The Phillies take Game One, but there’s hope for the Yankees

Cliff Lee pitched brilliantly tonight as the Phillies defeated the New York Yankees 6-1 in Game One of the World Series. The only run Lee gave up was unearned, in the ninth inning when Jimmy Rollins made a throwing error that allowed Derek Jeter to score.

The New York media will go into convulsions, blasting the lineup for being unable to hit in clutch situations and the bullpen for allowing the Phillies’ lead to expand. But the Yanks can turn it around quickly with a victory in Game Two. I note that Jeter got the Yankees moving in the ninth inning tonight with a single that fell at the feet of hard-charging Shane Victorino.  The Yankee hitters will produce. Count on it.

Besides, I don’t put too much meaning into a Game One victory. In 1982, the Milwaukee Brewers creamed the St. Louis Cardinals 10-0 in Game One, only to lose the series in seven games.

As Lawrence Peter Berra has been known to say, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

What exit? Yes, It’s the Jersey Turnpike World Series!

1985: The Cardinals and the Royals meet in an all-Missouri matchup, and it’s the I-70 World Series.

1989: The Giants and Athletics endure an earthquake to play in the Bay Bridge Series.

2000: The Bronx Bombers rumble with the Metropolitans of Queens in an all-NYC Subway Series.

This is 2009, Yankees versus Phillies, and there’s only one possible name for it: The Jersey Turnpike World Series!

It’s time the Garden State gets its due with a World Series of its own. New Jersey connects Manhattan’s George Washington Bridge in the north to Philadelphia’s Ben Franklin Bridge in the south. In between, millions of baseball fans from area codes 201, 609, 732, 908, 973, et al. are passionate the Yankees, Phillies or (rarely) both. From the Delaware Water Gap to Cape May, the people of New Jersey will be watching these games intently.

So come on, America. Recognize this series for what it is: A celebration of New Jersey!

So long, St. Louis Cardinals

That didn’t take long. The Los Angeles Dodgers made short work of the Cardinals in the National League Division Series, closing out the sweep this evening 5-1 in St. Louis. The Cardinals and their fans are thus stuck with this National League Central cap to mark their achievements this season.

My fingers want to type “There’s no shame in going to the playoffs and getting swept in the opening round.” But that’s not what I believe.

Getting swept is a humiliating experience in baseball — and there a many equivalents to it in real life. In the NFL, it stings to lose in the first round of the playoffs but not as badly as it does in Major League Baseball. Three and out — ouch.

It hurts even worse if you had one of the games seemingly within reach, only to bobble it as badly as the Cardinals did in the ninth inning of the second game.

If the Cardinals had squeaked into the playoffs as a wild-card team, it might not hurt so bad. But they cruised to their division title. They and their fans expected much more.

It will be a long, cold winter in St. Louis.

Iconic baseball caps: The St. Louis Cardinals

Decade after decade, the St. Louis Cardinals manage to field great teams. While they haven’t amassed quite as many World Series championships as the New York Yankees, no other National League team has as many titles as the Redbirds.

The Cardinals have had an amazing collection of stars over the years, chief among them in my lifetime Stan “the man” Musial (at left), the incomparable Bob Gibson and present day standout Albert Pujols.

The Cardinals first came into my consciousness, as best I can recall, in the World Series of 1964. They came into full view in the back-to-back series of 1967 and 1968, when Gibson (at right) was at the peak of his superb career. That was an era in which pitching was so dominant that Major League Baseball eventually lowered the mound to give batters a better chance.

In those years, National League teams like the Cardinals were foreign exotics to an American League kid like me. Without today’s round-the-clock coverage, I got to know the NL players mainly through their photos and stats on Topps baseball cards. Occasionally, if atmospheric conditions were right, I’d catch Harry Caray doing a Cardinals broadcast late at night on KMOX radio from St. Louis.

I had a head-on encounter with the Cardinals in the 1982 World Series, when they came to Milwaukee to play the Brewers. Both teams were loaded with talent, and the Cards — with Willie McGee and Vince Coleman and Ozzie Smith — to my dismay won in seven games.

Powered by Pujols (at left), the Cardinals easily won the NL Central title this season, and many oddsmakers list them as the favorite to win the NL playoffs and perhaps take the Series as well. I’m not going to risk any predictions here, but I will salute the Cardinals cap.

The interwoven “St.” and “L” is a classic logo. It has remained an enduring symbol of the team through the years as the colors on the cap have meandered from red to blue and back with many combinations in between. The cap in all its iterations represents one of the few franchises that can lay claim to consistent success over the years.

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.

Baseball players should wear caps, not earrings

With the San Francisco Giants losing horribly to the Los Angeles Dodgers tonight, I must vent my frustrations. I haven’t posted in a while, but here goes: baseball players shouldn’t wear jewelry.

Oh, it’s fine if they wear their diamonds off the diamond. But when they go to work between the foul lines, they should take off the bling. Having played a lot of shortstop as a kid and a teenager, I always cringed whenever I’d see Barry Bonds heading for second with that cross dangling from his left ear. He’s gonna get his ear lobe ripped out one of these days, I’d think.

I’ve seen a number of pitchers leaning in to get the sign from the catcher, and it always bugs me to see chains hanging off their necks.

My aversion to jewelry on ball players probably speaks to some deep inner insecurity of mine. Or maybe it goes back to the last couple of years I played as a teenager, during the disco era of the late 70s. I can’t pin it down, but I’m guessing I wasn’t crazy about a couple of teammates who wore those ivory horns or gold medallions strung from chains around their necks. (I actually had a pewter screaming eagle on a chain, but I’d never admit that publicly on my blog.)

There’s probably another reason I dislike bejeweled ballplayers. Prior to the free-agent era, most players didn’t get paid the stratospheric salaries today’s players receive. In the old days, most players didn’t have enough money to toss off a few grand or even a couple hundred dollars on a flashy necklace or earring, let alone wear it on the field. Even if they could afford it, can you imagine Joe DiMaggio or Stan Musial wearing an earring?

Not a chance.

Hitting the baseball perfecta

Inspired by a few trips to the betting window over the years, I’ve developed a system of rating how good a sports day I’ve had. To hit the daily double, my two favorite teams – the Cleveland Indians and San Francisco Giants – must win. That happens fairly often (although the Tribe didn’t exactly give me great odds during the first half of the season).

To hit a trifecta, the Tribe and Giants must win – and the Los Angeles Dodgers must lose.

For a superfecta: all of the above plus victory by the baseball teams next nearest to my heart, the Milwaukee Brewers and Oakland Athletics.

The parimutuel concept probably struck me in college, about the time I went to my first horse race. That was the 1976 Preakness at Pimlico in Baltimore. (I had bets on four of the horses in the field of six; neither won or placed.)

During college football season, the main components in my calculus were Ohio State winning and Michigan losing. Eventually, I added USC victories and Notre Dame losses to the formula.

In pro football, a Browns’ victory paired with a Steelers loss was extremely satisfying. Nowadays, my daily double is a San Francisco 49ers victory paired with a Dallas Cowboys loss. I’ll include the occasional (and I do mean occasional) Oakland Raiders victory  and a Steelers loss for good measure.

In September, when football and baseball seasons overlap, I can have either a mighty fine weekend or a miserable one, depending on the fortunes of the Indians, Giants, Buckeyes and Niners.

As for October, my baseball teams are usually watching the Yankees, Cardinals and Dodgers along with everybody else. But one can dream.

Brewers vs. Phillies, and bratwurst vs. cheesesteaks

The long shadows of October baseball

Of the division matchups in the baseball playoffs this year, the only one I can illustrate with a pair of caps I own is the Brewers-Phillies series.

I’m already on record in expressing my devotion to the Brew Crew. Their place in the playoffs this year takes me right back to their last appearance, when they lost to the Cardinals in seven games in 1982. Somewhere in a shoe box I have photos I took out the window of our flat of the Goodyear blimp flying along the Lake Michigan shore en route to Milwaukee County Stadium. I am also on record, if only semi-seriously, as wanting to be buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Milwaukee, hard by the ballpark and not far from my grad school apartment.

I have a soft spot for the Phillies, too. Some of that has to do with having worked briefly in the Philly market at Trenton, N.J. Part of it is rooting for a team that gets only sporadic cracks at the big time.

The Milwaukee-Philadelphia matchup can also be played out in food terms. Milwaukee is the center of the bratwurst universe, and Philadelphia is the capital of cheesesteak nation. I love them both. So although I’m fully pulling for the Brewers, I’m open to the Phils advancing. Does that make me a weenie?

Network TV baseball choices play it safe

If there’s a network TV baseball game on the tube, chances are it involves the Yankees, Red Sox, Cardinals, or some combination thereof. I know that New York rules the media world — I worked in Manhattan for a certain worldwide wire service for five years — but the air and cable time the Yankees get is way out of proportion to what most fans in most places want.

At right is my Florida Marlins cap, which I was given by the coach of my son’s ball team a few years back in thanks for the photos of the players that I took and distributed to the team families. How often do the Florida Marlins appear on network TV? I cannot recall seeing them even once this season.

Every time I turn on ESPN, I see Tony Larussa contemplating his next move from the Cardinals’ dugout. Or there’s A-Rod and the gang in pinstripes. Or it’s the hulking Green Monster at Fenway Park, sheltering the BoSox.

I admit, a mid-season tilt between the Padres and Pirates doesn’t exactly bring fans en masse to the TV. But I would occasionally like to get a look at Jody Gerut or Ryan Doumit or some other new talent who at present is only a name in a box score.

Would I like to see the Marlins? Sure. They’re hanging in there in the NL East this season, and I’d like a look.

This Marlins cap has a fun little side story. A friend from Miami was in New York for a visit during the 2003 World Series between the Yankees and Marlins. We went into Midtown Manhattan on a Saturday afternoon, and I wasn’t even aware that the cap I had chosen was that of the opposition Marlins. A few New Yorkers good-naturedly got after me because of it, and I said, “Hey, it’s from my son’s Little League team.” My friend had asked to borrow a cap, so I lent him — naturally — my Yankees cap.

The Cubs in ‘08: It could be, it might be…

Is this the year for the Chicago Cubs? As the all-star break wraps up, one of the big questions in baseball is whether the Cubs can end their 100-year drought and win the World Series.

To add atmosphere to the frenzied speculation, I present a relic from a quarter century ago.

Cubs cap, circa 1984

I bought this mesh-back cap in 1984 on my first (and so far, only) visit to Wrigley Field. A couple of Chicago-area buddies and I bought standing-room tickets for the privilege of watching from the back of the lower deck seats, behind home plate.

It was the full Wrigley experience that Saturday afternoon as the Cubs played the Philadelphia Phillies. It was the first National League ballgame I ever attended. Mike Schmidt, the Phils’ slugging third baseman, belted a home run into the bleachers. Cubs fans scornfully rejected it by throwing the ball back onto the field. At the seventh-inning stretch, a tottering Harry Caray — “Cub fan, Bud man” — led the crowd in singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

I lived just over a year in Illinois, long enough to absorb the intensity of the Cubs’ rivalry with the St. Louis Cardinals. My first Cubs hat was a wool one, but it was just a bit too tight and I eventually tossed it or lost it. So when I had the chance to buy a new cap at Wrigley a few years later, I jumped at it.

Mesh-backed caps flourished in the late 1970s and early 1980s, ultimately fading away. The first mesh hat I had was almost certainly intended as a fishing cap, but I wore it daily to the pick-up baseball league I played in as a kid in the mid-1960s. The red cap had a crown made entirely of mesh. My teammates called it (and occasionally me) “fly trap” because I learned how to trap flies with it on the bench and on batting helmets.

This Cubs cap is my only remaining mesh-backed cap, although there may be a few stashed somewhere that I’m forgetting. The cap brings back good memories of the Ryne Sandberg/Lee Smith/Rick Sutcliffe era. If the Cubs make it to the series — and I’m not trying to jinx them — I’ll definitely be rooting for them.