A tip of the cap to 49ers broadcast analyst Gary Plummer

Fans who spend their lives rooting for one team in one town and listening only to the hometown announcers don’t have much of a basis for comparison of the men and women behind the microphones.  As a kid in Cleveland, after the Indians’ games I’d catch a few innings when atmospheric conditions were right from games on WJR in Detroit, WLW in Cincinnati, KDKA in Pittsburgh and KMOX in St. Louis. But I didn’t listen critically, and during football season I only listened to the Browns’ games. It was and remains harder to catch a distant football broadcast on radio, as most games are played during the day when AM signals are limited.

With the advent of satellite radio, fans have an opportunity to listen to broadcasts from other markets. I listened to enough broadcasts on XM Radio the past two baseball seasons to get a sense of the best, such as Bob Uecker on the Brewers network and the John “Yankees win” Sterling. (My opinion is certainly burnished by having lived in both markets, listening to each over several seasons.)

XM has also exposed the “homers” who are shills for their teams and those whose delivery leaves me cold or at least unmoved.

I don’t have access to the other teams’ NFL broadcasts, so my football impressions are based primarily on local broadcasts as I’ve moved around the country. I always catch the 49ers and often take in Raiders’ games – at least until I can no longer stand the pain. Which leads me to the point of this post: Gary Plummer (pictured at right from his days as a 49ers linebacker) must rate as one of the finest color men in professional sports.

In his smooth baritone voice, he consistently offers clear, honest, rational commentary. He praises each team on the field when they deserve it and, just as even-handedly, criticizes the failings of each. He brings his experience from his playing days to the booth, but it never overshadows what’s happening on the field.

I wish all football fans had a chance to hear him.

Baseball and Black Friday

This is Black Friday, when millions of bargain-crazed Americans head to the malls to shop for deeply discounted merchandise. The only purchases I’ve made today have been on behalf of my son: at the doctor’s office, the pharmacy and – in a weak moment – an online gaming site.

If you’re a baseball fan and a fan of baseball caps, the Major League Baseball site is running a sale at the MLB.com Shop. I’m not buying anything there today, but this orange-billed San Francisco Giants cap did catch my eye.

I also stumbled onto a link to one of what the site describes as several recordings of classic baseball games on radio that you can buy. The one in the Giants’ area was of a game against the Astros at Enron Field. That park carried that name for so short a time that I’m amazed there was time to find a classic there. I’ll be poking around to find more classic broadcasts available on the site.

I’d love to dredge up some old Cleveland Indians’ broadcasts from the 1960s, when the team was usually terrible. Imagine reliving thrills from 1967 as the Tribe and Washington Senators battled for seventh place in the American League! Seriously, I’d love to hear random games from the past, if only to recall so many fine old players like Ken McMullen and Sonny Siebert or to hear announcers like Jimmy Dudley on WERE in Cleveland or Ray Lane and Ernie Harwell on WJR in Detroit.

Ex-Indian vs. Ex-Indian in Game One of the World Series

 

Cliff Lee warming up

Originally uploaded by DDay209

Fans of the Cleveland Indians (count me among them) will be in a rueful mood when the World Series opens Wednesday night in New York. Not long ago, the starting pitcher for each team sported an Indians’ cap.

Cliff Lee, who gets the start for the Phillies, has put together two consecutive spectacular seasons. I watched him carve up the Athletics at the Oakland Coliseum early in the 2008 season. (The photo shows him warming up in the bullpen before the game.) He was a terrific acquisition by the Phillies this year.

Starting for the Yankees will be C.C. Sabathia, who left Cleveland for Milwaukee late in the 2008 season and dominated for the Yanks this year.

Cleveland fans are accustomed to watching players they’ve seen traded away shine for other teams in the post-season, and the Yankees seem to have benefitted particularly with players like Roger Maris, Graig Nettles and Chris Chambliss.

Perhaps one of these years an ex-Yank or ex-Philly will make a difference for the Tribe.

 

 

Ironic offer from MLB.com: A cold-weather Cubs cap

I’m fighting off the common cold, swine flu or for all I know bubonic plague tonight, so I’ll make this quick. I got an e-mail from mlb.com pointing out that they’re having a post-season sale. Batting practice caps — those ugly variants on regular caps with goofy curved side panels — are just $9.99.

I followed the link and was tickled to see this Chicago Cubs cold-weather cap with ear flaps — the ultimate accessory for the franchise that for a century has rarely played in the post-season chill wafting off Lake Michigan.

Last October, I noted the flap cap worn by the Phillies’ Jimmy Rollins, who will likely pull it out of his locker for home games against the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League Championship Series starting with Game 3 on Sunday. Oddly, I could find no Phillies model like the Cubs version. For northern franchises like Boston, Cleveland and Milwaukee, I’d think they’d be a natural.

They might come in handy for home openers, too.

UPDATE: The earflap caps are made by New Era, and I was able to find the Phillies model at this link. The New Era site also has them for the Red Sox, Indians and Brewers. I’ll bet there are more, too. Good news!

Iconic baseball caps: Boston Red Sox

The Boston Red Sox were eliminated from the American League playoffs today by the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, as good an occasion as any to honor the Red Sox cap for its iconic status.

I’ve had occasional flirtations with the BoSox but mostly an uneasy relationship over the years. My first youth baseball team was the Red Sox, and for a while I tried emulating the high-elbow batting stance of Carl Yaztremski (inset). A lot of good that did me.

I saw quite a few games involving the Red Sox and Indians at Cleveland Municipal Stadium in the 1960s. At one, I sat next to a kid a year or two younger than I who said he was a cousin of Rico Petrocelli. He had a notebook with pages full of Rico’s autograph. (Did he offer me one? No — my first lesson in the social charms of New Englanders.)

When I went off to college in New England, I encountered gale-force Red Sox boosterism from the overwhelming majority of my classmates. It was tough being an Indians fan in that environment, and over the four years of my undergraduate studies I eventually talked myself into rooting for the Red Sox as a second-level affiliation.

When I moved to Milwaukee for graduate school, one of the first things I did in my free time was head to County Stadium to see the Brewers play the Red Sox. The ratio of Brewers-to-Sox fans that evening was about 39,000-to-1, and I kept my mouth shut. Fact is, I couldn’t cut it as a Red Sox fan. For one thing, my Great Lakes accent was pretty much an instant barrier into my stepping out onto Yawkey Way. And my heart wasn’t in it.

Nonetheless, I did cheer raucously when the Sox finally broke their streak and won the World Series a couple of years ago. And I must acknowledge the power of the Red Sox cap. It’s been around seemingly forever, or at least since 1933 according to the Dressed to the Nines baseball uniform database. That Red “B” — as in Beaneaters — against the blue field is a classic. It’s no wonder a newspaper publisher friend and Red Sox diehard wears one everywhere he goes.

For most of us, it’s ‘Wait Until Next Year’

Playoffs notwithstanding, for most baseball fans today is the first day of the long winter. The season is over, the concession stands are empty, the lockerrooms bare as the players have packed up to go fishing or hunting or whatever they do in the off-season.

For followers of the Chicago Cubs, the Cleveland Indians, the Kansas City Royals, the Pittsburgh Pirates, the San Francisco Giants, another year has passed without post-season play. We small- and mid-market fans will watch glumly as the Cardinals, Dodgers, Phillies, Rockies, Angels, Red Sox, Yankees and Tigers or Twins stretch their seasons.

For those teams, hope remains for October glory, a pennant, a World Series champagne spray. But for most of us — like this crushed Cubs fan — our refrain is “Wait until next year.”

Spring training can’t come soon enough.

Less than excited about baseball wild card races

We’re in a wild card race. Awesome!!!

Well, hardly. Wild-card races in Major League Baseball have been running for a couple of decades, and I still can’t fully accept them.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ll take a wild card berth. As I write this post, I’m listening to the Giants and the Dodgers. I want the Giants to sweep LA this weekend as I simultaneously pray for the Colorado Rockies to drop each game in their series with the Arizona Diamondbacks.

But the race for a wild card berth doesn’t nearly get me as excited as someone claiming a league or division title. Way back in the late 60s as baseball contemplated following the NFL into multi-division playoffs, I can remember my father telling me that the playoffs were supposed to be the antidote to the all-too-frequent runaway teams atop the old single-division American and National leagues.

In many years, that vision has come through. But — Yankees and Red Sox fans, don’t hate me — I grow weary of the same teams returning to the playoffs year after year after year. The seemingly endless run of playoff appearances by the Atlanta Braves is a good example. They hoarded playoff appearances, although I must admit my judgment carries the bitter tinge from their only Series victory in recent memory, in 1995 over the Cleveland Indians.

Then there was the ‘97 series, in which the NL wild card team – the Florida Marlins – defeated the Tribe in the series. Where’s the justice in that?

I know I’m fighting the last war by whining about the wild card concept, so let this be my last harangue on the subject. I will now turn my attention back to the Giants, and hope against hope that their stellar pitching and anemic hitting manage to sneak them into the playoffs, on the road to a World Series victory against an AL team that won 20 more games in the regular season.

Caps off to The Captain, Derek Jeter, on tying Lou Gehrig’s hit mark

Jeter and Gehrig, the spirit of the Yankees

It took me a while to appreciate the greatness of Derek Jeter, who tonight in New York tied Lou Gehrig for a record 2,721 hits in a Yankees’ uniform. He’ll undoubtedly break the record in the next few games, and I hope he keeps on swinging until he reaches 3,000 hits.

For most of my life, the Yankees were the enemy, bullies in high-priced pinstripes beating up on teams from the small markets where I happened to live – Cleveland, Seattle, Oakland. They even tormented me in Omaha, where the Kansas City Royals have kept their Class A farm club for many years.

From the hinterlands I had caught Jeter on TV, and he was no doubt a quality ballplayer. But I didn’t watch him regularly. Then I transferred to Midtown Manahttan and lived nearby. Slowly, inevitably, I was drawn in by the Yankees’ tractor beam pulsing from the South Bronx. At first, Paul O’Neill was my favorite Yankee, and when he moved on I got behind Jorge Posada.

Over the years, I started noticing Jeter more and more. I managed to miss the spectacular play he made along the first base line in a 2001 playoff game against Oakland, impossibly intercepting an errant outfield throw and flinging the ball to Posada at the plate to cut down Jeremy Giambi. But there was a night a year or two later when the Yankees were playing the Red Sox. Jeter went tearing after a pop foul and speared it as he tumbled into the first row of seats. Watching the game in our basement family room, my younger son and I looked at each other wide-eyed, knowing we’d just seen something exceptional.

In career of exceptional achievement, Jeter is having one of his best years in 2009. Hats off the Yankee captain, who is worthy of the accolades and superlatives accorded him.

The Tribe’s lost season

It’s another bitter September for fans of the Cleveland Indians. Not only is the team in the tank, but about the only star to remain after the summer fire sale — Grady Sizemore — is done for the year. Sizemore will undergo two surgeries, one on his left elbow and another on his midsection.

In tribute to another year of futility, I present above a Cleveland cap from the Cooperstown Collection. The cap, which belongs to my son-in-law, is replica of what the team wore in 1918. The Indians finished second to Boston in the American League. Two years later, they would win the pennant and one of only two world championships in franchise history.

Here’s hoping a title lies in wait for the Tribe in the next year or two. But don’t bet on it.

A cap for chocolate lovers

While visiting family in Cleveland, I had the pleasure of getting dessert at a Malley’s ice cream parlor. Malley’s is an institution, famous in northeastern Ohio for its candies as well as ice cream. The company produces the “Pronk” bar named for oft-injured Indians slugger Travis Hafner.

Indians regalia is a common site around greater Cleveland, as is the “CHOC” logo affixed to many cars. Malley’s has a cash giveaway promotion, encouraging drivers to put the logo on their vehicles. It’s fitting that my first mobile blog post should feature the Malley’s “CHOC” cap.