Step Up to the Plate. Sucker.

We’re playing catch in the front yard when my son asks me who had “autographed” my glove.

It’s a Pete Rose model, I tell him.
Who’s Pete Rose? he asks. He’s only six.
He was a great ballplayer, I say, who always played hard and got dirty a lot.

I started to add some patronizing drivel about how he would do well to pursue all of his future undertakings with half the drive and determination with which Pete Rose played baseball.

Instead, for some reason, I tell him that Pete Rose went to prison.
Why? he asks.
“Cuz he gambled, sorta,” I say.

He takes that in stride. Like most six-year-olds these days, he’s used to the bad news about public abstractions like Pete Rose.

I was just glad he didn’t ask me who had autographed his glove. I don’t know how I would have explained Darryl Strawberry.

Let me apologize if you’re thinking that you’ve stumbled into some Thom Marshall-esque harvest of navel lint about the timeless, pastoral joys of “Dad” and “First-Grader” tossing the ball about, with spring in the air and Opening Day approaching. I truly wish I were capable of such. But the realization that Dad and First-Grader were playing catch with pieces of cowhide etched with the signatures of convicted tax evaders — and both of the gloves stitched together, most likely, by near-slave labor in the Far East — plunged me into a darker reverie over another father-son tableau involving our former national pastime. It was one I had come across earlier that very morning on page 11B of the Sunday Chronicle.

There, right below the women’s basketball scores from this last Southwest Conference season, was a large ad for the Chronicle itself, exhorting you — that’s you — to “Show your support for the home team.” In this case, though, the home team wasn’t the Chronicle, and you, mercifully, weren’t being directed to cough up an extra quarter to cover the costs of newsprint. No, the home team being touted in this ad was the Astros, and underneath the headline were stiffly posed pictures of two sets of rather glum-looking fathers and sons, decked out in Astros T-shirts and caps.

Beneath the headline and photos, the ad took a more admonitory tone:
Keep major league baseball in Houston.
Below that, in smaller type, it got downright hectoring:

The game is on the line and it’s up to you to come through in the clutch. To help Houston win its bid to keep the Astros in town, you’ve got to show your support for the home team.

Well, by all means, if you put it that way. How can we help? Not to worry — the Chronicle was going to make it easy:

You can start by proudly wearing your Astros colors, displaying your Astros signs and calling the Chronicle’s InfoSource Line at 220-2000, access code S-T-E-P, to order season tickets.

So here was the Chronicle, admonishing all the peons to shape up and help the city “win” its “bid” to keep something it’s already got. In the meantime, I suppose, the paper will expect its writers to objectively report on the offer-you-can’t-refuse that Drayton McLane has extended us for this upcoming season.

As I was re-reading this wondrous product of some of the city’s finest copywriters, I took note that one of the pictured father-son pairs was African-American, the other Hispanic. I assume this was just another of the Chronicle’s clumsy stabs at multiculturalism, but it struck me that beneath those good intentions was something more insidious.

If you’ve got a child in HISD or pay taxes to it, you’re probably aware that many schools on the east and west sides of town are literally crammed to the brim with students. The overwhelming majority of those who are shortchanged by the overcrowding are Hispanic and African-American, yet the Chronicle was suggesting that fulfilling a paramount civic duty at the moment required that their parents spend a sizable chunk of income to subsidize the bad investment of a multimillionaire.

I’d say that reflects a seriously skewed sense of priorities, Jackson.
But I do want to come through in the clutch, so I rang up InfoSource, bypassed the offerings for the soap opera updates and the previous night’s Lotto numbers, and straight-away dialed S-T-E-P, which delivered me the recorded voice of Milo Hamilton. The Wrangler had a deal for me — actually, he had several deals — and all I had to do was hit one of several options on my touch-tone phone to have the pertinent information faxed over from the Chronicle. Soon I learned that coming through in the clutch could run me anywhere from $405 to $1,539 a seat — on top of the extra quarter I’ll have to pay for a Sunday Chronicle.

So, unless they opted for a cheaper 20-game package, the dads in the Chronicle ad would be set back at least $800 for experiencing the father-son bonding that would come from attending each of the Astros’ home games together. No wonder they looked grumpy.

Of course, if they happen to own property within HISD, sometime not too long after Opening Day another demand will be made on their wallets. This will come in the form of a referendum on a massive bond issue to alleviate the school overcrowding, a proposal that will require a stiff and as-yet unspecified tax increase.

I guess the Chronicle will then be urging us all to come through in the clutch for the schoolkids. Maybe they’ll even set up another InfoSource line to call. And when the baseball season ends a few months later, maybe Jeff Bagwell will have hit .390, the Astros will have finally made it to the World Series and Drayton McLane will be making more money than he can count.

Maybe we won’t even have to build him a baseball-only stadium.
Maybe the cost of newsprint will have come down.
In the meantime, we at the Houston Press have done our small part by purchasing, without prodding from the Chronicle, four season tickets at a cost of $6,000 or so. So perhaps I’ll see you out at the Dome for Opening Day.

Mark your calendar — it’s April 1.