Category: baseball

Cooperstown: 1 is good. 2 is better?

For many years in Cooperstown, there was a Hall of Fame weekend. It featured a parade, an exhibition game between two major league clubs, a regular season game between the Oneonta minor league team and an opponent, and of course, the induction ceremony, along with plenty of opportunities for the retired players to make a some money signing autographs on pictures, baseballs, bats, caps, any semi-flat surface.

Then a few years ago, someone had this bright idea: why doesn’t Cooperstown have TWO Hall of Fame weekends? One would be in late May or June, the other in the end of July or early August. The first event would feature the exhibition game. The second event would feature the minor league game. EACH event would feature a parade, and there would be TWO chances for the old-timers to make a few bucks. The merchants would be able to rake in some extra dough as well.

This year, the exhibition game was early, May 24, and one of the participants was the WORLD CHAMPION Boston Red Sox. My father-in-law, Richard, stood in line for 8 hours in February, but failed to get any tickets. So I didn’t go to the game for the first time in five years. He seemed destined to miss his first game in about fifteen.

On May 24, which was his birthday, Richard and his wife Joyce went to Cooperstown anyway; it’s only about 20 miles from Oneonta, where they live. He asked off-handedly whether there might be seats available, and there were! Some of the teams who had gotten an allotment of tickets had returned them. So that was a very nice birthday gift to him.

Richard has a book where he keeps a record of each game; he’s a season ticket holder of the Oneonta Tigers. For a regular season game, scorekeeping is not too hard, though we saw a 7-2-5-1 pickle earlier this year. (That means the left fielder threw home to the catcher who threw to third base who threw to the pitcher covering home and got the out.) But in the exhibition game, it’s almost impossible. For one thing, both teams bring up a bunch of minor league players, especially pitchers, just for the day. Also, the stars usually play only an inning or two. Also, one can leave the game, then come back in the game, which is not generally allowed in professional baseball.

This weeekend, Richard and I are going to the second 2005 Hall of Fame weekend in Cooperstown. Then we’ll walk through town picking out the old pros. “Hey, there’s Yogi.” “That’s Mudcat Grant.” “I think that’s Ferguson Jenkins.” Then we’ll see the Oneonta Tigers play the Tri-City Valley Cats (of Troy, NY, near Albany) in, as it’s always called, “historic Doubleday Field.” It’s a real thrill for the young players.

There is usually a Q & A with some of the inductees and/or other Hall of Famers. But this year, that’s been pushed back to Monday, featuring the new inductees, Wade Boggs and Ryne Sandberg.

Cooperstown is a pretty, idyllic place. But if you want to come just to to see the Baseball Hall of Fame, I MOST DEFINITELY recommend that you come some time other than the HoF weekends, some time when it isn’t a madhouse.

ROG

Let’s Get National

I was watching the New York Mets play the Washington Nationals in DC on the 4th of July on one of the ESPN channels. Ostensibly, I was rooting for the Metropolitans, the New York team, and all. Yet I developed a certain affection for the team from our nation’s capital because of its long history of adversity.

The city of Washington had a team, first named the Nationals, then the Senators, since the creation of the American League in 1901. The team won a World Series in 1924, and the league pennant in 1925 and 1933, but soon was dubbed as a loser: “First in war, first in peace, last in the American League.” The team in the musical “Damn Yankees” that was dealing with the devil in order to try to overtake the title team was the Washington Senators.

Then in 1961, the American League expanded from 8 to 10 teams, in Minnesota and Southern California, but of the two, only Los Angeles got a new team; the Twin Cities got the old Senators and were re-dubbed the Minnesota Twins. And wouldn’t you know it, this team, now in the Midwest, actually became competitive, winning the American League crown in 1965. Meanwhile, the expansion Senators were pretty bad, drew poorly, and moved to Arlington, TX to become the Texas Rangers in 1972, leaving DC with no team at all for over three decades.

Expos

Meanwhile, the Montreal Expos were formed in 1969. The team never won a pennant, but they looked to have a lock on the National League crown in 1994 when the baseball strike eliminated the remainder of the season. I went to one home Expos game back in 1992, and I found the stadium forbidding and cold.

Later, the Expos, along with the Twins, were slated for elimination. This does not happen, but the Expos ended up under the operational control of Major League Baseball, which created an awkward situation in that MLB, which regulates the other teams, also OWNS a team. Worse, because they were drawing so poorly in Montreal, they played nearly a third of their “home games” in San Juan, PR for the last couple seasons, which was very difficult for the players.
(Imagine that you have a 6-month job and could be home half the time. That’s much easier than being on the road two-thirds of the time.)
The attendance of 748,550 in 2004 was over 500,000 less than the next lowest team, Tampa Bay.

Then, the team was scheduled to move to DC, but a last-minute move by some members of the Washington city council over funding for a stadium nearly upended the deal.

So, these Washington Nats, 50-32, even after their 5-2 loss to the Mets on Independence Day, lead their division by about 5 games, after being a losing team (67-95) as the Expos last year.

Robby

One important factor in the Washington team’s success is manager Frank Robinson. He was a big star for the Cincinnati Reds in the 1950s and early 1960s, where he was Rookie of the Year in 1956 and Most Valuable Player in 1961. The Reds thought Robinson was worn out and traded him to the Baltimore Orioles after the 1965 season; apparently he wasn’t, for he won MVP honors for the season AND for the World Series in 1966. He is one of a handful of players to win the season MVP award in both leagues. Most people don’t realize that he is one of the top half dozen home run hitters of all time, at 586, behind only Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth, Barry Bonds, and Willie Mays. (Sammy Sosa may overtake him, as he’s at 583 as of July 4. Many folks thought that Mark McGuire would overtake Aaron, but actually he came up three shy of Frank Robinson’s total, also at 583.)

Robinson became the first black manager in Major League history in 1975 with the Cleveland Indians. (The Indians had the first black ballplayer in the American League, Larry Doby, in 1947, a few weeks after the Dodgers played another Robinson, Jackie, in the National League.) He also managed the Giants and the Orioles before eventually working in the Baseball Commissioner’s office. When MLB took over the Expos for the 2002 season, it asked Frank to manage the team.

So, if the Mets are unable to make up that 9-game deficit and pass every other team in their division, I’ll be rooting for the Washington Nationals, even though I barely know the players, and most of those I know from other teams they played for other than the Expos: Livan Hernandez, Carlos Baerga, Wil Cordero, Junior Spivey, Cristian Guzman, and Vinny Castilla. Better them than the tomahawk-choppin’, division-always-winnin’, “America’s-Team”-self-proclaimin’, Turner cable-advantaged Atlanta Braves.

The sport of the gods

I’ve mentioned only briefly that I try to play racquetball every weekday. (That HAS been tweaked somewhat by the arrival of the child, but it’s still the goal.)

What I’ve discovered is that racquetball, in some ways, is very much like baseball. BASEBALL? Yes.

  • You have to keep your eye on the ball
  • You must go where the ball is going to be, not where it is
  • Often, you have to back up to get the best defensive angle on the ball
  • Sometimes you hit it well and you’re unsuccessful, while other times you hit it poorly and luck out
  • You have to change your pace
  • It’s often a “matter of inches”
  • You can be down 14-1 and still come back and win

    I’ve played with a lot of guys, and a few women, over the years, but my main three competitors all have a FantaCo connection. Don Labriola was a FantaCo customer, as was Norm Nissen, best man in my wedding to Carol. Don had to stop playing (his knees, I think), but Norman & I are still at it nearly 20 years later.

    Tom Yanni has a more indirect FantaCo connection. He was going out with a woman named Debbie who had a roommate who was friends with FantaCo’s Mitch Cohn. Tom and I played for about 15 years until he got married and moved to Rhode Island. He has a teenaged daughter and a new son, Sam, just a couple weeks older than Lydia.

    You really get to know people quite well when you play racquetball: how often they call a “hinder” on the shot, how often they hit someone with a shot (someone’s almost always going to be hit by the shot, or more rarely, the racquet), how often they argue a call agreed to by the majority, how angry they get with themselves when they muff shots.
    You’ll see a side of people others don’t often see. One guy who we used to play cursed quite often; he was a minister who has since moved to Maryland. (But another minister we used to play, who has since moved to Pennsylvania, was the same on and off the court.)

    I used to play almost exclusively singles (2 of us) or cutthroat (3 of us), but I’ve played more partners in the last year or two than ever before, mostly due to circumstance. (The singles people used to come earlier and the doubles people later, but now we all show up at about the same time.)

    I know one guy who has a bad knee but plays when he can. His wife hid his racquet, but he found it, took it to play, then carefully replaced the racquet to its original place. Another guy had a stress test and was told by his doctor not to play until the test was over. Well, the day after the test, but before the results were in, he was back at it. The game has a devotion practically religious in nature. It was Norm who characterized racquetball as the “sport of the gods”, and he may be right.

    So thanks, Norm, Mike, Alan, Danny, Stanley, and Sherman. Hope Charlie gets better. Hope the elusive Ted shows up sometime.

    • ROG

    Play ball!

    Today is the beginning of baseball season.

    WHAT? you proclaim. The Yankees, Mets, Red Sox and the other teams have been playing for nearly two months. Indeed they have, but I wasn’t talking about Major League Baseball. I was talking about Minor League Baseball, specifically the Class A New York-Penn (NY-P) League.

    When I was growing up in Binghamton, my father or grandfather (but seldom both) would take me to see the Triplets. They were team in the Eastern League from 1923 to 1963 and again in 1967 and 1968. They were called the Triplets because they represented the Triple Cities in New York State’s Southern Tier: Binghamton, Johnson City, and Endicott (the fact that only Binghamton was a city and the other two were villages is not germane to the discussion). The out-of-town papers referred to the team as Binghamton. They were an affiliate of the New York Yankees from 1932 to 1961, so I was a fan of the Bronx Bombers as a kid.
    I saw Al Downing pitch there. He eventually became a Yankee starter. (He was best known, though, for being the Dodgers pitcher when Atlanta Braves’ star Hank Aaron hit home run #715 in 1973, breaking Babe Ruth’s record.)
    The Triplets were a Kansas City Athletics affiliate in 1962 and 1963. The team spent three years (1964-66) in the lower level NY-P League, linked with the Milwaukee Braves the first year, and the Yankees subsequently before their brief return to the Eastern League, still affiliated with the Yanks. Then nothing, as Johnson Field was torn down after the 1968 season so that a newer Route 17 could be built west of Binghamton.

    That Yankee Class A NY-P team that was in Binghamton in 1965 & 1966 ended up in Oneonta for over 30 years before moving again. Oneonta is now a Tiger affiliate in the NY-P.

    Albany has had trouble fielding a team. For a time, they had an Eastern League team in Heritage Park in Colonie (near Albany) that was affiliated with the Oakland A’s (1983-84), then the New York Yankees (1985-94.) I saw Bernie Williams play there. But those arrangements eventually collapsed.
    Then there were the Diamond Dogs (alas, no David Bowie) in an independent league not affiliated with major league baseball. I went to a few of those games and they were quite a bit of fun, though not always the highest caliber of play.
    Now, the Capital District has a new team, the Tri-Cities Valley Cats (the Tri-Cities in this case being Albany, Schenectady and Troy — all CITIES) in the NY-P League.
    The out-of-town papers referred to the team as Troy. Today’s opener is against the Oneonta Tigers at the Joseph L. Bruno Stadium, nicknamed “The Joe”. (The running joke at the time: “It’s a good thing his name wasn’t John.”) Joe Bruno is the Majority Leader in the New York Senate.

    One of the cool games this season will be on July 30, when the same two teams meet in Cooperstown at Doubleday Field. The Oneonta team has, for many years, gotten a “home” game there, and I understand that it’s quite a thrill for the players. Since my father-in-law has had season tickets to the Oneonta Yankees -he saw Ricky Ledee play for them- and now the Oneonta Tigers, I’ve seen a couple games there myself.

    It’s a bit surprising that a market the size of Albany/Schenectady/Troy has a Class A team, especially since Binghamton, which is about the size of Troy and half the size of Albany, once again has a team in the Class AA Eastern League, with a higher caliber of player.
    Last year, for the first time, I went to the stadium in downtown Binghamton where the Binghamton Mets have played for a few years, after a nearly three-decade gap for baseball in Binghamton. The program had third baseman David Wright on the cover; he’d already been promoted to the New York Mets, but that’s baseball. It’s a lovely stadium, but I have to think that foul balls must hit the cars driving by on Henry Street.

    In any case, if you like baseball, but have gotten cynical over Major League Baseball because of the salaries, or whatever, check out Minor League Baseball.

    ROG
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