred to me! I recall Dad starting to pull out of the parking lot, then when I told him, he stopped, and I can see him poking his finger under that coach’s nose. That little league coach, a barber named D’Antonis, had a big face, big fingers.
This may be the most emblematic of the posts in this blog: I encounter something I don’t understand, can't figure it out, and to this day am flummoxed by it. Younger guys with big heads and florid features: why do you seem to know so much more than I do? Too bad I never had a talk with Sal, but I bet he would have been bewildered by the prospect of explaining to me what to him was simply the world he lived in.
Mike Clevinger is 32.
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