Why I Like Baseball

(Originally posted on February 20, 2000. Reposted to new site on December 19, 2008.)

I’ve said before how I “can’t wait” for the season to start. (Or even for Spring training to start!)

But now I know I have it bad. Well, not that I didn’t know before, but yesterday I went to new extremes for my baseball fix. I knew that Mariano Rivera, Yankees closer, had his arbitration hearing Thursday, and that the answer would be delayed until Saturday. Yesterday I diligently checked my usual spots, several times, The Sporting News online, majorleaguebaseball.com, etc… and still no posting of the story. Many of the stories that run on these sites come from the Associated Press. So I went straight to the AP site, and voila, not one but three articles about it…! Ahhhh, at last.

(In case you don’t know, Rivera lost, and as a result will only make $7.25 million dollars next year, be the highest paid closer in baseball, and has the highest salary ever awarded in arbitration, even though he lost. His agent wanted $9.25 million. Rivera’s was the last deal the Yankees needed to wrap up in core players–everything else from here on out is what non-roster and minor league guys will make the team during Spring Training. But that’s not important right now.)

Anyway, teams are working out on sunny fields across Florida and Arizona, and there’s snow on the ground in Boston. It’s fourteen days until I leave for Tampa!

Going to see games at Spring Training is something that, when I was a kid, I never thought I would get to do. We would see little news bits about it on tv, and for some reason I had it in my head that only a few really special people ever went to Spring Training. Now I realize it’s the special few who either live in Florida, or who can surf the Internet for tickets months in advance, take time off to fly down there, and, as the Nike commercial says, “Just Do It.” There are serious advantages to being an adult and not a kid anymore…

Here’s what I’m going to do over the next fourteen days:

1. Print Out Blank Scorecards (just in case)
2. Print Out Spring Training Previews on the Opposing Teams
3. Launder My Yankees Shirts (I own two, both Xmas gifts this year) & warm weather clothes
4. Visit Mapquest and get driving directions to all the ballfields
5. Fax Rick Cerone (Yankee Press Relations) re: freelance article I’m working on
6. Check for any last minute available Braves or Red Sox tickets
7. Load laptop with web connection software (so I can keep checking majorleaguebaseball.com while there, and add entries to this journal!)
8. Read Tampa area restaurant reviews (gotta eat sometime!)
9. Pay Cell Phone Bill
10. Find Cat-sitter
11. Confirm Reservations
12. Gloat to friends
13. Find sunglasses
14. Rub hands with glee

Oh, sure, before I go, I’m also going to put in about 140 hours at my desk, plus some 20-25 hours working at the tae kwon do school. And I’ll probably sleep about 100 hours, too. Nothing important, in the fanatics’ scheme of things.

(Originally published on February 19, 2000. Reposted to new site on December 18, 2008.)

I always liked going to Yankee games as a kid, even if I didn’t really understand what was going on all the time. Being with my Dad, the excitement of the crowd, having a picnic lunch in the stands or getting to stay out late, those were plenty of reasons to like going to the game without anything to do with baseball itself.

But when I really started to enjoy watching the game, was when Dad and I started keeping a scorecard. He’d score one inning, and then I’d score one inning, and we’d go like that for the whole game.

I think I must have been about ten years old when we started. We were at Yankee Stadium early–we often arrived early enough to see batting practice beforehand–and we had bought that day’s program and scorecard book. We were reading it to keep from getting bored. I think we always bought one, but this was the first time we read the instructions in it on how to keep score. Or maybe that was the first time we’d seen it printed–I notice that in the scorecard I picked up in August ’99, there’s no description of how to keep score. Which is a bit sad, to me.

But anyway, at ten years old, I was fairly well impressed with whoever invented scorecard notation. I mean, how brilliant–each box has four corners which represent the four bases and what happened at or around each one to advance or put out the batter/runner. When I was ten this seemed like another proof that the fundamental physics of the universe made baseball the perfect sport. Or something.

To the left, the way we would have scored an inning where Knoblauch walked, then advanced to third on Jeter’s single (there’s a line in the upper left corner that’s hard to see ont his scan), O’Neill popped up to the catcher, and then Williams hit a home run, scoring both runners. (Jeter stole second in there, too.)

I don’t remember us marking things like the Strike Out Swinging vs. Looking, and I do remember the way single, double, triple and home run were scored–and it was a bit different than the way that’s popular now. As I learned from talking to people at the games last summer, and from poking around–where else–the Internet.

There’s a great site –The Baseball Scorecard–with tutorials, glossary, and other info about keeping scorecards. I didn’t agree with all of Patrick’s definitions there (i.e. it had said that on a walk, all runners advance one base, when actually if there’s a guy on second and no one on first, the guy remains on second…) but most of it is pretty good. Lots of explanation of what the significance of various stats is, and how to calculate them.

Nowadays, they sometimes print a little gray diamond inside the box, and for a single, the scorekeeper draws a line showing the runner’s path from home plate to the base. For a walk, same line, but BB written in the corner. If he advances to second on a play, or steals, another line, drawing his travel from first to second and a notation to mark how he got there. To the left I’ve scored the same inning as above, showing by the numbers of positions in the corners whose hit or play it was that advanced each runner. In Knoblauch’s box, you see the “2″ for Jeter advancing him to third, and the “8″ for Williams scoring him.

OK, the more modern method has some elegance, and is a clear evolution of the way I learned to do it. We used to just circle it whenever a runner would score. Now the trip around the bases makes its own kind of “circle.” And it is in some ways easier to jot down how each base advance worked. But too many little numbers–if there’s then an error on the play, the position number from the opposing team also has to be entered, and to me it’s not as obvious on the glance how many runs scored. But hey, whatever works for you.

I guess I’m just a traditionalist, and like to keep doing it the way I learned. I have adopted the backwards K for Strike Out Looking, though. Because it’s fascinating to watch the patterns emerge for certain batters throughout a game, the battle between pitcher and opposing lineup. Is this pitcher overpowering them with speed and heat? Or is he just keeping them guessing? I don’t, however, write in the count for each at bat, and there’s just no easy way (other than with a computer) to keep track of total pitches thrown. (I don’t like to do too much math when I’m trying to enjoy a game…)

Another thing I’ve started doing is marking the difference between, say, a pop up to the first baseman (“3″) and a grounder to the first baseman that he takes and then steps on the bag (“3, with a little squiggle representing the grounder…). I got this from a friend (Aaron, the husband of my friend Bonnie who got married on the day of Game One of the World Series last year), who not only records each out, but draws the trajectory of the ball on each fly, so you know if it was a high pop up, or a line drive that was miraculously caught, or what.

Did I mention I even keep score when I watch games on tv? I even do it sometimes when I listen to the radio (or Internet), if I’m not in the middle of doing something else. For televised games last year, I found myself improvising scorecards on the back of napkins, placemats, yellow legal pads. Of course, some of the improvisation was due to my being in weird places when I watched the game.

I was in Atlantic City for a convention during the final Yanks/Rangers playoff game last October, and ended up in a bar/restaurant at Caesar’s Palace keeping my score on the back of a Caesar’s napkin, which turned out to be just about the right size. The maitre’d was a nice old guy, Yankee fan, too, who kept stopping by to find out what had happened while he was away from the big screen tv, seating high rollers who had gotten meal tickets and what have you. And because I had the scorecard I could give him a really good recap…

Then there’s the Game Three of last year’s World Series, when corwin and I were in Disneyworld, and I used the placemat from the fancy french restaurant in Epcot Center that night when we went to the All Star Sports Cafe to see the game. Did I mention there were no Braves fans left in the place by the seventh inning? Kind of strange since the Disney Wide World of Sports Complex is the Braves’ spring training home. We had thought maybe we’d be on enemy territory there. But well, Florida’s actually full of retired New Yorkers, and of course Disneyworld is just a planet all its own. So in the end it was us and a couple of other guys from New York cheering. (They were pretty shocked to find out we’re from Boston.)

Now, of course, in the long cold nights of the off season, I’ve made up a scorecard template for myself in Quark Xpress that I can print out at will. And corwin’s wondering if there’s a scorecard for the Palm Pilot (and if there is, if he actually wants it). If anyone out there wants a PDF of it, here’s the PDF of it now.

(2001 Season Update–my scorecard has evolved and improved: see the entry Scorecards, Part Two.)

Remember, mine doesn’t have the dinky baseball diamond in every box. At least, not this year.

Then there’s the whole question of whether to KEEP old scorecards or not. I think my policy will be: I’ll keep the ones in the souvenir magazine from the games, because I don’t actually get to go to that many games. And I’m keeping my Caesar’s napkin, for instance. But day to day regular season televised games? No. After all, that’s what the Sporting News is for.

Pencil or pen? Pencil. I can actually write smaller with a sharp pencil–and of course erase if I need to. Do you write down the time of the first pitch and of the final out? The weather? Total playing time? Attendance at the game?

Then of course there are the times when, no matter how closely you’re trying to follow the game, you just don’t know what happened. The story goes that one day Fran Healy leaned over to Phil Rizzuto in the Yankee broadcast booth, glanced down at Phil’s scorecard, and said, “Scooter, what’s ‘WW” mean?”

Rizzuto: “Wasn’t Watching.”

(Originally appeared on February 18, 2000. Reposted at new URL on December 10, 2008.)

So, today spring training gets underway in earnest. So many of the articles I’ve been reading have been about the players who have rehabbed from injury or surgery during the winter. Even Cal Ripken! Pitchers galore. And more.

I’ve been “recovering” from a back injury since 1996, so I can say something about strength, or lack thereof, and about how it takes a kind of focused mindfulness to come back from injury.

I’ve been practicing tae kwon do for over a decade now. And I’ve had my set-backs because of injuries. Doing something physical at a very high skill level, I’ve come to appreciate just how hard it must be for some of these players.

I injured my knee skiing in 1991, right after starting up in tae kwon do again after a three year hiatus. That time, I was stupid. I “stayed off it”–meaning I didn’t work out for about a month, but I was still walking from the T station to work every morning, and working on the fourth floor of a building with no elevator. I did untold damage to the knee by not going to the doctor right away, but I was between health insurance providers at the time (my job had just switched companies and I didn’t have a doctor assigned yet). Besides, it was the first time in my life that I’d ever been injured. That’s right, all those years running cross country track, but I’d never sprained my ankle. Never broke a bone or needed stitches. Never dislocated my shoulder. So I had no mentality for how to deal with injury or rehab.

Then there’s the fact that I was out of shape in the first place. I never would have hurt my knee in the skiing fall if I had been in shape. But after all those years of cross country track, teaching skiing professionally, and tae kwon do in college, I had no concept of what being out of shape was. never in my adult life had I been so inactive as those two years at a desk job. I didn’t jog, didn’t ski, didn’t do anything. I even ruined my eyes at that job. (Don’t get me wrong, it was a good job, an exciting and fulfilling one… but it led me to neglect my physical self.)

That’s why I wanted to get back into tae kwon do so badly, and why it was particularly heartbreaking to have to stop again after only about two months of it, because of the knee.

Like I said, I “stayed off it” for a month. Then I went back to tae kwon do class, because I was bound and determined that I wasn’t going to slack off.

And that’s when I did the real damage. The muscles still being weak in my leg, and giving no protection to the ligaments, I blew it out again in class.

That time it was a year I was out, but that time I finally went to a doctor. Got an orthopedist. Then got a physical therapist. And started doing quad exercises.

I’ll never forget the moment though, when the physical therapist said to me that I’d probably never compete again. Here I’d been going in to therapy with the mindset that I’d be as good as new when I was done. Insert Six Million Dollar Man music here…”we can rebuild her, we have the technology…” But he brought me up short with that dose of reality. I remember feeling physically ill at that moment, dizzy. To tell you the truth, I didn’t have plans to win any more medals and had figured I was done with that years before. But to hear him say it was no longer an option… it was a blow to my spirit. I cried when I got home.

Later, though, I came to decide he was wrong. I look at someone like David Cone, or Kerry Wood, or Jackie Chan, for gods sake, who have not only recovered from serious injury, they have returned to form and been able to perform at a very high level. I kept doing my exercises with the thought that although some things are unlikely, they are not impossible.

I’m still doing those exercises today, nine years later, because the inherent flaws in my knees are still there, and given the noises it has been making, I think the “good” knee is going to be the one to go next. But as long as I keep doing my exercises, I have a chance to keep it together.

That’s hard when my back is out. The back injury was a similar story to the knee, only this time I was in the best shape I had ever been in in my life. When I got my black belt I weighed 10 pounds less than I do now, could work out two to three hours at a time without feeling tired, and felt more or less invincible. That’s the problem–I felt invincible, and thought I could lift something that I could not. And–crack–I threw out my back.

I didn’t go to physical therapy this time–I didn’t need machines to do the rehab really. What I needed was to do lots of stretching, lots of trunk strengthening exercises I can do at home, and I needed to stop doing a lot of things that put stress on my back.

Nothing makes a person feel old like a bad back, though. Instant old lady feeling. “Oh, my back!”

Now it’s a couple years later on the back thing, and really only about three months ago did I feel like I could start trying to get back in shape. My cardiovascular system is at another all time low, my flexibility is shot, and I have a long way to go to get back to the level I was at in 1996 when the injury occurred.

But I look at guys like Cal Ripken, and the other players who are suffering through the dull winter months on their machines and doing their sit ups and their stretches and so on, and so forth… and I think maybe I can make it. Sure, they have professional trainers working with them, and sure, they get paid to get in shape, and I’ve just got me.

But maybe that’s all I’m going to need. Me, and the inspiration those guys give me.

(Originally posted on February 17, 2000 and re-posted to the new URL on December 10, 2008)

I’ve waxed poetic before about Yankee Stadium, and well, I’m about to do it again. Yankee Stadium embodies, for me, the Platonic Ideal stadium. If my baseball history is right, it was the first three tier stadium, as well. Add to that the fact that it is The House That Ruth Built, and the tremendous amount of baseball history that has been made in that park, and, well… I could go on and on. (But won’t.)

It does occur to me, though, that my views on Yankee Stadium are a bit skewed by the fact that, well, I’ve never really been anywhere else. There was one year when the stadium was being refurbished in the seventies. I remember going to Shea for a Yankee game that time–but most of what I remember about it was that it poured rain. And I do mean poured; Niagara-like spouts of water were shooting from the upper decks. We arrived home sopping wet and wringing out our clothes. I was probably about seven years old at the time.

So, not counting that one soggy trip, I was at Shea for a concert in the 1980s (was it 1983?)–The Police, Joan Jett, and R.E.M. I don’t think that counts either.

And I’ve been to Fenway Park only once, despite the fact that I lived a block from the place for five years, and it was to see a high school World Series game in around 1995. (more…)

(Originally published on February 15, 2000, and reposted to the new blog on December 7, 2008)

OK, OK, I’ve talked before about being a Yankee fan in Red Sox Land. It’s tough, let me tell you. I go into the copy shop where I do thousands of dollars in business a year wearing my Yankees cap, and they give me s**t about it. The give me the evil eye in the post office, too. And yet, I see more people wearing Yankee caps both here in Boston and in my travels around the country, than I see of any other hat.

But really, although I was ecstatic, of course, that the Yanks went all the way and won it in ’99… wouldn’t a Red Sox/Mets series have been an incredible sight to behold? A replay of the Bill Buckner series, but without Bill Buckner? (You know that poor sap had to move out of New England because no one would ever let him live it down? Even in New Hampshire he couldn’t pump his own gas without getting booed. And I think I have it tough at the post office…) Even Sox/Braves would have had an age old rivalry to it, the Braves originally being from Boston. (And a Mets/Yanks series would have turned New York upside down!)

The Sox deserve to have their shot at winning it all. This “Curse” business, you have to take it seriously, if only because at the very highest levels of play, it’s the slight mental edge that makes the difference. The Yankees have a winning attitude, and that contributes to them winning more. The Sox, no matter how much the players say they don’t think about the Curse, you know it has to pop up in the back of their minds from time to time.

The Sox are great baseball because there is always drama associated with them. They play in one of the great old parks–though of course there is talk now of building a new stadium, a bigger stadium, which would pull better profits, and allow them to increase the payroll, and pull in more Yankee-killing pitchers, and so on. Maybe a new stadium would break “the Curse” if only for a psychological fresh start. But how can you think about tearing down Fenway Park! Man, it pains me just to think about it.

Then again, they are talking about tearing down Yankee Stadium, too. Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park, though, may be the places with the most historic overall baseball significance of any of the old parks.

I tell you, if those two old ballparks go, it will be the end of an era in baseball. The end of an entire age. I suppose it may be inevitable, what with the loss already of Tiger Stadium, and many of the other beloved parks.

But I was talking about why I like the Red Sox. There’s always drama. And my Yankee fandom aside, I like to root for the underdog. And the current Sox are such a likable team. I watched most of the Sox post-season games in ’99, watched them battle through trying to get a crack at the Yankees. And it looked so good, too–they had a winning record against the Yanks in ’99, and hopes were high…

But in the end they were ground up in the Yankees postseason juggernaut (except for Pedro Martinez, who you just gotta love), and a truly, truly incredible story did not come to pass. And hearts were broken everywhere.

And maybe that’s what it takes to be a real Red Sox fan. The strength to carry on despite heartbreak. I don’t think I quite have the constitution to survive Red Sox fandom. But you can be sure I’ve got my eye on them, and I’ll be waiting for that day when they rise above.

(Addendum: And yes, once they eliminated the Yankees in the 2004 ALCS I knew it was their year, finally, and rooted for them!)

(Originally posted on February 14, 2000, reposted to at new site on December 6, 2008)

There are a lot of reasons why I like baseball. I’ve already talked about formative experiences of youth, bonding with my father, and so on.

But I think there’s more to it than that, and this has to do with sports in general. Because in recent years I’ve found my interest in all sports becoming more intense.

It began with Olympic coverage in 1996–frankly, I was disgusted with it. Every bar or restaurant we went into (we had no tv then and we still have no cable or regular reception), we were glued to it. But the network had tried so hard to create a “story” around each American athlete, that it actually worked counter to the drama of the games themselves. The drama and suspense was ruined because you knew that the three people they would show you profiles of would be the three medalists, and they didn’t show you enough of the actual competition and games, since they were spending so much time on the interviews and background features. I was, to say the least, annoyed. And I realized that a lot of the drama in sports is on the playing field itself. Yeah, you want to know who the players in the drama are, but it’s the actual amazement you feel at their achievement, (the amazing plays, the competitive edge, the home runs), the actual thrill of victory and agony of defeat you feel at the end of the game, the heartbreak of errors or bad calls… all that is what is actually compelling about it. I remember getting up early in the morning to see matches the year the US Hockey team did the impossible and won gold. The way the Olympics are covered now, there’s not time for that kind of drama to develop. The 1996 Olympics left me with a hankering for what they lacked.

Then, I read the novel INFINITE JEST by David Foster Wallace. Much of the book revolves around life at an elite tennis academy, and the inside game of tennis. This was an amazing book for reasons having nothing to do with tennis, but I suddenly got interested in tennis. I actually hated playing tennis as a kid–my mother and father basically strong-armed me and the friend who got married on the day of Game One of the World Series (see above…) into taking lessons together when we were like 11 years old. We were terrible at it. And my parents were always watching tennis on tv. Which I found boring. But I remember watching these apocalyptic showdowns between Borg and McEnroe and really being glued to the set. (no pun intended)

So anyway, inspired by reading Infinite Jest, while traveling for business we’d channel flip in our hotel, and come to ESPN2 broadcasting the Monaco Open or something, and we’d get sucked right into it. corwin and me both. Or even better, Classic Sports Network showing those selfsame Borg/McEnroe matchups. Yeah, this after about ten years of not watching any televised sports.

Add to this the fact that I write fiction for a living. I write short stories, novels, novellas. In the past I’ve written screenplays, tv scripts, (none produced, mind you) and to like, too. So when I see a tv show or we watch a Hollywood movie, I know what’s going on in the writer’s mind a lot of the time. Hollywood works on certain formulas, and, OK, this works to some degree because the movie isn’t a satisfying entertainment experience for much of the audience unless certain criteria are fulfilled. I.e. in an action movie you have to have a car chase (or boat chase, or whatever ‘spin’ on the car chase the director decides on), a shoot out, etc. Good guys usually win, and so on.

But as we all know, plenty of bad movies come out. The formula doesn’t always work. And at some point I just run out of compassion for characters who are weakly drawn or badly acted or just plain fake.

But baseball is real. Sports drama is real.

You don’t have to suspend your disbelief because these are real actual guys whose job it is to go out there and compete every day. And they are amazing at what they do. Believe it. And the back story? The baseball season is like a soap opera. On any given day, nothing earth-shattering may seem to happen. But who will rise above? Who will slump? Who will have the clutch hit at the critical moment? Who will get tagged out at third to end the rally? Who will get injured? Who will recover from injury?

This is why even teams that don’t have winning records have fans. Because it isn’t, actually, all about winning. It’s about being there. It’s about not knowing what will happen. No one is scripting
the happy ending for you. You never know if today will be a tragedy or a comedy.

This is why the Yankees are so compelling to me. The media have taken to calling them “the most storied” sports franchise in history, and I think that is really true. You could make a movie about a hundred different players or situations or seasons with the Yankees.

The Red Sox are pretty storied, too. But their story is so inextricably linked with the Yanks story, it’s hard to be objective.

Ah, who needs objectivity anyway? When I was a kid, I was a fan of a lot of things, Star Wars, the Lord of the Rings, Duran Duran, and the Yankees. These days, I get interested in something like, oh, The X-Files, but it doesn’t last. I eventually feel cheated by the writers of the series who have other concerns than being true to the characters or satisfying me, the fan. But baseball, that’s real. That’s something you can get into, and stay into, because it’s happening live, right there, in front of you. The players you like, the teams you hate, it’s all unfolding in real time.

And this season, I’ll be right there for the whole thing.

(Originally posted February 13, 2000, reposted to new site December 3, 2008)

In 1999, corwin and I had been together eight years. Eight years! And now that we’re both in our thirties, we’ve gotten on to a kind of second-childhood kick. (We also took a vacation to Disney World this year.)

I decided that, with our limited funds, we ought to take a vacation to New Jersey, and it was high time he experienced two of the things that were really formative to me as a kid. One, the Jersey Shore (Seaside Heights, specifically) and two, Yankee Stadium.

I went to two games, one with corwin and one without. On Sunday afternoon, I’d gone with my brother and his girlfriend. The Yanks had beat the Mariners that day, but the victory was bittersweet for us, because my parents were supposed to be along with us, also. But my father ended up hospitalized and in the Intensive Care Unit a few days before. (He’s fine now, thanks!) So he was laid up and my mom decided to stay there with him. Ricky Ledee hit an inside the park home run, and Ken Griffey Jr. was held powerless to do anything, really… (gloat, gloat)

But then came the next night. We went with two friends, my best friend from high school, Bonnie, who was on that birthday trip to the stadium all those years ago, and her then-fiance (they’re married now), Aaron. It so happens that Aaron is a huge sports fan and knows the inside scoop on all the players, even the opposing team. It’s Yanks versus Oakland A’s on a beautiful summer evening in New York.

We arrived early, with the traditional fried chicken in our bags, met our friends and found our seats (lower deck, third base side). corwin made an audible gasp as we came through the dark, dank, concrete corridor that leads to the seats and out into the intense green and blue open space that is Yankee Stadium. I said “you think this is cool, let’s go up to the upper deck just to see the view from there!” We did, and then a cop chased us away since that section was empty.

It was the best kind of game, the come from behind victory. We got to see a little bit of everything that game. Controversial umpire calls. Home runs. Double plays. Rookies blossoming. Old hands making their comebacks. History in the making.

On the drive back to my parents house, corwin said, “That was really fun.”

“Yes, dear, it was.”

“No, I mean really, that was incredibly fun.”

“Yeah, I know, that’s why three million people are going to do it this year.”

“No, Really…”

You get the idea. He was hooked.

I had no idea just how hooked, though, until the next day, when we were due to drive back to Boston in the evening. We had some errands to do in North Jersey, sort of near the George Washington Bridge.

As we were getting on the road, around 6pm or so, corwin looked across the Hudson River toward the stadium and said, “You know, we could go to the game.”

But being as the errands we had done included buying a couple hundred dollars worth of furniture and stuff, it didn’t seem wise to leave the car parked in the Bronx.

Then, the road we were on became blocked by a horrendous accident. It took over an hour before the cops began to re-route traffic, and we sat in the car, and sat, and sat…

“You know, we could listen the game on the radio,” said corwin.

We turned to the pre-game show. And then we were happy as clams. In fact, we started to get worried when the traffic broke up. Because we were probably going to drive out of range before the game would end…

So picture this. Halfway through Connecticut hours later, we’re north of New Haven, and the signal starts to go. corwin’s driving.

“I’m going to pull over,” he says.

We pull off the highway into an abandoned factory parking lot. The game goes to the ninth inning.

“I’m getting hungry,” I say.

The game is tied up. Going to extra innings!

We suffer. We get back on the road. We search for a Hartford station. We pull off again. John Sterling’s voice is being eclipsed by static. Suddenly we find a Hartford radio station carrying the game. Off we go again!

At 11:30 pm we pull into the parking lot of the Olympia Diner. The Olympia used to be open 24 hours, but now they are only open until midnight. So it is a good thing that in the bottom of the thirteenth inning (13 innings!), the Yanks were unable to make the hits they needed, and they went down in defeat. And at 11:45 pm, after sitting in the car all the way through the final out, we finally get out and went into the diner.

“I can’t believe they lost,” says corwin, while staring at the menu.

“Yeah, and I want a Sabrett Hot Dog,” I grumble. They’re just not the same if you eat them anywhere else but Yankee Stadium.

The next day I came home from teaching tae kwon do (which I do three night a week) to find corwin in the kitchen, where he was supposed to be making dinner. He had his head in a cabinet, but no food was being prepared. “Look what I did!” he announced.

He had been downloading the RealPlayer G2 to his laptop and then hooking it up to our home stereo system so we could listen to the game live while in the kitchen.

I forgave him not having dinner ready.

And you know what else? Those two friends who came to the game with us? They had the nerve to get married during Game One of the World Series. (Aaron says if he ever gets married again, he promises he’ll check first…) From their wedding, we went on our Disney vacation, and one evening went to the Disney All-Star Sports Cafe to watch Game Three. It was almost like being at a game–they have a live DJ there who plays all the little fight songs and things. Earlier in the day, we had been in a restaurant at Epcot Center where they had crayons on the tble, and I drew the Yankee Top Hat logo on the placemat. I was still carrying that placemat and kept my scorecard on the back of it, with a pen I bought at Disney Wide World of Sports, a ball point pen with a baseball on the end. I don’t know if it was lucky or what, but they won the game. (That was the Chad Curtis home run game.)

And yeah, I can’t wait to go back for another game. And neither can he. And I’ve been jonesing for more baseball ever since, reading the news on the Internet every day. Checking the trades. Reading the STATS INC book over Christmas. corwin’s now reading “The Physics of Baseball.” Yeah, we’re hooked. We’ll probably even see some non-Yankees Red Sox games this year!

To be fair, we recently mentioned a Derek Jeter interview in SI.com which featured much talk about him playing in an EA Sports Video Game Tournament with Tiger Woods.

Well, now Alex Rodriguez is in a commercial for Guitar Hero, with Kobe Bryant, Michael Phelps, and Tony Hawk. Ripping off Tom Cruise, no less. This is one of the funniest things I’ve seen since Jack Cust fell down between third and home one night at Camden Yards…

(Originally posted February 13, 2000, reposted to new site November 1, 2008)

So, how did a young fan of Reggie Jackson, the Year of the Comeback, Bucky Dent, Ron Guidry, and Thurman Munson, a woman who still counts among one of the best days of her life witnessing Dave Righetti’s Fourth of July No-Hitter live at Yankee Stadium, lose her faith in the late ’80s, forget the sport of baseball entirely, and then find it again in 1999?

Let’s turn the clock back to the 1970s first. There I am, a young tomboy growing up in suburban New Jersey. I have to credit my Dad with getting me hooked on baseball, though I never got hooked on any of the other sports he liked to watch on tv (golf, tennis, football…). Perhaps this is because although we watched a lot of ABC’s Wide World of Sports (remember back when that was pretty much all there was?), the only sport we went to witness live and in the flesh was baseball, and the place we went was Yankee Stadium.

As a kid, I was very concerned with history and fame. How did famous people get remembered? I had this notion that I wanted to be famous someday, or at least remembered for something. I remember going to Yankee Stadium when I was about 9 or 10 years old and thinking, wow, history gets made here every day. Pretty mind-blowing for a ten year old.

There’s also no doubt about it that a lot of the bonding that went on between me and my Dad happened while we were sharing a scorecard at the ballpark, or stuffed into the same armchair at home watching the games. (We were skinny back then.) He’d tickle me during the commercials. At the ballpark, we’d take turns keeping score. I still keep my scorecard the way I learned back then–it’s a little less fancy than the mini-diamonds they have now. But, let’s not skip ahead.

When I was eleven years old, I was at 4-H camp when Thurman Munson died in a plane crash. My parents were really worried I’d be devastated, and were fretting over how to tell me when I got back to the real world. But as it turned out, I had already found out. One kid at camp had twisted his ankle or something and gone to the emergency room, and while at the hospital had seen the news report. With a whole staff of counselors on hand they announced the sad news in the dining hall that night. When I got home, I made a little shrine on my closet door, with a poster of Munson, and fifteen pictures of him I cut out from the newspaper in the weeks following his death. Fifteen because that was his uniform number.

For either my 13th or my 14th birthday party I made my parents take not only me to the park, but all my friends, as well. Our family tradition was to pick up a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken on the way, because at Yankee Stadium you can bring in your own food (as long as you don’t bring cans or bottles). Two carloads of teenage girls, plus my parents and brother–how could we not have a good time? You know, I don’t even remember who they played or if they won. I suppose in my childhood memories, they always won, even though I know they didn’t.

I remember sitting behind home plate once. My father and my grandfather and I had gone to the ballpark, just the three of us, and bought our tickets at the gate. Those seats must have been held in reserve for press or players’ friends, and were released before the game when they went unused. That was the night I learned what grand slam was. Bobby Murcer came in to pinch hit with the bases loaded, and hit one out. I remember everyone around us jumping up and down and screaming. I was too short to actually see Murcer cross the plate what with all the adults around me standing up. But I guess you never forget your first grand slam.

And of course there was that incredible Fourth of July, thanks to Dave Righetti. It was already an incredibly exciting day for me and my brother (his name’s Julian, by the way), because Chuck Mangione, who we thought was the coolest for some reason, played the national anthem, and then paratroopers came flying down into the stadium on parachutes with smoke shooting out of their shoes. Cool. Then comes young, good-looking, Dave Righetti to the mound. The opponents were the Red Sox, who we had been indoctrinated to loathe by other fans (“Boston sux! Boston sux!”) so tension was high. Righetti was pitching perfectly, and after the first couple of innings the words “perfect game” were on everybody’s lips.

OK, then at some point someone got walked. I can’t remember who, but I’m sure if I wanted to I could find a scorecard of the game somewhere on the web or in a stats book. So then “no-hitter” became the watchword.

It was the most exciting game I’ve ever seen, and all because almost nothing happened!

The tension and suspense was almost too much to stand. By the eighth inning, the two strike claps were becoming one-strike claps. (They tell me two-strike clap–the audience making rhythmic claps on two strikes hoping for a strikeout, which started with Ron Guidry in Yankee Stadium– has spread to some other ballparks as well.) The audience was going crazy and yet also subdued, holding our breath, not wanting to blow it for the young pitcher.

And he didn’t blow it. He did it! And so me and my family were witnesses to history in Yankee Stadium. After the game we waited outside the clubhouse with the media, tv cameras, etc… and a lot of screaming fans. We waved to Dave Righetti as he departed the park. We were a little disappointed that you couldn’t see us in the newscast that night, but so what? As if that wasn’t great enough, from there we went to the East River to see the awesome fireworks, and then to Chinatown for a dinner that, as Arlo Guthrie says, couldn’t be beat.

With memories and formative experiences like that, how could I leave the Yankees and baseball fandom behind?

Find out more in tomorrow’s entry.

(Originally posted February 13, 2000, reposted to new site November 1, 2008)

I never anticipated how difficult the offseason was going to be this year. It’s my first offseason since my return to baseball fanaticism, and I just had no idea it would be this hard to get through the dark months.

Oh, sure, in November there were a few tidbits, like the awards and such, that counted as “news.” Trade rumors. Actual trades. A trickle here, and a trickle there. I found myself re-reading my dog-eared copy of Yankee Magazine from August ’99, and watching video highlights of past games on various web sites.

As of this writing, it’s February, and to get my “fix,” I’ve been surfing the web almost every day. I’ve grown fond of The Sporting News site, and I also pop in to majorleaguebaseball.com, and I check the Yankees web site (which is terribly over-designed, by the way–very graphics-heavy and printed in tiny, tiny white type on a dark blue background… it’s painful to look at but I have to keep going back…). I get most of my direct Yankees news from the Yankees index of The Bergen Record online. Pathetic, aren’t I?

But today Spring Training officially started, and not only that, it was above freezing here in Boston! All of a sudden, real anticipation is shooting through my veins–the 2000 Season is upon us!

My boyfriend, corwin, who lives with me, thinks I’m nuts. But when he gets on my case about my obsession, I remind him of last fall. That’s when he was the one who was so dejected when a Yankee game was called off due to rain, we ended up going to see the Kevin Costner movie “For the Love of the Game” that night! This after he’d had to rent “Bull Durham” and “Field of Dreams” on two other “off” nights. (Here in Red Sox Land the only way we can hear the games is to listen to them on the world wide web through Real Audio. It’s not as if we missed going to an actual game…)

When I was a kid, I never missed baseball this much. Maybe because even as a young fan, I never followed the season quite that closely. Or maybe it’s because there’s no more zealous zealot than the born-again, eh?

In any case, the wait is almost over. And I can hardly stand it. Play Ball!

Baseball season is really over, and the pickings become slim for us information junkies. I’ll be dong my part this offseason to keep things interesting as I migrate my old posts from ceciliatan.com to the new URL here at Why I Like Baseball. So look for a new posting here every day from the old site! I’ve got posts from 2000 – 2006 to move, so there will be plenty of good reading.

Meanwhile, some fun places to look into. The Baseball Early Bird, a daily newsletter of baseball news, history, recs, and more, will continue to be published in the offseason! Check it out at baseballearlybird.com.

Over at Jim Nemerovski’s site GirlsPlayBaseball he has republished Dorothy Jane Mills’ article Our Mother’s Game, about how women are storming the gates of baseball scholarship (as well as front offices, umpiring, and the field itself).

Alex Belth’s Bronx Banter blog is moving from Baseball Toaster over to the SNY group of blogs. You’ll find him and his crew all over at www.bronxbanterblog.com. Always readable.

You know how we make fun of the fact that Derek Jeter never says anything of substance? In this kind of goofy interview with SI.com, he actually comes out and tells the interviewer he’s not going to say anything. (Although to be fair, the interviewer was trying to ask him about his love life and politics…) SI.com.

Re-posting starts tomorrow!

Baseball in 2008 as a haiku:

“Devil” was struck out
Thrown out of the Rays team name
World Series here we come

You can’t make this kind of thing up. The team that has been so bad for so long, the perennial butt of jokes, finally not only has a winning season, they win the AL East, then beat the Red Sox in 7 games, AND go to the World Series. It remains to be seen whether the final flourish in the tale will be actually winning the World Series, or if just reaching the biggest stage of all for the first time will be the top of the mountain.

Tonight’s game saw the flourishing of a new breed of fans in Tampa Bay, too, starting what could be their own continuing traditions if their club continues to be good in seasons to come, like the proliferation of cowbells. When there was just one “cowbell guy” in Tampa, whose percussive enthusiasm rang hollowly in their usually half-filled domed stadium, was one thing. Now that there are droves and droves of cowbell-ringing fans, game seven’s starter, Matt Garza, wore earplugs. One fan held up a sign that read: MORE COWBELL.

Another clever fan held up a sign that read “The Improbable Dream,” a historical nod to the team they were about to beat, the Red Sox, whose “Impossible Dream” in 1967 revived baseball in Boston, as 2008 has revived it in St. Pete. Ownership there has been trying to get the city to build them a waterfront, open-air ballpark… Winning a World Series seems a great PR move in that direction.

The Rays, whose franchise is only 11 seasons old, will face one of the oldest franchises in the National League, the Philadelphia Phillies, whose franchise was founded in 1883. They adopted the name Phillies officially in 1890, and have won exactly one World Series since then, in 1980.

The homer happy Rays should have a good time in the hitter haven that is Citizens Bank Park, while the Phillies outfielders will probably not enjoy trying to play balls against the beige canvas dome at Tropicana Field. The franchises have faced each other before in Interleague play.

An interesting note which may or may not presage anything: of all the NL East teams, the Phillies have had the worst record in interleague play. Often this has come from playing “down” to bad teams in the AL East like the Orioles and then-Devil Rays, rather than getting beat by the historically strong teams like Boston and New York. In 2001, the Phillies ended the season only 2 games out of first place, but had been swept at Tampa Bay earlier in the season.

When the two teams met in 2006, both Cole Hamels and James Shields were rookies pitching for their respective teams. Now they are both aces. The three-game series was played in Philadelphia and both Shields and Scott Kazmir earned wins for the Rays, facing a lineup that looked similar to the one the Phiting Phils will field on Tuesday: Jimmy Rollins leading off, and Chase Utley and Ryan Howard coming soon after, and other familiar faces like Shane Victorino. Hamels was hammered for 7 hits, 6 runs (5 earned) and knocked out in the fourth inning.

The one Phillies pitcher who did beat them back in 2006 was a highly touted prospect, Ryan Madson, who this season was a cog in bullpen, one piece in the “bridge to Lidge.” He notched a 3.05 ERA and an excellent 1.23 WHIP.

Of course, all the numbers mean nothing once the game actually starts. Great hitters can fail, shaky pitchers can get at’em-balls, and anything an happen. In fact, it is exactly the things that are against all odds that amaze us the most about baseball. Each and every game can be an Improbable Dream.

So, the Red Sox and Rays are getting ready to have a pennant showdown, and I find myself getting very antsy that there has been NO BASEBALL for the past several days. I know this new schedule is supposed to boost the TV ratings of the various playoff series’, but it going to be the opposite for me. I’ll be busy all weekend and see NONE of it, whereas the past few nights after dinner I’ve been twiddling my thumbs. Heavy sigh, winter is coming.

The date of the ALCS beginning, October 10th, is an auspicioys one for the Red Sox, though. It is the infamous day on which the fledgling New York Yankees challenged Boston for AL supremacy for the first time, only to have their chance thrown away—literally.

The culprit was “Happy Jack” Chesbro, the pitcher without whom the New Yorkers would not have contended at all. In 1903, their first year in the American League, the New York club (called variously the Highlanders, Hilltoppers, and many other nicknames including “Yankees” by the newspapers) was inconsequential, while Boston won the league and the World Series. But in 1904, Chesbro served notice on the champs on Opening Day, facing Cy Young and leading New York to an 8-2 win. The two clubs would battle all season, and the balance of power between them was evened when AL president Ban Johnson arranged for one of Boston’s dominant sluggers to be traded to their rival in exchange for sickly Bob Unglaub (who was so sick,he didn’t even play).

Chesbro would finish the year with one of the best single-season performances for a pitcher in the 20th century, going 41-12, pitching complete games in 51 of his starts, and relieving in 4 others. In the final 3 weeks of the season, he started 9 games and relieved during a doubleheader, earning wins on both ends. And because of rain-outs and rescheduling, the pennant race came to a crescendo at the wire; the final five games of the season would all pit Boston against New York, including two doubleheaders, one in New York, and one in Boston.

Chesbro pitched the first game of the five in New York and earned a hard-fought 3-2 win. With four games to play, New York needed to win any two of the remaining contests and the pennant would be theirs. They headed to Boston on the train to play the next two. Manager Clark Griffith planned to leave Chesbro in New York and pitch him again when they returned, but Chesbro chased the team to the station and talked his way into taking the ball. Griffith granted his wish, but Chesbro faltered in the fourth and Boston won both games.

Now New York needed to win both of their games in the home doubleheader. There was a day off thanks to rules against Sunday baseball, which allowed Chesbro to rest. He looked fresh and strong upon taking the hill on the fateful day, retiring the first three batters easily. He escaped a few jams, but guarded a 2-0 lead jealously into the 7th. Jimmy Williams, New York’s second basemen, made three unfortunate errors that inning, letting in two runs. With the game tied 2-2, Chesbro went out to pitch the 8th inning.

With two outs and Boston’s catcher Lou Criger perched on third, Chesbro needed only retire Freddy Parent, a hitter he had owned. Throwing his signature spitball, Chesbro quickly put Parent into an 0-2 hole. One more unpredictable, impossible-to-hit spitter would do it.

Unfortunately it was impossible to catch. The ball went to the screen, the run scored, and the Yankees’ bubble had been burst. Newspaper accounts describe Griffith as falling to his knees at the fateful pitch and Chesbro collapsing in tears. Though they batted twice more, New York did not rally. The second, now-inconsequential game, was called off after 5 innings. New York would not contend again until the arrival of Babe Ruth in 1920.

By the way, I’m rooting for the Rays.

So, since the Yankees are out of it, and I find myself without a real rooting interest, I am looking at the postseason like if a daytime soap opera suddenly decided to wrap up its run with a prime-time mini-series. All questions will be answered! All the suspense hangs in the balance! Here are the subplots I’m looking to see tied up. There are nine of them in my lineup, of course:

1. Will the Cubs be the first Cubs team in one hundred years to win a World Series? They’ve been so good all year, but the monkey on their back (or is it a goat? the monkey’s in Anaheim…) is even bigger than the one the Red Sox shook off in 2004. Even their crosstown rival White Sox got rid of their “curse.” Could this be it? Do Cubs fans even dare to hope?

2. The Rays. Who writes this kind of a script? Perennially losing team, the only franchise in baseball history to still have never reached the postseason, removes the word “devil” from their name, and immediately wins the impossibly tough AL East. The baseball gods, that’s who. The story is already amazing, the only question is how much more amazing can it get?

3. Which means more, that the Red Sox have beaten the Angels soundly in every postseason meeting between the two teams in the Scioscia-Francona era, or that the Angels trounced the Red Sox in nearly every regular season meeting this year? The Red Sox can always be schizoid, as in last year’s ALCS where for a few days it looked like they were going to steamroll the Indians, then suddenly it looked like they were never going to get the job done… only to steamroll the Rockies. The Angels can be kind of like that, too, though. Could be a sweep, could be a seesaw.

4. Will C.C. Sabathia’s arm fall off? He pitched his team into the playoffs on three days rest. Now he’s going to pitch again on three days rest, with the PLAN to pitch him AGAIN on three days rest. A lot of teams are just counting the hours until he becomes a free agent (the Yankees among them), and you know each time he goes out there, they are cringing that he’s adding wear and tear to his arm. But Brewers fans have to be loving it, and any fans of old school hard-nosed baseball.

5. Philadelphia beat out the Mets at the wire two seasons in a row, now, but last year that momentum didn’t help them in the playoffs. They were summarily bumped from the first round and the pressure is on them to avoid that this year. The first game they lose, expect half the city’s attention to turn to the Eagles.

6. Manny being Manny. He’s been hitting .400 since going to LA, playing a good left field, and in the opening game against the Cubs, actually beat out an infield hit! To Boston fans, that only proves all the more how he was dogging it while a Red Sox. The Sox were taking BP last night when Manny blasted a home run one-handed at Wrigley. If Jason Bay hadn’t broken the ice in the Sox’ own game a few hours later with a homer, then the trade of Manny would have surely been lamented. Instead, Boston fans can continue to say good riddance… unless the Sox and Dodgers end up facing each other. Another World Series MVP trophy would suit Manny just fine.

7. Joe Torre’s vindication. The Steinbrenners decided they’d had enough of a good thing, apparently, and let Torre walk away. Now the Yankees are at home carving pumpkins with their kids for the first time since 1994′s work stoppage, and Torre is loving life. But he still has to get his team out of the first round to be able to really gloat. (Not that Joe would gloat.)

8. What will Ozzie Guillen say this time? Whether the White Sox win or lose, Ozzie is always good for some great quote that will set the media and the clubhouses buzzing. The White Sox had to fight tooth and nail to finally quell the uprising of the Twins, they might now have their hands full with the Rays. But wouldn’t it be a fine thing to see Junior Griffey be a hero?

9. Who am I going to root for? Since I don’t have a horse in this race, should I root for a cool matchup in the World Series? Cubs/White Sox would be a spectacle. Cubs/Red Sox could have a nice historical appeal, and I could drag out all my old stories about 1918. (There are some doozies from that World Series.) I don’t like the Angels or the Red Sox, though. Honestly, I rooted for the Red Sox in 2004, but I’m kind of tired of them winning now. Red Sox/Dodgers would be cool for the Manny angle. I think, though, ultimately, I have to root for the Rays. They’re new, they’re young and exciting, and they’ve got nothing to lose. I’m an AL gal at heart, and besides, that’d just make it sweeter when the Yankees beat them next year.

Here’s a trivia question you’ll be able to stump your friends with in 2013. Who hit the last home run in Yankee Stadium?

Answer: Jose Molina.

Jeter tried to do it, but his line drive was caught just short of the wall. Johnny Damon tried to do it, blasting a three-run shot to put the Yankees ahead in the third inning. But after the Orioles had tied it up again in the top fourth, it was Molina who came up with the two-run blast that put the Yankees ahead for good.

If the Orioles’ defense had been a little bit better, then Mariano Rivera would have gotten a save. Instead, it was a comfortable 7-3 lead when the strains of Enter Sandman blared for the last time, but the appearance was no less pressure than in any playoff game. National media watching. Fans in full voice.

Oh, and did I mention, the Yankees elimination number stood at one when the game began? (more…)

Following last week’s post about September 22, 2007, in which I had arrived at the press box at 9am, following a 14 inning night game the night before, and then didn’t leave until nearly 9pm because of rain delays and another extra inning affair, what follows is the account of what I did during the delay, which was chat with Bob Rosen from the Elias Sports Bureau.

I’ve had some of my most memorable times at ballparks during rain delays. In Columbus, OH one time I spent the evening listening to the stories of Joe Santry, the historian for the Columbus Clippers, then a Yankees farm club for most of my life. Today that day dawn foggy and gray, but the sun was trying to break through the mist all morning. Batting practice had been cancelled because of last night’s extra-innings marathon, so when the writers met with Joe Torre in the dugout all was quiet in the ballpark. The sun looked as though it would burn off the mist fairly soon, and just before noon everyone trooped inside as usual to have lunch and get ready for the game.

Going up in the elevator from the clubhouse to the press box, though, some fans on their way to the luxury suites looked particularly wet.

“Is it raining?” I asked one particularly bedraggled looking young woman.

“Yes, and it sucks,” she replied.

Indeed, I got upstairs to find the tarp on the field and steady water pouring down. I had set up my computer and such in the third tier of the press box–the top row in seats means the bottom rung in terms of writer seniority–and sat down to make some notes.

A gentleman with no computer had sat in the chair next to mine and was busily filling in a crossword puzzle, but when he looked up from that I introduced myself.

Turns out he was Bob Rosen, a life-long Dodgers fan who after the team left in 1957 swore he would never pay to attend another baseball game. He loved the game itself, though, and by 1962 had gotten a job with the Elias Sports Bureau, which has had him attending major league games for free (in fact, for pay) every since.

We proceeded to regale each other for the next hour of rain delay with tales and stories of our lives as baseball fans who are also baseball professionals.

There is no cheering in the press box, that’s true. But no one signs up for a job covering or working in baseball who does not love it. It wouldn’t be worth it otherwise.

Among the topics we covered: the wild card, expansion, difficulty keeping up with all the teams, will A-rod stay or will he go, stadiums around the country, fans around the country, our first ballgames when we were young, and so on.

Bob went to his first game when he was already 12 years old. His father “wasn’t a baseball fan. he was a Brooklyn fan. He was a fan of Dixie Walker and Duke Newcombe. He didn’t know anything about other teams.” Bob was bitten hard by the bug, though, and soon was not just a Dodger fan but a baseball fan, playing dice-based baseball games and keeping stats. “That was what I liked, stats.” How perfect, then, that he found a home with the Elias Sports Bureau.

“I was working my way up the corporate ladder and hating it,” he explained. “But my wife, who was truly wonderful and still is the most perfect wife to me, told me if you don’t give this a try, you’ll always wonder.” So he took the job with Elias 45 years ago and never looked back. The boy who loved baseball stats made it his livelihood.

“Did you ever join SABR?” I asked.

“Nah. That seemed like overkill. You?”

“Yeah, I joined because I thought it would be a good chance to meet people who love baseball as I do.”

“And did you?”

“Yes. Yes, definitely.”

“The people I meet in this business are incredible,” he said. “Bob Sheppard and I are like this,”–here he held up his crossed fingers–”and I’ve made so many good friends.”

Well, Bob, it was lovely to meet you, which means, I couldn’t agree more.

And best wishes to the other Bob, Sheppard, who as of tonight it appeared would not be well enough to do the announcing at tomorrow’s curtain call for the Stadium.

Last season, on September 22, 2007, I had press credentials at Yankee Stadium, doing some photography for one project and some interviewing and writing for another, so I arrived at nine in the morning, and ended up keeping the following log as I went along that day. I just found it and decided it could make a nice post unto itself.

9 am
Foggy over the Hudson and East River, sun trying to burn through.
There are already fans parking their cars and lined up one deep at the barriers toward the press gate. Autograph seekers.

The calliope begins to play shortly before 9:30.
Loose-wheeled ‘trains’ of carts laden with Cracker Jacks, pulled by small tractors, rattle through the concourses.

9:45 am
A lone player, unrecognized, runs along the warning track.
Tony Pena exchanges greetings in Spanish with the door guard at the press gate.

By 10:15 the sun is starting to come through, making the grass seem to glow. A trio of women works as a team to hand-clean every seat in the lower stadium bowl, their equipment and supplies pushed in a shopping cart.

Everywhere there is polishing and washing going on, including on the field where a groundskeeper spends 45 minutes tamping down dirt around the batters box and making it perfect.

Others work the infield and mound

Every plaque in Monument Park gleams like new.

At ten am sharp Bobby Murcer takes his seat in the YES booth, begins reading the newspaper while techs are still doing techy things around him.

Down in the press dining room they are serving brunch, scrambled eggs, a salad bar, coffee.

The Toronto writers begin to trickle in before New York’s. The jays bus arrives at 10:30, but the Yankees will be slower to come in after the late night last night. [It had been an epic, extra innings game.]

From the press box, one can hear but not quite see, the gap in right where the trains go by.

What will the press box in the new stadium be like? Will it be glassed in like the one in Tampa, with windows that open? Or will the try to recreate what it’s like here? This is possibly the last true open-air press box in the majors.

These are the best seats in the house… and yet the foul lines down the line are still obscured. Sitting in the upper deck above this might be slightly better if farther from the action.

Two players are working out with a coach, two Yankees. The coach is hitting grounders to a guy at third base while a first baseman stands by just to take his throws. The first baseman really looks like Giambi but from here it’s hard to be sure — I haven’t brought my binoculars.

No idea who the kid is, but he might be wearing a U of Texas hat, some kind of faded orange hat.

The replay of the previous night’s game is on the monitor above my head right now, at 10:40am Jorge Posada is clearly safe on replay at first, sparking the rally.

The guy who worked the batters box is now working on the slope of the mound

On Cano’s broken bat hit, Halladay’s face is one of shell shock, stricken, whereas when Giambi strokes a ball into left to tie the game, he looks purely glum and holding it in for all he’s worth.

GAME NOTES

3:07 pm — men on the corners, no one out, Jorge at the plate, first outbreak of “Let’s Go Yankees” of the day.

From the press box everything seems louder; I think bc the shape of the stadium angles the fans and captures the sound.

At the same time it is quieter — we are not listening to the broadcasts and everyone in here is concentrating on the game or on writing something so there is not the kind of boisterous chatter one gets in the stands.

It is a very pure baseball watching experience.

Giambi lashed the bat in frustration after swinging at strike 3 with a man on 3rd and no outs.

As Cano came to plate in 2nd, 2 on, one out, one in, the sun came out.

5:24 pm folks in the LF bleachers start the wave while the Blue Jays are batting and Jose Veras has put two men on with no outs. Section 39 of the RF bleachers proudly and steadfastly refuses to participate. (I approve.)

After the wave goes around 5 times, Veras strikes out Matt Stairs.

5:31 After throwing a wild pitch that moved men to second and third, Veras strikes out Alex Rios (with no help from the crowd this time).

6:05 pm One of the writers in the front row–can’t quite see who–slams his computer shut and then bangs it forcibly against the desk in a fit of emotion. It’s doubtful it’s caused by the 3-2 count that Bobby Abreu has just received, though perhaps he’s put off by the organist playing a riff from Beethoven to outline the tension.

6:07 Abreu walks.

6:08 A-rod gets yet another two-out hit to put the Yankees ahead. Today, he’s the epitome of not doing too much.

6:16 Posada sets up low and away. Farnsworth’s pitch is up and in. Farnsworth goes to a 3-0 count on Reed Johnson and gets booed.

6:17 Farnsworth walks Johnson on the next pitch. Gets booed. Joe Torre goes to the mound. Gets booed for leaving Farnsworth in.

6:24 After giving up the tying and go-ahead runs, Farnsworth is booed. Torre emerges from the dugout and is cheered. Farnsworth gets one more round boo before disappearing.

6:37 Jorge Posada manages an infield hit. No, I don’t make this stuff up. Mr. Tantrum’s computer seems to be working fine, by the way. No, I can’t see what brand it is from here. Probaby something cheap, though.

6:43 As the Jays’ seventh pitcher goes to a full count on Wilson Betemit, I notice the guy in the seat in front of me surfing eBay. A game with thirteen pitching changes in it already, on top of a 90 minute rain delay, will do that.

6:53 Mariano Rivera throws his first pitch of the day to a burst of flashbulbs. Every succeeding pitch draws another flurry.

8:22 pm The stadium is empty, all the players but Matsui are gone. The lights are low at the stadium and the writers have returned from their quote-gathering expedition to Joe’s office and the clubhouse.

8:23 Family of a Yankee or employee make their way onto the field. Two small children and one older one with three adults, gleefully tossing white baseballs back and forth and catching them in undersized gloves.

A single bulb on the Armitron scoreboard is flaky. In the expanse of black, it flickers like a lone candle, sometimes barely visible, other times wavering into brightness.

Well, now I have proof that the Home Run Derby is even better live than it is on television. And I’ve always enjoyed it on television. Tonight I sat in the upper deck at Yankee Stadium and watched at least 106 balls sail out of the park. And that’s not counting batting practice!

We arrived at the Stadium around 5pm, managed to park in our favorite parking lot, and then headed out to find some food before being at the mercy of stadium concessionaires for the next six hours or so. What we found first, though, was a large Nike-sponsored amusement area, with a batting cage, PlayStation 3 setups for MLB: The Show, and souvenir stand. We amused ourselves there for a bit, then moved on to the pizza joint we like. Sitting in the back in the air conditioned area of the shop, eating Real New York Pizza ™ — the likes of which cannot be gotten in Boston where corwin and I live – I counted fans of no fewer than five major league teams, including the Orioles, Red Sox, Yankees (of course), Mets, and a large contingent for the Twins.

Outside the Stadium Chevy was running a promo where if we answered a survey about our car-buying habits, they would give us a free DVD about Yankee Stadium. Score!

Once inside, we wandered around the Main level for a while, watching batting practice. The American League was taking their practice then, and we hung around in the box seats watching that for quite a while. We were about to go off to see if they would do Designated Driver signups on an All-Star night (they do) when we realized Alex Rodriguez was about to bat. We decided to wait.

It was worth the wait. A-rod put on his own personal home run derby, launching the first ball that I have ever witnessed go into the upper deck in LEFT. Many of his shots were mammoth. It was impressive and really made me wish he had decided to do the Derby, but on the other hand, I would rather see him hit 25 more homers this season than see him hit any in a meaningless exhibition.

After that, we collected our free Designated Driver drinks and headed up to our seats.

There is lots of entertaining hoopla around the derby, of course, one piece of which is the introduction of all the Major League Mascots. Wally the Green Monster got one of the loudest boos I have ever heard at the Stadium. Yankees fans are already anti-mascot (an early 80s experiment with one was a horrible failure) but add to that the Red Sox connection and, well, the result was predictable.

Meanwhile, there is some stuff that makes it feel not that different from other special game days, like of course there is the National Anthem, and Reggie Jackson threw out the ceremonial first pitch. His catcher was Derek Jeter, which prompted a loud, unified, “Derek Jeter” chant from the fans.

The first contestant in the derby was Dan Uggla, whom I love just for his name, plus I’m partial to hard-nosed guys who make the most of their shot. Uggla, in case you don’t know or remember, labored in the Diamondbacks minor league system for years until he was left unprotected by them and went to Florida in the Rule V draft in 2006. That same year he was picked to be a reserve on the All-Star team, and has torn up the league since. He broke the ice immediately with a blast to left, and racked up a respectable 6 homers in his first round.

In between almost every hitter (or at least each pair), there are commercial breaks in the TV coverage, so for people in the stands there are all kinds of other filler, including video montages, various people being given charity awards and such, and little interviews with players. The on-field host for the event was Michael Kay, and at one point he interviewed Mariano Rivera. Mo is so soft-spoken half the time you cannot make out what he says anyway, and this time there was no chance since the fans broke into a quite loud and unified “Mariano” chant.

The man who would get the most and loudest chants of the night though was not a Yankee. Oh sure, there was a very strong chorus of “ass-hole, ass-hole” at the umpire who ruled that one ball which was going to fall short of the wall, but which was grabbed by a fan Jeffrey Maier style, was not a home run. But the thing that really raised goosebumps was the hitting of Josh Hamilton.

Hamilton is already MLB’s feel-good story of the year. A 1999 draftee, with a near-$4M signing bonus, he was working his way through the minors with his parents in tow in an RV. They had quit their jobs to follow his career. But a car accident resulted in injuries for his mother and his parents headed home to recuperate. On his own, Hamilton ended up falling into drug addiction, and then out of baseball from 2002 through 2005. He worked his way back, then was left unprotected by the then-Devil Rays and was taken by the Cubs in the Rule V draft. He’s bumped around a bit since then, but as a Texas Ranger this year he has been phenomenal, winning the starting center field job out of spring training and tearing up the place since.

We saw almost every major league team represented among the fans tonight. I never did see anyone wearing either Diamondbacks or Washington Nationals gear, and for the AL we saw no one with Seattle Mariners, Oakland A’s, or LA Angels stuff. I imagine we’ll see more of them tomorrow, but at least 50% if not more of those in attendance were Yankees and Mets fans. Since there was neither a Yankee nor a Met in the derby, the crowd quickly adopted Hamilton as our own, when one of the first homers he hit banged off the BACK WALL OF THE BLEACHERS. That got him a standing ovation, and while people were still on their feet for that, he hit one that hit the BANK OF AMERICA sign! Five hundred feet.

He hit them into every part of the ballpark. The upper deck in right. The bullpen. The “black.” He was also the hitter who came closest to hitting the “HIT IT HERE” sign, which if he had would have meant MasterCard had to pay some lucky fan a million dollars. He never did hit it, but he came within 50 feet of it, and the crowd stayed on their feet for most of his incredible 28 homers in the first round, a new single-round record for the HR Derby. Between pitches, he received one of the greatest honors a Yankee Stadium crowd can bestow, which is the rhythmic chanting of one’s name. For about a half hour or so, Josh Hamilton was adopted as an honorary Yankee.

The rest was mostly anti-climax, fun but not the incredible show-stopping performance that Hamilton’s first round was. In the end, too, because of the way the derby rounds work, Hamilton lost the final round to Justin Morneau, 5-3. Morneau is the guy I was betting on (though not with actual money…), so that is kind of neat. But in the end I was as won over by Hamilton as anyone.

Now we hope he smashes a couple more balls like that in tomorrow’s game. More to come! I’m going to FanFest and then to the All Star Game itself!

Here, we are, day three, the final full day of the SABR convention for the year. Tomorrow has an awards breakfast I won’t be attending (I was trying to do this convention on the cheap), and that is about it. So this will be my final report from the lovely, baseball-crazy city of Cleveland.

I may have mentioned in earlier chronicles that one of the ways I judge how baseball-crazed a part of the country is, is by counting how many baseball and softball diamonds one can see when coming in to land at the airport. Coming in to Logan, for example, you can count literally a hundred fields from just a few minutes before landing. Orient Heights alone has a dozen. (Whereas the Dallas area… not so much.) Cleveland definitely counts.

The morning’s first session was by Jeff Katz, who has just written a book on his presentation subject: how the Kansas City A’s were essentially a farm club for the Yankees. (The book is The Kansas CIty A’s and the Wrong Half of the Yankees published by Maple Street Press.) This is not ground-breaking news–it’s common knowledge and was widely lambasted in the press during the era when it was going on (1954 to 1960). But Katz’s research uncovered some really wonderfully damning evidence, including letters of Walter O’Malley bitching about the situation, and such. If you’re not familiar with the story, it goes something like this. When Connie Mack was trying to sell the financially ruined A’s, a man name Arnold Johnson wanted to buy them. At the time, he had just bought Yankee Stadium and he stadium of the Kansas City Blues,the Yankees’ farm team in KC, from Del Webb. Some AL owners opposed the team sale to Johnson, including Calvin Griffith in Washington and one or two others. Mack even organized a syndicate to try to buy the team and keep it in Philadelphia. And Charles Finley was also interested in buying the A’s.

But the fix was in, and after a few fruitless meetings, the team was sold to Johnson, who then hired Del Webb’s construction company to rebuild the Blues’ stadium for a major league team. The entire font office of the A’s consisted of former Yankees employees. In the 5 years before Johnson had bought the team, the Yankees had made 28 trades, only two with the Philadelphia A’s. In the five years after he bought the team, the Yankees made 29 trades, 16 of them with Johnson’s KC A’s. And pretty much every trade was in the Yankees’ favor. When Enos Slaughter wasn’t doing that well, they dumped him in KC. Then when he rejuvenated and became KC MVP, the Yankees gt him back.. for the waiver price. Ralph Terry was sent to KC for 2 years for some seasoning, then brought back to New York when he began to excel. (Not mentioned in the presentation, but I will here: KC Is also where Billy Martin was exiled after the Copacabana incident.)

The relationship was so blatant that when the A”s traded for Roger Maris, various Yankees weer hear to remark in the clubhouse “We got Maris, we got Maris,” and although Clete Boyer was a bonus baby for the A’s, meaning he had o stay on their roster for a minimum of two years…. they gave him to the Yankees before that. Rumor also was that he ha been signed with “Yankee money,” and indeed in later years Tom Greenwade, the famous Yankee scout who signed Mickey Mantle, would talk about Boyer being one of “his” boys on the pennant winning clubs.

What put a stop to it was Johnson’s death in 1960, after which the team was sold to Charlie Finley. A photograph that appeared in the newspaper depicted Finley standing next to a schoolbus on fire with gouts of smoke pouring from it. Painted on the side of the bus were the words “Shuttle Bus To Yankee Stadium.”

I then made a last swing through the book dealers room. I was about to leave to go find some lunch while the banquet was going on when a friend gave me his banquet ticket because he decided to spend the time in the microfilm stacks of the Cleveland Public Library.

I sat with Merrie Fidler, author of a great book on the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (The Origins and History of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League). The cheesecake was quite delicious, and Mark Armour won the Bob Davids award for service to SABR.

The keynote speaker was Ron Shapiro, who is a motivational speaker who writes business how-to books, also a lawyer, and also one of the first baseball agents when free agency came along. He had close ties to the Orioles, was Cal Ripken Jr.’s agent, as well as Minnesota’s Kirby Puckett, and many others. He told a number of anecdotes about the Orioles of the late 70s and 1980s, including a hilarious one about Len Sakata that I can’t do justice to. Then he gave a 20 minute motivational talk on how to “Dare to Prepare,” which is the theme of the book he recently wrote (on mega sale right now through Amazon: Dare to Prepare, and a copy of which was given to every attendee of the luncheon. It was odd because it felt a little like a sales pitch, and yet he wasn’t selling us the book–we all already had a copy. I conclude that he really believes what he says and like an Evangelist loves telling others and helping others. As it turned out, I found a LOT Of what he said to be right on target to the turnaround my small publishing business is having (or hopefully having). It still seemed odd to preach it to a SABR audience, but, at least it wasn’t boring.

After that came a “roundtable’ which was really just a Q&A session with Ron’s son Mark Shapiro, the GM of the Indians, and Mike Veeck (son of Bill Veeck as in Wreck and the man once known as the creator of Disco Demolition Night, bu now better known as the genius behind the St. Paul Saints and the author of a how-to-succeed book himself called Fun Is Good.)

The questions ranged far and wide. Among the tidbits I jotted down because they are of interest to me, Veeck said that 46% of his minor league team fanbase is female, and that in Charleston, SC where he has a team they have worked a lot with the local community such that their African-American attendance is aruond 9%, which is twice the national average. Shapiro admitted he is not involved at all on the marketing side of things, but he acknowledged that although they want to please purists, the flat truth of the matter is that the team needs to appeal to “people who are not white 50-70 year olds.” Which I thought was a gutsy thing to say to a group like SABR which is, well, mostly white 50-70 year olds. But people seemed to respect his honesty, if not the answer itself. One member asked how Veeck would market SABR itself, which has a desire to be not just a haven for that demographic. Veeck said “I would use a photo of [names a member who is well known to the group and is a middle aged white guy], and caption it ‘We’re not just about beautiful figures.’” Which got a huge laugh. He went on to say emphasize what’s fun about SABR and people’s mutual love of the game.

I nearly forgot the other special event of the day from this morning, was the premiere of a new movie documentary, “Baseball Discovered,” which was made by MLB Advanced Media and which followed SABR member David Block on a trip to England in search of baseball’s ancestry. John Thorn is also prominently featured in the film, and after the one hour film was shown Block, Thorn, Tom Schieber of the Hall of Fame, and Sam Marchiano (the producer of the film for MLBAM) all spoke on a panel and took questions. The documentary is really great, and while in the UK making it, publicity about their filing led a woman in Surrey to bring forth an 18th century diary she had found in an old shed which clearly has the earliest recorded written mention of baseball, in the 1755 diary of one William Bray. And by wild coincidence, there is a Bill Bray pitching in the major leagues right now who is a relative of his! Not only that, Bll Bray pitched in the game LAST NIGHT for Cincinnati, which meant he was in town! MLBAM invited him to the premiere, too, and he got up and said a few words about how awesome it was to be connected to the history of the game that way. Really neat.

There is no DVD on sale yet. It will son be available on iTunes, will stream from mlb.com (www.mlb.com/baseballdiscovered/) and soon will be distributed (still being worked out).

I made sure not to miss David W. Smith’s presentation on the Importance of Strike One (art 2). He started this topic last year and continued it. Using Retrosheet pitch by pitch data, he analyzed over 3.4 million plate appearances and over 13 million pitches. Among the things he found: batters foul off a lot more pitches now than they did in previous eras, and that the path one takes to get the first strike or to 1-1 matters. Batters who swung and missed on the first pitch or the second pitch weer likely to do badly in he at bat even if they worked the count full later. He described perfectly the “first pitch dilemma.” The pitcher is suppose to “get ahead in the count” by throwing a strike, but if the batter puts the first ball in play, his chances of getting a hit are much higher than on later pitches in the at bat. So he has to throw a strike, but not give him anything good to hit. Hmm.

Then Pete Palmer and Dick Cramer repeated their 35 year old study on clutch hitting, but with using he more and better data now available, to see if Bill James’ assertion that perhaps clutch hitting does exist, we merely haven’t been able to isolate it from the statistical “fog” of randomness around it. The new conclusion for Palmer and Cramer was the same: clutch hitting probably doesn’t exist and that the fog is still really darn thick. David Ortiz really did have two extraordinary years in 2005 and 2006 though.

My brain was full at that point, so I did not see the last two research presentations, and went off to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum.

As it turns out, the museum is having a “Baseball Rocks!” exhibit, which was really neat and interesting, combining stuff from their own collection with memorabilia from the Baseball Heritage Museum, for an exhibit that could easily ave fit right in at the Cooperstown National Baseball Hall of Fame. It was basically a lot of juxtaposition of popular music artifacts like sheet music and 78 and 45 records with baseball memorabilia and text describing the importance of each thing. Like sheet music from the 1858 “Base Ball Polka”–the earliest known published baseball song–written by J. R. Blodgett, who played with the Niagara Base Ball Club of Buffalo, NY. Or the 1935 song, by Eleanor Gehrig and Fred Fisher, “I Can’t Get To First Base With You,” the cover of which showed Lou (smoking a cigarette and looking very Hollywood) with an inset of Eleanor and both of their signatures printed on. They also connected the emergence of black entertainers into the fledgling rock and roll in popular music with Jackie Robinson breaking the color line. Apparently Denny McLain played the organ at a professional level (he apparently had to do organ practice before baseball) and that George Thorogood played semi-pro ball before making it as a musician.

I finished off the night with friends and a beer at the Bier Markt, a place with a fantastically large selection of belgian beers, and also delicious pomme frite (fries) with flavored mayo belgian style to go with. Yum.

So, signing off from another great SABR Convention. Next summer will be in downtown Washington DC!

Back from the ballpark where the Indians pulled off a nice 6-0 shutout of their in-state rival Reds, C.C. Sabathia pitched 8 innings, 4 hits, 11 strikeouts, 2 walks. His only rough inning was the first when with 2 men on Grady Sizemore saved Sabathia’s sizable bacon by making a sickl leaping over-the-shoulder catch that had him land almost Spiderman-like with his spikes buried in the padded wall. After that, he cruised. And then the game was toppe off my a rather impressive fireworks show. Perhaps the single show I’ve seen with the highest explosions per second ratio. It was very nice, but a constant barrage of color and noise.

Now, when I left off today, in the mile of the day, I was running to try to catch a presentation on the “Mitchell 89.” That is, a study of the 89 players named in the Mitchell report and looking at whether taking performance enhancing drugs actually enhanced their performance. The study was undertaken by four researchers, Pat Kilgo, Jeff Switchenko, Brian Schmotzer, and Paul Weiss.

Among the fascinating facts their study seemed to uncover is the fact that players taking steroids appeared to enhance their offensive statistics by a factor of 12%, but if you cut Barry Bonds from the study, the effect is lessened to 7 percent. Still significant, but he was a big skew factor. Also, they found that the players reported to have taken HGH did NOT show any improvement in performance–in fact some measures were slightly negative. (This doesn’t mean HGH is harmful to performance, more likely that the guys taking it were doing it to try to recover from injury, and the effect of the injury is seen in the numbers.)

Andy Andres, a SABR member and a college professor who teaches both physiology and baseball statistics at Tufts, Harvard, and B.U. has posited from his studies that steroids ought to give between a 5% and 10% increase in offensive statistics, and that HGH ought not to, and interestingly this seems to bear it out. Further study is needed, but it was an interesting analysis.

Earlier, I was describing the beautiful Cleveland Public Library, was I not? They have an outstanding baseball photograph collection, which they ad a lot of on display to coincide with the SABR convention, and also some rare books and a collection of scrapbooks and memorabilia — great stuff. In the “Treasure Room” they had a bunch of the things on display that could actually be touched and looked through with care, including Henry Chadwick’s 1878 Our Boys Base Ball Rules for 1878 book, and The “Bull” Durham Baseball Guide 1910, which listed itself as “Published Annually by the Baseball Publishing Company, 2 Park Square, Boston.” They also had a selection of early novels mentioning baseball, including reference to Jane Austen’s 1798 book Northanger Abbey, which I JUST referenced in the Baseball Early Bird newsletter last week!

Not related to baseball, but equally fascinating to me were the exhibits in the library of Miniature Books (define as books from half inch by half inch in size up to 2″ x “3). The first well known one was made in 1475, just 20 year after Gutenberg’s Bible, the Officiam Beatae Virginis Maria. In WWI, a Scottish publisher produced a one-inch Koran that was issued to Muslim Allied soldiers in a metal locket case that included a magnifying glass. The other exhibit that caught me was one on Conlangs, or Constructed Languages, including not only Esperanto, but Elvish and Klingon. Folks I know tangentially, like Suzette Haden Elgin, whose Laadan language and “Linguistics and Science Fiction” newsletter are very familiar to me, fascinating to see. And fascinating to be reminded of the highly brainy and very geeky world I come from in science fiction/fantasy that is totally parallel to the one I know through SABR.

Next, a historical presentation by a SABR member from Japan, Yoichi Nagata. He presented on the Tokyo Giants’ north American tour of 1935, in which they barnstormed all over the western USA, plus a little Mexico and Canada. With pro baseball set to take off in Japan, the Giants (who were given that nickname by Lefty O’Doul, one f their major supporters in the USA), wanted to come to acquire American baseball skills.

Nagata was drawn to researching this tour because all records of the tour that were in Japan were lost during World War II. He had to used 102 local newspapers from all over North America to recreate all he results of the tour. He was able to recover 82 box scores and in the end, they had 104 games, only 31 losses and one tie, playing 74 different teams on the 118 day tour.

Among the facts I fond surprising, were that the Giants tam included one Russian-born player whose parents had fled the Bolsheviks to Japan when he was 3 years old, and one American citizen, a Nisei born in Hawaii.

During the tour they played 16 games against Nisei teams, going 14-2.

They also exhibited certain behaviors that charmed American fans, such as bowing to the umpires and forming a player “huddle” between innings. They also wore Chinese number characters on their backs. All three of these things, though, weer not usual for Japanese baseball–all were suggested by Lefty O’Doul as marketing ploys, and photographs featuring bowing, the huddle, and the numbers were sent out in press kits to all the newspapers.

In the end, the tour was not a financial success, but the team did acquire American baseball skills, so was considered an overall success, and thus was professional baseball launched in Japan the following season.

I’m amazed at the significance of this event culturally, and that Nagata was forced to come to the US to study it because of the devastation of the war.

The final research presentation of the day was Vince Gennaro’s talk on Free Agent Salaries. If you have not read Gennaro’s book Diamond Dollars, I recommend it. He explains in that book, among other things, why it is so key for the Yankees and Red Sox to spend as much on players as they do, and other factors that affect financial decisions in the game.

Here e described coming up with a model for predicting a player’s fee agent worth, adjusted for premiums of position (pitchers get paid more, middle infielders less), injury history (more durable player got a premium, injury-prone ones a discount), age, player quality, marquee value, and other factors. His study was only looking at the 2007 free agent class, but he is working on an expanded version that will cover 5 years and about 600 free agents to see if it holds up. By his model, Kaz Matsui is overpaid (valued around $3M, paid around $5M) while Cliff Floyd is getting $3M but is valued around $4.9M. He also noted that three guys who did not get jobs this season still carried value: Mike Piazza around 3.5 million, and interestingly, Barry Bonds $12.2 million. Barry says he’s been blacklisted. Has he?

Edit: Gennaro won the award for best presentation at the conference!

The final thing I saw before going off to the ballpark was Rick Wilber read from his new book published by McFarland & Company, entitled My Father’s Game. Rick is the son of major leaguer Del Wilber, but I know him as a science fiction writer. He and I and Eric Van (who runs the Readercon convention and works for the Red Sox) are about the only three people I know who crossover between the two sub-cultures.

Rick read some moving passages from his book, which deals with his perfect childhood as the son of a ballplayer, and his not-so-perfect adulthood where he was his father’s caregiver in the last stage of his life. I bought the book, and also Dorothy Seymour Mills’ book, A Woman’s Work: Writing Baseball History with Harold Seymour. Dorothy was Harold’s wife, and his major collaborator, though in the early years of his fame as a pioneer in baseball research, her contributions were not acknowledged. In those days, women were not allowed in the press box. You get the idea. Thankfully, Dorothy is well-recognized now!

That’s it for today. It’s one in the morning, and the first session I want to see tomorrow is at 9am, so I had better get to sleep.

Sorry again about all the typos. I’m writing this on the television web access thing in my room and it’s very hard to edit (or even see).