Road Warriors

And I thought springtime baseball in Rochester was rough.  

Lefty! Lefty!

Story of my Little League career.   As it was, I seemed to prefer hitting it to left field, particularly as I got older, so they could shift all day.  

Can't wait for baseball season.

Quote for the Moment

America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again, but baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good and could be again.

-Field of Dreams

The sports question at Pres. Obama's press conference? Not Michael Phelps.  Not Super Bowl-related.  Baseball.  For the wrong reasons? Yes.  But the game endures, and the quote continues to remain relevant.  Much better than "if you build it, they will come."  

A-Rod

Point of inquiry: did people really think A-Rod was clean this whole time?

Citizens Bank (Water) Park

So the World Series is the last series in Major League Baseball's season.  Presumably, if they postponed a game, they could just shift a game into the off-day(s) scheduled into the series.  If they had to do it twice, they could simply shift Game 7 (if necessary) to October 31.  

Why, then, was Game 3 delayed for over an hour and a half, leading it to end at quarter to 2 in the morning, and why in Willard Scott's name are they playing right now?

Everything that is right in the world:

The opening montage about baseball and America, with voiceovers from Obama and McCain, before Game 2.

Yeah, I'm a sucker for that stuff. Oh well.

Real Americans

I refer you to the entire Daily Show from this Monday if you haven't caught up on the latest kerfuffle.  Jon Stewart is out for blood, and employs a heavy rotation of expletives to draw it, but 1) he's a comedian and 2) he's onto something.

As an added anecdote: just now during Game 1 of the World Series, MLB and Fox showed the 7th inning singing of God Bless America.  A woman from the Air Force sang a wonderful rendition, but I noticed that the crowd was relatively quiet down there in St. Petersburg, FL, and I couldn't help but compare that to the crowds at Yankee Stadium--in the middle of New York City, the anti-Small Town--where the crowd belts it out.  I'm iffy on "God Bless America" during the 7th inning stretch as a continuing tradition (closer to jingoism on the spectrum, it seems to me, at least in 2008), 

But, knowing those New Yorkers, they're probably singing it ironically.  Commie hipsters.

Beautiful Baseball Writing

Via The Plank, excerpts from late MLB commissioner Bart Giamatti's "The Green Fields of the Mind":

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today ... a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.

...

Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They grow out of sports. And there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion. I am not that grown up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.  

Some people can't stand the poetic waxings of the David Halberstams, the Roger Angells, and the like about the national pastime.  I'm not one of those people.  Even George Will is sometimes palatable when he's writing about baseball.  Sometimes.  But the fact that baseball has inspired so many like-minded paeans over the years reinforces its place in the national psyche.   

God save Alexander Cartwright.

Joe Maddon: Related to Joel Madden?

I'm not saying... I'm just saying.  I was watching ESPN last night, and Joe Maddon, skipper of the Rays, was sporting a faux-hawk and boxy-framed glasses.  It then drove home that he could be the "cool uncle" of Us Weekly icon and near-namesake Joel Madden, of the not-so-great Good Charlotte:

 

Next time he does a press conference (in, oh, an hour or so when they beat the Sox (!) to go to the World Series), check it out.  I think he might be the first emo manager.

Cultural Insensitivity Alert

Harold Reynolds just announced concern about the "frailty" of Japanese players' bodies during the White Sox-Rays game as Iwamura was up at the plate.  2 pitches later, Iwamura hit a home run.

Playoff Baseball

As much as I love Opening Day and think it should be a national holiday (we need more national holidays), and as much as Opening Day is usually the best day of the year for a fan of a team like the Orioles, as a baseball--and sports--fan, the playoffs are my favorite time.  Game times that battle the fading sunlight and growing shadows of the late afternoon, fans that get no quieter than a steady buzz and roar with a haunting intensity, everyone--not just pitchers--wearing long sleeves: it's hard to beat.  

In basketball and hockey, I would say that the intensity of the game picks up, which then fires up the crowds.  Given the large percentages of teams who make the playoffs in the NBA and the NHL, it makes sense that there's an urgency gap between regular season play and post-season play. In baseball, however, with only 4 spots per league (and yes, I do faintly remember when it was just 2 spots per league) in the playoffs, there is less of a jump-up in intensity in the playoffs.  Rather, it's the fans, understanding the stakes, feeling the cold, cheering in the hopes of perhaps holding on to the last traces of summer, who up their intensity.

Field of Dreams Live

So far during the "Yankee Stadium finale" broadcast that ESPN is pulling together for the Orioles-Yankees game, there has been a discussion between Joe Morgan and Joe Girardi on the difficulty of retiring from baseball and leaving the game you have played since age 5, an excellent Peter Gammons interview with an ex-Negro League player who hit a home run off of Satchel Paige in Yankee Stadium in the year 1940, a broadcast booth discussion with Whitey Ford and Yogi Berra, and the requisite Frank Sinatra tunes taking us in and out of commercial breaks.  The only thing that's missing is a James Earl Jones voiceover about the centrality of baseball to American life and fathers and sons playing catch in the outfield as they turn off the lights.  If Lifetime is "television for women," then this game is "television for men."  

As for "The Stadium" itself closing, well, it didn't have to close, but it sure as heck needed to clean up its insides.  Like most old ballparks, the bowels of the stadium were pretty run down, and not in a charming way.  The concession offerings (at least in the outfield) were mediocre, and--according to those who knew it back then--it lost a lot of its charm following the renovations in the 1970s.  Still, it's a nostalgic night for baseball fans of any rooting persuasion.  There's a lot of history (baseball and non-baseball) that went down in Yankee Stadium, and now that the Boston Red Sox have displaced the Yankees as the Evil Empire of Annoying Fans, I don't have the same visceral disgust for the pinstripes. Until they win their next World Series, that is.   

Over/under on the next Orioles World Series appearance: 7 years.