Trout out to hook kids on baseball

Sunday, October 22, 2006

Left-handed pitcher Steve Trout spent five seasons with the Chicago White Sox and four with the Chicago Cubs in the 1970s and 1980s. Now retired and running kids' baseball camps like the one Saturday at Galesburg High School, the question nagging at me as I approached John Thiel Gym was: Does he consider himself an ex-White Sox or ex-Cubs player?

Opening the door to the gym, there stood Trout in front of me - amazingly unaged - wearing an oversized White Sox jersey. Question answered, right?

"No," said Trout, trying to explain.

"When you're a Cubs fan, you're a Cubs fan. You don't give up because you have a year like they had this year. Loyalty is what it's all about to a Cubs fan.

"My loyalty is to the game of baseball," he said. "There's no particular team - Cub or Sox. I'm about baseball and giving whatever I've learned to clinics, making my living teaching pitching and helping someone get through the different levels."

If Trout seems a little vague and hard to follow, that parallels the course he set during his playing career. The son of former Detroit Tigers pitching great Dizzy Trout, he was a No. 1 pick of the White Sox in 1976 and filled the role of talented, flaky lefthander for the Sox, Cubs, Yankees and Mariners.

His biggest success came with the 1984 Cubs when he went 13-7 in a rotation that included Rick Sutcliffe and Dennis Eckersley but accomplished a feat few other Cubs pitchers can claim in this century: He pitched and won a Cubs' postseason game with a 4-2 win over the Padres. That gave Chicago a 2-0 lead in the best-of-five series, which they promptly blew with three straight losses in San Diego.

Although the finish might have been tough, it's a summer Trout will never forget.

"Vince Vaughn the actor sang "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" at Wrigley Field this year and they asked him, 'What's your favorite thing about baseball?'

"He said, 'The 1984 Cubs.'"

"I call it the year the ivy smiled," Trout said. "In 1983 you could count how many people came to the ballpark. The next year, a couple of trades and boom. Ever since then, it's been sellouts."

For a guy supposedly with no team loyalties, Trout seems to have followed the Cubs well recently.

"You saw a couple of guys this year with the Cubs who didn't hustle - one of them was (Aramis) Ramirez.

"Where Ozzie Guillen would get in your face, with Dusty Baker it was behind closed doors.

"I think a guy like Lou Piniella (hired as manager this week) will get in your face, like Ozzie. But Dusty does it differently.

"The goal for the manager is to get the guys to play for him. It looks like some of the guys with the Cubs last year got complacent."

Trout divides his time these days between Chicago and Sarasota, Fla. and conducts camps at his Florida home called sports holidays which involve playing all sports.

Some of his activities in the Chicago area have included a former Galesburg High School baseball player, Michael Spinks, who coaches at Westchester St. Joseph's High School along with running an indoor sports facility in Ithasca.

Spinks is a 1986 GHS graduate who continued his playing career at Ellsworth College and the University of Iowa. He played minor league baseball and worked for the Montreal Expos for two years

He also helped organize Saturday's clinic, one of his few return trips to Galesburg since leaving for college. But in one way, he's always a part of his hometown.

"I've had a lot of good coaches in my years - Jim Isaacson, Gary Bruington and John Shay - and the way I coach now, I see a little bit of all of them in me. Get them on, get them over, get them in."

According to Spinks, bringing Trout to Galesburg - something he may try to do again with other retired and active players - is just his way of giving back to the community.