Showing posts with label Baseball. Show all posts
You can take our Wiffle Ball, but you can't take our Freedom
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
With apologies to Defiantly Dutch, who would assuredly disagree (thanks for the plug, Double D), what the hell is wrong with Connecticut these days? Earlier this summer you had some overly aggressive moneyed homeowners in Greenwich trying to shut down Wiffle ball-playing teens and kick them back into the Great Indoors where they apparently belong.
Now we've got a youth baseball league in New Haven booting a 9-year-old pitcher and probably his entire team because he's too good a hurler.
After reading about these back-to-back fiascoes, I have to ask, why doesn't Massachusetts annex the Northwest Corner and add it to the Berkshires and let tiny Rhode Island have everything else from this crazy state? (In a battle of disgraced politicians, I'll take Providence's Buddy Cianci over former Connecticut Gov. Rowland.)
Let's see, here are some things that Connecticut cursed us with: the Hartford Whalers, Joe Lieberman, Carl Pavano, Benedict Arnold, and the movie Mystic Pizza.
Good things to come out of the Nutmeg State? (nicknamed after something you put in your apple cider, I might add.) You have Katharine Hepburn, no arguing that. I'm OK with Meg Ryan, too. Wiffle Ball itself was alleged to have been invented in Fairfield. And then, … um, the Danbury Mall was pretty cool for a week in, like, 1987 (it once was the site of an even cooler fairgrounds). That's about it.
And, no, I didn't forget the worst offender in Connecticut's lineage — no, not the various other corrupt elected officials from the self-named Constitution State. It's that all-consuming monolithic sports Galactus in Bristol.
I love this quote from the AP story on the 9-year-old pitcher:League officials say they first told Vidro that the boy could not pitch after a game on Aug. 13. Jericho played second base the next game on Aug. 16. But when he took the mound Wednesday, the other team walked off and a forfeit was called.
League officials say Jericho's mother became irate, threatening them and vowing to get the league shut down.
"I have never seen behavior of a parent like the behavior Jericho's mother exhibited Wednesday night," Noble said.
Um, you think she was irate? Hey, I can't stand most kid-sports parents — even if they're not the infamous hockey dad, I think most parents should be banned from watching their kids play as soon as they start doing more than cheer their daughters and sons and begin commenting, criticizing and, hell, even speaking anything other than "Yay." But if I was this mom and they kicked my kid out because he threw too fast, yeah, I'd go apeshit too. Not hitting-people-apeshit — you can't condone that. But there would be some raised voices, yes.
More coverage.
Moneyball
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Sorry I haven't linked to my man Mark Kriegel as often as I should — I am still having trouble forgiving him for going Hollywood and moving to sunny L.A., to say nothing of his current employer — but he has hit it right on the head with this column, which my Father the Would-Be Sportswriter shared with me.
Kriegel argues that New York has truly become home of the Hedge Fund Class, and its sports teams are reflecting that reality. Forget Gawker's Creative Underclass — they (we) are just the rabble mob muttering underneath this pile of money. Yes, the money has arguably brought a cleaner, safer city, but at the cost of keeping it, and by extension most of the desirable places in the state and the country, nearly unaffordable to the middle class, to say nothing of anyone trying to support a family at a lower rate than that.
It's a weird twist on Benjamin Franklin's famous quote on liberty and safety — the money has brought both (or as much as attainable in these dark days), but at a cost that none but the wealthy can afford.
At least the Yankees are not laying off workers part-time, at least as far as we know. Then again, who knows what Hank Steinbrenner has up his sleeves for the average front-office worker?
Hey, we reached 102! (as in, this is the 102nd published post and you actually read this far).
Catching some baseball on vacation
Saturday, August 2, 2008
I haven't forgotten you, loyal readers (all 2 of you). We've just been on vacation a little bit.
Watching Old-Timer's Day with My Father the would-be Sportswriter, and thinking of Thurman Munson, who died on this day 29 years ago, while trying to educate the Baby in the lore of baseball (and bunny cars).
A few days ago, the Yankees traded for Detroit's Ivan Rodriguez, and I thought the same thing this blogger did at Bronx Banter: what would Munson have thought about the Yankees acquiring a catcher with the nickname of "Pudge," the same as his hated Red Sox rival Carlton Fisk?
Anyway, more blog posts in the future, after vacation. Enjoy the summer.
On baseball
Friday, June 27, 2008
What is it about baseball, or base-e-bol as The Baby calls it? (He says it almost like Chico Escuela's "beisbol been berry berry good to me," which Sammy Sosa would sometimes pay homage to in 1998.)
What is it about a late afternoon game under sunny skies and lightly breezy temperatures, about sharing a game with two people you adore and love, about a guy walking around with cold beer to sell you, about hot dogs, about soft-serve ice cream in miniature helmets, about no matter how much The Game pisses you off because of steroids, big-ego players and (shamefully) most of my fellow Yankee fans (not the true-Yankee blue Bleacher Creatures of the ’90s who were denizens of Sections 37 to 43 before alcohol was banned there, but the loud-mouth and obnoxious ones guzzling gas in SUVs with Yankee decals on their trailer hitches; perhaps many Red Sox and Mets fans feel the same way about their obnoxious cohorts)?
Despite all that, what is it that makes the game still great to see live, even if your toddler can only sit still in awe for an inning and-a-half? Is it the clichéd pastoral nature of a game that for the formative years of its inception was really a city game1? Is it summer evenings under a waning sun? Is it the pure simplicity and complexity of the game, the only major team sport without a clock?
Whatever, we took The Baby to his first real game last weekend. He can't stop talking about it. Though this was his favorite part:
1From George Vecsey's, Baseball, 2006, Modern Library, an imprint of Random House:Hoboken, the birthplace of another American institution, Francis Albert Sinatra, has lobbied to be considered the home place of baseball [possibly the first big recorded game took place there on June 19, 1846, some 162 years ago last week], but its urban grit and anonymous proximity to New York City make it a poor competitor with upstate Cooperstown for the honor. In the minds of the American builders of baseball, the game needed the appeal of the woods and pastures, with the players retaining the posture of farmers and outdoorsmen. This image was more myth than reality: baseball was a city game.
Within a few miles and short ferry rides, the Knickerbockers could challenge teams like the Empires, Atlantics, Eagles, Putnams, Washingtons, Gothams, Eckfords, and Phantoms in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and New Jersey, whose rosters included men from the shops, factories, offices, and civil service of the metropolis. Some clubs were organized along ethnic lines, like soccer teams of future generations, but others represented trades or companies or neighborhoods.
I've got a bad feeling about this
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Thank God this wasn't part of the baby's first-ever baseball game.
Great Men Out
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Lost, perhaps, in the sad news last week of the death of Buffalo's own Tim Russert was the death of another journalist — Eliot Asinof's passing at 88 a week ago can hardly be called sudden in the way Russert's was, especially because Big Tim was 30 years his junior.
Still, let's not forget Asinof. His 1963 book Eight Men Out, filled with research, interviews and (according to the Times) some fiction was a groundbreaking work, and one of the many influences of The Young Icepick in his quest to become a Writer — I read it at age 15 when an edition was released to coincide with John Sayles' excellent 1988 movie.
Asinof's conceit, hammered home in Sayles' film, is the eight Black Sox of 1919 were victims of a miserly owner and a unionless system that chewed them up with no chance for the freedom that today's free agents enjoy, even though at least five of the eight were in fact guilty of throwing games to the gamblers.
The scandal ruined the lives of many yet, in an ironic way, saved the sport from shadiness by paving the way for Babe Ruth and the needed strong, centralized leadership of baseball's Office of the Commissioner; strong and heavy-handed, and perhaps too heavy-handed at times — Ford Frick helped kill an early Asinof screenplay attempt at the Black Sox story — though Bud Selig has acted like he's been apologetically making up for prior commissioners.
There was much heartbreak on individual lives in the pages of Eight Men Out, from the young boy's plea of "Say it ain't so, Joe," to the sad decline of the talented but naive Buck Weaver, still looking for another chance to play practically until the day he collapsed and died on a street on Chicago's Southside at age 66.
The story gets a lot of justified mileage as a tale of the Loss of American Innocence, coming on the heels of the horrors of World War I and the moralizing by the Baby Booomer-like righteous leaders of Strauss & Howe's Missionary Generation that instituted Prohibition.
Asinof, Bruce Weber's Times obit states, was blacklisted in the 1950s, with Asinof claiming, “after he got hold of his F.B.I. file, the blacklisting came about because ‘I had at one time signed a petition outside of Yankee Stadium to encourage the New York Yankees to hire black ballplayers.’”
The passing of Asinof, who lived in upstate Ancramdale since 1985, near where I cut some teeth covering semi-semi-semi-pro ball in cow country, was sadly missed by my sometimes favorite sports blogs, which shows there is some (some) use for newspapers still. (Though how weak is it that in Chicago, muse of Nelson Algren, home of the Black Sox story itself, the Tribune ran the obit written and distributed by the New York Times, and not by one of its own writers, perhaps highlighting the downward turn of the Sam Zell's Tribune and the local press in general. But again, I digress.)
Happily, I discover via The Google this blog post at Bronx Banter at Baseball Toaster by writer Alex Belth, who quotes Roger Kahn as saying Asinof had "an enduring anger at what he perceived to be injustice" — my kind of hard-working writer.
Belth later quotes Glenn Stout as saying Asinof was one of the first writers (including Al Stump of Cobb fame, another Icepick favorite) to legitimize baseball history as a serious subject.
Meanwhile, the past few days marked another mourning — the end of the annual exhibition Hall of Fame game in Cooperstown. I feel nothing but sadness about this and have nothing but good feelings for Cooperstown and the Hall, but I am currently reading George Vecsey's Baseball (yes, it was a Father's Day gift) and perhaps I am the naive one, but the amount of racism sewn into the fabric of the game's history never fails to amaze me.
The Hall and the Abner Doubleday myth were largely (if not wholly) created by the racist Albert Goodwill Spalding (yes, of the Spalding sporting goods fame) who, according to Vecsey's book, organized an international barnstorming tour in 1888 without any black players, yet took along a black man as a "mascot" who was vulgarly (I had to read this twice to believe it) "paraded around in front of Asians, Australians, Africans, and Europeans with a leash around his neck, a wonderful advertisement for the American character, indeed," Vescey writes.
Evening (caffeine) buzz 2.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Random thoughts while waiting out a wind-whipping thunderstorm at a local cafe:
For the Blogfather.
Had this months ago. And I thought I was embarrassingly re-stating the obvious.
I don't know the answer to this, but if Obama can figure something out to help these people (more rural transit, gas subsidies for those making under a certain income) and put the supposed lack-of-middle-class-cred comments to rest, he should hit this issue, and hit it hard.
And now, for tonight's anti-newspaper rant:
If you're a kid in college wanting to be a journalist, it's not too late to change your sucker bet. Don't worry, the newspaper industry isn't what you thought it was, and hasn't been for 20 years. It's a Boomer-centric society, where hiring and news coverage is dictated by those who think new rules to make things better — including clubby hiring and obstructionist and narrow-minded coverage — apply to their younger employees, but not to them. It's the continuation of the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do ethos of the Boomers.
Because, like a lot of other industries, the Boomers got in and locked the door behind them and said, no, sorry, this is for us. You go get us coffee, child, and we'll use up most of the resources so there's nothing left for you. And then create new rules to limit your advancement (while not limiting our own), all in the name of protecting "the children" and "the earth." Which they pretty much fucked already.
Top Baseball Films
Sunday, September 9, 2007
To be revised, but will include...
Eight Men Out — A tragic look at a baseball team, also showcasing the beginnings of America's sports-obsessed culture that continues to this day.
Major League — At the other end of the spectrum. Forget the cliched plot about the underdogs winning the pennant and the love story (despite the gorgeous Rene Russo) and enjoy how it fetishizes the culture and quirks of baseball.
Bang the Drum Slowly — Yes, the pacing of the film certainly reflects the title, but works because of the touching friendship between Michael Moriarity's Henry "Author" Wiggins and Robert DeNiro's dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks dying back-up catcher. Also looks like a piece of early '70s kitchz, which always gets a few extra points in my book.
Not on the list:
That Minor League Film with Kevin Costner as Crash Davis and Susan Sarandon — Overrated. I don't need Susan Sarandon telling me about the lyrical joys of baseball. Nor do I need Susan Sontag telling me the same fucking thing. About the only good thing about it is that it helped usher in the late 80s/early 90s boom of rediscovering Minor League Baseball, which unfortunately morphed into putting a ball team in Staten Island while abandoning classic Minor League towns like Pittsfield, Mass. (OK, that was the Coney Island team, but that gets a pass for simply being Coney Island.) The abandonment of Albany as a maket can be forgive, since it is such a shitty sports town unless you're Siena hoops, UAlbany hoops (only in a winning season) or a Saratoga pony for 6 weeks. By the way, why the fuck is Troy's minor league team playing on a college campus away from any downdown shit to do before or after a game, or at least in a quaint rural setting. And where the fuck is "Tri-City"? Another great fuck-up by the locals here. Figures.
OK, I digress...
The Natural — Looked at now as some sort of a classic, it was never beloved earlier. And can't be forgive for changing the ending to Hollywood-uplifting.
Field of Dreams — Never saw it. I put this in the same category as Forrest Gump — two late '80s/early '90s beloved films that surely must be overrated because everyone fucking loves them. Forget it. Though if you ever find yourself in Dyersville, Iowa, (we did, once) the Field of Dreams site is more than worth the visit. The chance to walk into cornfields directly from the outfield, and the farm house overlooking the field make it worth the visit to the two sites (yes, there are two sites, since the field actually straddles a property line, and thus, there are two visitor centers).
The Bronx is Boring
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Can't wait for the "Bronx is Burning" miniseries on ESPN. Seriously, these are the real Yankees, not the Corporate Raiders these clean-cut Yanks have been ever since 1999 when Clemens first came to town. I can still remember doing laundry in the local strip-mall laundromat reading the Daily News coverage of the Wells trade. It was like when they traded Nettles because for some reason they picked up Toby Harrah in the 1983-84 off-season (Harrah's best attribute was that you could spell his last name backwards and forwards the same way).
I only hope they don't kill (no pun intended) Thurman Munson in this miniseries and make him out to be some sort of bad guy. I would think most of the old-time sportswriters hated him, but he is still St. Thurman in The Icepick household. Ask me about my framed picture of him that will go up in The Baby's room as soon as his moms isn't looking.
