Can Northwestern Baseball Survive *Gestures Broadly* All This?
And, some completely unrelated good news.
At the corner of Roosevelt Road and Lake Shore Drive on the edge of downtown Chicago, there is a tall, obelisk-shaped mass shrouded in plastic wrap and tape and enclosed by an impenetrable fence barricade.
It’s easy to miss if you drive by, which is, in fact, the point – beneath these layers of secrecy lies a platform where a statue of Christopher Columbus once stood.
Columbus, of course, was a genocidal maniac who pioneered the concept of Manifest Destiny in the Americas. Many people have known this for many generations, but it didn’t stop the U.S. from creating a day to celebrate him in 1792 which (since we can agree on absolutely nothing in this country) has remained a federal holiday to this day.
In July 2020, activists attempted to topple the statue and were met with a brute-force police response that caused multiple injuries. A week later, the city took it down to “protect public safety,” leaving an incomplete monument to that fraught summer in its wake.
3 years later, not much has changed. The city still vigorously protects this sad little concrete slab wrapped in plastic, which persists as an eyesore on valuable and beautiful real estate.
Addressing this matter, one presumes, is seen as more trouble than it’s worth for local officials, who want nothing more than for everyone to forget that any of the statue controversy ever happened. It is failed leadership in the form of kicking the can down the road.
A similar brand of cognitive dissonance is currently playing out within the walls of the Northwestern athletics department, which refuses to outright fire disgraced former baseball coach Jim Foster. It’s just more trouble than it’s worth.
By now you are likely aware of the deep-rooted, never-ending, multifaceted scandal that has been slow-boiling the Northwestern athletics department for the last month. Of course, it began with the bungled half-punishment of Pat Fitzgerald in response to hazing allegations within the football program at the beginning of July. It has since progressed quickly to embroil other sports one by one.
The baseball program was second to fall, being dragged into the cycle of unsavory headlines as a result of reporting done by Danny Parkins of Chicago AM radio station 670 The Score.
Monday, July 10, was already setting up to be a dark day in Evanston. As Fitzgerald’s employment hung in the balance, soon to be terminated, Parkins went on the air in the afternoon to share horrific details on the short tenure of the since-“fired” Northwestern baseball coach Jim Foster.
It’s best to just read the full story yourself, which was later supported by additional reporting from Inside NU, but the allegations surrounding Foster included the following:
Bullying
Sexism
Discouraging the treatment of injuries
Lack of presence during practices, misguided training plans when he was there
A bunts-only hitting practice off a high-speed machine before the opening series at Texas State, for example.
Preventing the team from volunteering at an event for children with special needs
A 2.5-hour punishment run, similar to conditioning that caused the death of one of Foster’s players at Rhode Island in 2011, which evidently did not come up in the hiring process that athletic director Derrick Gragg pawned off to a pair of boosters who aimed to hire a “disciplinarian to help the players overachieve.”
Much, much more
NU reportedly received reports of these actions over the course of the year, and launched an HR investigation that went nowhere. Crucially, it failed to seek testimonials from any NU players.
“Maybe the players aren’t good enough and are just making excuses or are disgruntled,” Foster told the Score in response, not denying any actions of which he was accused, other than to call the story a hit piece. “Maybe it’s how they’re raised, could be any of that stuff.”
Even if you set aside (and you shouldn’t) the slipshod hiring process that brought Foster to Evanston, the Score’s report should have given the department a ball-on-a-tee shot at an efficient, straightforward punishment, something it had clearly failed to execute with Fitzgerald.
As you know if you’ve spent any time online in the last decade, this so-called culture war of ours takes no days off. There is always a new ideological battlefield, as seemingly straightforward issues take on the weight of competing factions.
But in the eye of a swirling guano-storm, the factions actually found some level of agreement in the most surprising of locations: Northwestern baseball. Foster needed to go.
Nonetheless, 3 days of tense silence passed before this story reached its inevitable conclusion. Or, something like it:
You may be wondering about the distinction here. This is conjecture, but with Fitzgerald already seeking compensation for wrongful termination in a high-profile case he will probably win, one can imagine how a department that will be paying exorbitant legal fees for the foreseeable future might want to find a less financially inflammatory way to cut ties with another embattled coach.
To parse through the legalese, Foster has been suspended indefinitely, but not technically fired. It seems that he will continue to receive checks until the end of his contract, the length of which is unknown because, private school.
Anyone who cares about Northwestern athletics has been carrying around a little bit of pain for the last month. It’s still hard to digest, and the headlines just keep coming.
This athletic department, and frankly this university, has long praised itself for doing things “the right way.” The truth is, in big-time college athletics, there’s really no such thing.
Northwestern, desperate to be one of the big boys, cut corners in its oversight, hiring processes and leadership at every level. It tried to play in that sandbox and failed, catastrophically.
Now the world watches as this proud institution flails about in a mess of its own making.
As I wrote this blog, I found myself going back day after day and adding additional damning details that had slipped my mind and felt too disturbing to omit. I probably still missed a few, but watching this whole thing play out and deciding when I would even be able to reflect on it has absolutely killed my blogging vibes.
The process of writing this has taken several weeks, and I’ve officially hit my personal limit on Monitoring the Situation. But we’re not quite done.
Mind-mapping the future of Northwestern baseball is a dangerous game.
Brian Anderson, a former big league infielder who was added to Foster’s staff midseason upon the departures of essentially every assistant coach (maybe this should have indicated something!), has been tabbed as the interim head coach.
In contrast to his predecessor, Anderson seems to be well-liked among the players and generally projects enthusiasm and positive vibes in his limited online dispatches. It seems unlikely that he’ll be a detriment to the team’s already bleak 2024 prospects, which is probably about all one can reasonably ask for.
To his immense credit, Anderson may very well have saved the program from losing the vast majority of its players to the transfer portal. Recently, he has even been hitting the portal to fill out the areas left barren by the dozen or so players who departed immediately after this past season concluded.
Here are my concerns: the 2024 season will come and go, and the athletic department will have to decide between retaining Anderson or finding a new coach on the open market.
The last time the program faced this predicament, of course, came after the 2022 season. The ‘Cats had fallen just short of the B1G Tournament under well-liked interim coach Josh Reynolds, who was summarily shown the door in favor of… Jim Foster.
Whether or not Anderson coaches his way into a full-time job, to keep the baseball program alive, Northwestern has got to nail its hire for 2025. I have very little faith in Derrick Gragg’s ability to achieve this task. But the program that was already at the very bottom of Division 1 college baseball before Jim Foster coached a game simply cannot withstand another scandal, failed hire or mass departure without risking irreparable damage.
As mentioned, NU will be funneling a lot of cash into legal fees, out-of-court settlements, Jim Foster’s bank account and (hopefully? someday?) some outside crisis management help for at least the next five years.
Despite the amount of money the university pumped into renovations to Rocky Miller Park nearly a decade ago, if the baseball program fails to stand on its own two feet soon enough, the athletic department could very well deem it to be more trouble than it’s worth, the kiss of death in college sports.
That’s a lot of pressure to put on a team that went 10-40 last season, saw essentially all of its most talented players depart and is now under the direction of its 5th coach since 2015, 2 of which have served with an interim tag.
The players are riding out all of the worst parts of this rollercoaster, and I truly wish them the best. That’s all we can do.
Now that this story has been expunged from my writing brain, I can resume covering the niche, goofy baseball things that make this blog tick. Since this post is definitely hitting word count records, I’ll list them below and get back to our regularly scheduled programming very soon.
In the meantime, here is some good news from the month of July:
Chicago Dog legend Keon Barnum, now a New Jersey Jackal, won the Frontier League All-Star Game MVP award. He is currently hitting an otherworldly .338/.439/.693 for a 1.132 OPS and 26 bombs in just 60 games. The K/BB rate is manageable too. Big league orgs – give this man a chance! More on him later.
The Chicago Dogs currently hold the wild card lead (just found out we were now doing playoff seedings this way…lol) in the American Association with a 38-35 record, 5.5 games behind the division-leading Milwaukee MilkTrash. There are 27 games remaining, so that seems a hard hill to climb. There is a whole pack of mid-tier teams right on their heels, including the Kane County Cougars, so the Dogs need to finish strong to sneak into the playoffs for a 3rd straight season. The Gary SouthShore RailCats are once again not really a threat. More on all of this later.
The Windy City Thunderbolts and Joilet Slammers also find themselves bringing up the rear in the Frontier League, but the Schaumburg Boomers are just 2.5 back of the league-leading Tri-City Valley Cats. Schaumburg has been bringing playoff baseball to the burbs for many years now, and it appears they will do so again. More on this later, too.
As always, thanks for reading.