Tuesday, October 10, 2017
It struck me as we were walking from the parking lot to the Stadium today, for the second night in a row, that most successful postseason runs appear, in hindsight, to be a string of miracles. Sometimes they seem to be a series of small miracles, other times one or two big miracles come in a timely fashion. And sometimes when you lose, it feels like it’s because your luck ran out.
Last week we were here for the Wild Card game and I wrote that it was the loudest I’ve ever heard the Stadium — the new Stadium, I should specify. The new place has milder acoustics as well as milder fans. Or at least they were milder fans until a couple of years with no postseason caused attrition among the bandwagoners. The result is that for ALDS Game 3 and 4, each a must-win elimination game, the Stadium was packed to the rafters with die-hards.
Yesterday, in an intense pitchers duel between Masahiro Tanaka and Cleveland’s Carlos Carrasco, I heard the two-strike clap louder than I’ve ever heard it since the days of Ron Guidry. I’m not kidding. It was louder than it used to be for Roger Clemens in those showdowns with Pedro Martinez. The two-strike clap is a tradition that started at Yankee Stadium for Guidry, but in the past 10 years it has dwindled. Not yesterday.
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Saturday, October 7, 2017
It was very freeing, somehow, to go into a winner-take-all postseason game with low expectations. Or maybe no expectations would be a better way to put it? We were expecting a rebuilding year. We weren’t expecting Aaron Judge. We weren’t expecting Brett Gardner to have a career high in home runs. We got excited about the young kids last year, but we didn’t expect them to run away with the AL East.
Although that’s what they did at the start of the season–run away with it. They built up such a lead that when they came back to earth and played under-.500 ball for much of the middle of the year, they nevertheless kept the Red Sox in striking distance. The possibility of a one-game tiebreaker loomed all the way through Saturday, when the Sox finally won one of the two remaining games of the season in order to clinch.
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Wednesday, August 23, 2017
“All the HOK stadiums have a ‘look,'” corwin said upon laying eyes on Busch Stadium. Then he thought for a second. “Well, except for Yankee Stadium. And I guess Kauffman Stadium is unique, too.” I reminded him that Miami had more similarities with the new Yankee Stadium than with Camden Yards, too. Perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that all the HOK “retro-style” ballparks a la Camden Yards share a specific aesthetic. “Retro-style” means red brick, green I-beams, and jauntily jutting decks and ramps.
I’d been to Busch once before, during the SABR convention in St. Louis years ago when the ballpark was still brand new. Since then “Cardinals Village” has been built, a mall-like structure outside the park that houses retail of various kinds including a fudge store, Cardinals merch store, a giant Fox Sports themed sports bar from which pregame festivities are broadcast, and also the Cardinals Museum. It costs $14 to get into the musem if you don’t have special Wrigley-esque seats on the roof or you’re not a card-carrying member of Cardinals Nation. We decided to buy a praline at the fudge store and skip the museum in favor of exploring around the outside of the ballpark before the gates opened.
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Wednesday, August 23, 2017
We drove across Missouri on Saturday, had dinner in St. Louis, and then continued on the Louisville, Kentucky, where we planned to see the Louisville Slugger Museum in the morning.
On Sundays, the museum opens at 11am, which was also checkout time at our hotel, so we slept as late as we could (it was nearly 3am when we had arrived), checked out a few minutes after 11 and then got our stuff into our car. By the time we walked over to the Louisville Slugger Museum it was 11:20 am and there was a line around the building. In anticipation of eclipse-seekers in need of something to do on Sunday and Monday, the museum was running a two-for-one special, and lots of people were taking them up on it. (Continued)
Like many baseball fans I have a dream to visit every major league ballpark. When I started looking into travel plans for this summer back in April, and we started planning where we might go to see the “Great American Eclipse of 2017,” we discovered the path of totality would pass very close to Kansas City and St. Louis. I’ve been to St. Louis before, but corwin hasn’t, and Kansas City is one of the last four parks I haven’t been to. So we set the plans in motion for a road trip that would start in KC and include eclipse viewing.
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It’s been a while since I did one of these baseball treks–over ten years. What can I say? I’ve been busy. So has the world. The last time I did this, I drove all over the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida looking at landmarks and places associated with Babe Ruth and other greats like Ty Cobb and Shoeless Joe. It turned out to be a much more emotional experience than I expected, partly because at that time we’d just started a war in the Middle East. (You can read about that trip under the “Bambino Road” tag.)
And here I am again at a fraught moment in American politics, sojourning around staring at monuments to our national pastime.
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Saturday, August 19, 2017
I’m on a trek across America’s heartland right now, ostensibly to put me in the vicinity of the total eclipse next week. But who knows if the sky will be clear that day? To ensure myself a worthwhile trip, I’ve planned a baseball trek to take in some of the places I’ve heard of over the years but have never had a chance to visit, including the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, the Louisville Slugger Museum, and Kauffman Stadium.
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This year’s SABR convention was in New York, which was awesome for me, given how many of my research interests are New York-centric. It meant that I didn’t have to “pick out” all the Yankees-related topics to go see because there were so many. (Unrelated but cool: There were also so many women presenting and speaking that I didn’t feel compelled to prioritize them. How excellent.) The Yankees were out of town, but you could hardly tell there was so much Yankees talk.
I learned a lot at this convention but I figured as a wrapup I could basically write a lineup card of things I learned about New York teams and players that I didn’t know before.
Alfonso Soriano
I had vaguely known that Jean Afterman, one of the few women at a high front office position in MLB, was instrumental in bringing Hideki Matsui to the Yankees, and I had vaguely known that there were some shenanigans involving Alfonso Soriano going to play in Japan first before being signed by the Yankees. What I didn’t know is that Jean Afterman was not only involved in both of those Yankees signing, she was the person basically responsible for opening the floodgates of Japanese talent to come to the U.S. overall. Here’s the story:
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Filed in Baseball Fans and Fandom, Baseball History, SABR, Yankee Fan Memories
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Tagged aaron judge, alfonso soriano, babe ruth, claire smith, curtis granderson, jean afterman, jim bouton, phil niekro, tom villante, yogi berra
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I’ve been pressed for time lately (okay, for the past three years thanks to my own book deadlines plus SABR deadlines) so I haven’t blogged about all the fantastic baseball things I’ve experienced. Just a few of them. One I did have time for was seeing the debut last year of Aaron Judge and Tyler Austin, who both hit home runs in that game, which was apparently historic.
Historic debuts don’t always presage more feats of historic proportions but as I write this we’re on the way home from two days at Yankee Stadium, during which we saw Judge hit what was almost certainly the longest home run outside of a home run derby that I’ve seen with my own eyes. In the old Yankee Stadium we once saw Alex Rodriguez hit the ambulance that used to park in the utility access area to the left of the visitors bullpen. I thought that might have been 465′? A fan we were enthusing with as we walked out of the stadium today said he remembered it as 483′. Either of us might have been right, a few of A-Rod’s homers on this list might have been the one we were thinking of and they range from 463′ to 488′–the longest homer by a Yankee in the HitTracker era according to a great post at River Avenue Blues. But 488′ is no longer the longest.
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This post originally appeared in the Spring 2017 issue of the Baseball Research Journal as my editor’s note/introduction. (The BRJ is the semi-annual research publication of the Society for American Baseball Research.) I’m reposting it here as part of #BlogMarch2017.
I would like to take this space to express how grateful I am for SABR’s existence. I grew up in a baseball-loving household, with a shrine to Thurman Munson on my wall (I was at summer camp when his plane crashed). But there were occasional judgmental people who felt it necessary to belittle the game or people’s devotion to it. It’s “just a game,” they would say. Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we spent our time and energy being devoted to something “more important?”
In a word, no. (Continued)
