An off day for baseball, and a glimpse at winter

Friday was an off day for the 2009 World Series, a reminder that the season is nearly over. Baseball is the daily game, and its rhythm regulates our lives most of the year. It’s the oldest and most established of our spectator sports, and I find it the most American of all.

There’s a doctoral thesis waiting to be written about the connection between baseball and our agricultural heritage: The games starting as the blossoms set on the trees in spring, the play flourishing under the summer sun, the shadows lengthening on the diamonds as the cool autumn harvest arrives.

As we’d visit my grandparents in the 1960s, my father often pointed out the places he and his buddies had played baseball when they were kids in the 20s and 30s. “There was a ball field there,” he’d say, pointing to an expanse of grass or a meadow as we drove past. At another plot, “We used to play there.”

Baseball changed as America changed, and urbanization is really what developed the sport into what it is today. While my dad and the other sons of miners in Pennsylvania were playing their games, city kids were playing stickball on the streets of Brooklyn.

In these days of luxury suites and retractable-dome stadiums, it’s important to remember that the game’s roots reach deep into a heritage of farm boys and miners’ kids playing pickup in any scrap of open field they could find.

 

 

 

Who’s your daddy, Pedro?

The highlight of Game 2 for me, the fan sitting in the recliner in front of the 36″ screen in his family room, was the Yankees fans chanting “Who’s your daddy?” to taunt Pedro Martinez.

The self-proclaimed most influential man ever to set foot in Yankee Stadium took the loss.

This is a fun series.

 

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!

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.

 

 

The baseball gods are angry

There’s only one plausible explanation for the rainout that postponed Saturday’s American League Championship Series game between the Yankees and Angels: The baseball gods are angry.

They’re angry that the mere mortals who run Major League Baseball would show such hubris to schedule the playoffs so late into the year. Assuming no weather delays and a seven-game series, the World Series this year is scheduled to finish on Nov. 3.

That’s right. In November, when the NFL season is headed toward its own playoffs and the NBA and NHL are well under way.

Baseball is the summer game, and it’s supposed to wrap up with the “Fall Classic.” November is technically in autumn, but it’s simply too inclement then in most major-league cities for the games to be played as scheduled and without significant disruption from the weather.

Major League Baseball needs to change its way. The gods demand it.

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.

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.

Autumn dreams of … spring dreams

The World Series is fading into memory. As the weather turns colder, a baseball fan must turn to the “Hot Stove League” of speculation on who’s going to deal for whom in the coming months. Amazingly, it was the Oakland Athletics who made the first significant move, acquiring slugger Matt Holliday from the Colorado Rockies.

There’s no guarantee the A’s will keep Holliday past the 2009 season, or even past the middle of the season. Holliday will become a free agent after next season, and if he can sustain his typical production of the last few years, he’ll command a high price.

The A’s, operating on the east side of San Francisco Bay, are considered a “small market” team. I can’t buy that. The Bay Area is enormous. A cut below New York, Los Angeles and Chicago? Certainly. But to lump the East Bay with Kansas City or Pittsburgh doesn’t hold much sway with me.

Nonetheless, the Athletics are the No. 2 team in the Bay Area. The San Francisco Giants command the better media placement on radio and TV. By virtue of having a decade’s head start in the area, the Giants historically have had a stronger fan base.

I lived for six years close enough to the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum that we could see the lights from the boys’ bedroom on the upper floor of our house. Those were the Bash Brothers years of Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire, two of the poster boys for the steroids era.

That it no way taints my affection for the plastic A’s batting helmets that we picked up at A’s games. The model pictured above was sponsored by Granny Goose snacks. I set the helmet among the autumn leaves on our lawn this afternoon, resting it atop a green A’s bat we picked up on Bat Day in the mid- to late 90s. Although the season is over, baseball is never far from mind. It won’t be long until spring training.

Celebrate the Phillies’ win: Have a cheesesteak and a Yuengling

This is tough for a baseball fan to admit, but I completely missed tonight’s half-game conclusion to what turned out to be the final game of the 2008 World Series. I was either finishing my bike ride home or hunting for pot lids in the kitchen when Brad Lidge recorded the final out.

I had to settle for watching taped highlights on ESPN of the big plays and the jubilation. To celebrate properly, I need a cheesesteak and a Yuengling beer. Alas, the latter is not available here in California, and the former can only be found occasionally in imitation form.

Nonetheless, three cheers for the Phillies — they’re the real deal — and a tip of the cap to the Rays for a great year.