Great Stadiums (5): Houston, We Have a Problem

Posted on November 9, 2013 by rightoffthebatbook
Another relic of 20th-century enterprise: The Houston Astrodome in its former glory

Another relic of 20th-century enterprise: The Houston Astrodome in its former glory

The NRG Astrodome, once The Eighth Wonder Of The World in Houston, may (or may not) succumb to the wreckers’ ball, as Ebbets Field did, as the Polo Grounds did, as countless great ballparks have, unless a lot of people step in, as seems the case. Read all about the demise of one of the engineering marvels of history.

Ground was broken for big, cigar-chomping “Judge” Roy Hofheinz’s vision on January 3, 1962. (He first dreamed of a domed stadium in 1952! Within sight of the Astrodome was the Judge’s modernist-sleek Astroworld Hotel.)

The originating home of exploding scoreboards and bugle calls (charge), Texas-sized dugouts (so that more fans could claim “dugout seats”), television monitors, Mercury-astronaut get-ups for the grounds’ crew, and every other imaginable Space Age gimmick—including air conditioning—meant to modernize the National Pastime, the Dome had sadly rusted away amid tractor-pulls, rodeos, and Funny Car exhibitions in the middle of a gigantic, empty parking lot; while back-to-the-future retro stadiums flourish.

Mickey Mantle hit the first home run at the Astrodome during a 1965 exhibition game attended by LBJ and other big-shots. Undoubtedly before the first pitch was thrown, fielders knew the graceful steel web of support girders and glass, thro which passed the sunlight or reflecting artificial light at night, made it impossible to track balls hit in the air. Nonwhite baseballs were proposed. Ultimately, the roof was painted as daylight created the biggest problem. This killed the grass. (It was as if a greenhouse were painted black.) AstroTurf-8, an unforgiving plastic carpet requiring little maintenance and no water or light, was devised.

The modern sports era had begun.

Unless some new county-referendum vote is held with different results, here we have it: the Houston Astrodome (1965-ca. 2014). R.I.P. Or maybe not!

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1918 and All That

Posted on October 31, 2013 by rightoffthebatbook
2013 was never in the wildest dreams of Ted Williams or his fans

2013 was never in the wildest dreams of Ted Williams or his fans

And in the end the only team left standing is the Boston Red Sox. I (Evander) doubt any major-league franchise and fan base have suffered as much.

The club put The Curse Of The Bambino to rest in 2004 by beating the New York Yankees in unprecedented style: Winning a seven-game series when down three-to-nothing had never been accomplished before. The Swawx went on to add a second World Series in 2007. But winning it all at Fenway, and truly ending The Curse, took ninety-five years to reach October 30, 2013.

Adding a flourish, the Red Sox went from worst to first within one short year, erasing a miserable 2012.

Like Rickey Henderson, like Mariano Rivera, Ruthian David Ortiz, who hits everything in sight, is the best anyone’s watched at what he does: DH. When called upon, Big Papi also has played a nimble first base. He is likely bound for the National Baseball Hall of Fame in spite of…see three paragraphs below.

But when Papi sent Torii Hunter flipping over the Fenway-outfield wall in the A.L.-championship series, the book on this season might as well have been closed.

The World Series featured three events no one had ever seen: (1) an umpire’s call overruled by the five others on the field; (2) an obstruction play to end one game; and (3) a pickoff at first base to end another. Perhaps the only worse ending occurred in 1926, when Ruth was caught stealing to conclude the World Series in favor of the St. Louis Cardinals. The caught-stealing, however, ushered in the 1927 Yankees, among the greatest teams ever. There always seems to be redemption.

The winners get to celebrate, having waited close to a century. I feel bad for a good friend and her family in St. Louis. Through everything, I wonder what the offseason will bring. There are whispers about, yes, Ortiz and PED. The suspension-appeal of Alex Rodriguez will make the wrong sorts of headlines. Boston itself is still recovering from a horrific terrorist attack. I’m happy everyone was able to put reality aside for one night in the most-venerable of ballparks, the oldest one also left standing.

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A Close Shave

Posted on October 25, 2013 by rightoffthebatbook

Mike Napoli will likely rest his beard on the Boston bench over the next three games.

Mike Napoli will likely rest his beard on the Boston bench over the next three games.

Life has its oddities and ironies. I (Evander) didn’t know that Gillette Razor headquarters is only two miles from storied Fenway Park.

Of greater importance: the World Series is now tied a game apiece between the Boston Red Sox and St. Louis Cardinals. Carlos Beltran is showing his superb postseason form, which sadly left him when he was with the New York Mets versus the very same Cardinals franchise.

The Cardinals’s ownership is well known for keeping its uniforms neat and the best-fitted in Major League Baseball.

The Red Sox? Not exactly the neatest bunch I’ve ever seen.

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Shortstops Reaching Jack Benny’s Age

Posted on October 21, 2013 by rightoffthebatbook

What a handsome shortstop looks like once the bubble reputation bursts: Phil Rizzuto.

What a handsome shortstop looks like once the bubble reputation bursts—from the length of those sideburns, I’d say about fifteen years after: Phil Rizzuto.

In North America, professional baseball is readying itself for the oddly named World Series, a best-of-seven-game set between the Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals, which will open in Boston in a couple of days. Once again, the Red Sox are resorting to beards to stimulate winning ways. The Cardinals, in the meantime, rely on a Moneyball-like balance to their lineup, good young pitching, and some of the most rabid fans in Major League Baseball. Which is not to say Boston fans, having tasted championships in 2004 and 2007 after a drought from the days of the Great War, are much less avid.

There is little question in my (Evander’s) mind that the two best teams of 2013 are hooking up.

Amidst the delirium, and in an attempt to remain ever quirky and irrelevant fading into the offseason, I want to talk about the two greatest shortstops in the history of the New York Yankees and one interesting fact that they share.

An old showbiz wheeze had Jack Benny stop counting the years aetat. thirty nine. Had Benny played shortstop instead of the violin accompanied by jokes, he would have found this age of no laughing matter.

One month before his thirty-ninth birthday in 1956, Phil Rizzuto played his last game. For this truncated season, he was in thirty one of them, with 52 at-bats, a .231 batting average, and a slugging percentage of the same number.

Derek Jeter turned thirty-nine in mid-season 2013. His statistics for the season: seventeen games played, 63 AB, a .190 BA, and a .254 slugging percentage. (It ought to be pointed out that Jeter had a monster season the year before: 740 plate appearances, 216 hits, a .316 BA, and a .429 slugging percentage.)

Derek Jeter will attempt to handle more than one hundred games at the position in 2014, something only Omar Vizquel and Luke Appling (1949: 142 games!) have ever accomplished. Phil Rizzuto, who possibly sacrificed his greatest seasons in youth to military service, was resorting to the saws of color commentary as a Yankees broadcaster at forty.

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The Next Commissioner of Baseball

Posted on September 28, 2013 by rightoffthebatbook

This Bud's for you.

This Bud’s not for you.

Bud Selig, a most mediocre commissioner—doubling for a spell as an owner—of Major League Baseball (MLB), will step down in early 2015. By meting out a devastating if circumscribed series of suspensions for PED use, especially to Alex Rodriguez (August 5, 2013), Selig is attempting to leave a legacy for cleaning up the sport.

Rodriguez surely is no Boy Scout. But does his behavior merit a suspension three or four times longer in duration than the next-closest player? Scapegoating in the name of establishing a lasting image of toughness won’t work.

Whatever one thinks of Selig, the identity of his successor is top secret. I (Evander) will float a few nominees of my own.

My first choice is Bill White. The negatives loom large: age (he will be eighty in 2014, same as Selig), a not-always-diplomatic temperament, and a likely unwillingness to accept the job if offered. To be the first African-American to hold the highest post in baseball, however, would crown an amazing career: player, broadcaster, league president, author.

A more likely choice and another former player with roots in the Players Association is Joe Torre. Following his days as a catcher and third baseman, Torre became an unsuccessful manager, a fine broadcaster, a successful manager, and an executive of MLB.

Torre is younger than White, but not in the prime of his post-playing career. What about another Joe—Girardi? Like Torre, Girardi was a catcher. He was a player rep and trained as an engineer with his mathematical mind. Girardi has won Manager of the Year kudos and knows how to liaise among players and officials.

A dark-horse candidate for the position had a much larger one earlier in life. George W. Bush had been co-owner of the Texas Rangers and has expressed interest in returning to baseball.

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Ain’t No Mariano in Cricket

Posted on September 27, 2013 by rightoffthebatbook

The retirement of Yankees closer Mariano Rivera brings to an end an era in that storied franchise, as it does for yours truly (Martin). Mariano had only been playing for a year in the Major Leagues when I went to my first baseball game in 1996. His consummate professionalism, the air of inevitability that would settle over the park when he was ushered in from the bullpen, the stillness and authority that he projected from the mound became, for me, synonymous with the meaning of “The Closer.”

The game of cricket has no place for the drama of Rivera: the call to the bullpen in the eighth or ninth inning; the slow walk onto the field of dreams as the opposition’s heart sinks to depths with which it’s all too familiar; the bim-bam-boom of the one-two-three outs. In cricket, all bowlers remain on the field and bowl at regular intervals throughout the game, which means that Rivera, should he have played cricket, would have been called upon to bowl more than once—with no grand entrance and no Act V twist—and then retired to center field to await his next spell.

Certainly, bowlers have their specialties: some are better at getting out lower-order batsmen than others, others are good against left-handers, etc. But because baseball relies so much more on specialists (although cricket is heading in that direction), the refinement of Rivera’s particular skills has as yet no comparison. Ironically, it is likely that only in his absence—after being omnipresent for almost two decades—we will realize just how much of a nonpareil the Sandman was.

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Always Wanted to Do This

Posted on September 25, 2013 by rightoffthebatbook
Broadcasting the New York Yankees for 25 years: John Sterling

Broadcasting the New York Yankees for 25 years: John Sterling

I (Evander) always fantasized broadcasting a major-league baseball game—or at least one inning. But either at the stadium or in front of the boob tube with the sound turned off, I have found the task requires enormous skill.

Time was broadcasters were strictly and essentially on-air journalists. A few brought along oversized personalities: Harry Caray for the Chicago Cubs, Ronald Reagan (a well-worn anecdote on broadcasting from a broken ticker-tape description), Dizzy Dean on “The Game of the Week,” Mel Allen and his “Ballantine Blasts” by the New York Yankees. But Dean (“He slud [for slid] into second”) was a rarity: the jock-turned-broadcaster, as was the more articulate Waite Hoyt.

When Phil Rizzuto was unceremoniously dumped by the Yankees, his playing career abruptly terminated, he was offered jobs with the Baltimore Orioles and the (then-)New York Giants to broadcast games, before the Yankees realized that they had one of the most endearing personalities ever and invited him back. Rizzuto took a crash course in enunciation and grammar. He still felt overwhelmed among professional announcers. Roughly five years later, the New York Mets hired home-run king Ralph Kiner to join two of the best-trained voices of the game who ever lived: Lindsey Nelson and Bob Murphy.

A new trend was in place: Rizzuto, Dean, Jerry Coleman, Kiner, Tim McCarver, Joe Morgan. And the beat went on.

Today, nearly sixty-years later, the John Sterlings and the venerable Vin Scullys are well outnumbered by former players: color commentators and play-by-play men. (Sterling’s daily booth-mate is one of the few and perhaps only female broadcaster: ex-singer Suzyn Waldman.) The grammar can be tortured and the descriptions are rarely the most inventive. But these former players are almost all college men, sophisticated in the arts of doing interviews and giving quotes.

They are way better than I ever could hope to be.

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Great Stadiums (4): Dodger Stadium, the Taj O’Malley

Posted on September 15, 2013 by rightoffthebatbook
Help me find my car!

Help me find my car!

I (Evander) thought it only fitting, as the Los Angeles Dodgers run away with the 2013 N.L. West crown, to talk a little in this series about the Major League Baseball stadium that set the standard.

The third-oldest big-league field and traditionally “a pitchers’ park,” Dodger Stadium is otherwise pure Tinsel Town/Malibu Mentality.

Designed by Praeger-Kavanagh-Waterbury, opened in 1962 at Chavez Ravine, well-researched stories over how Dodger Stadium construction displaced locals (already disenfranchised) are well known. Prior to this time, the Dodgers had been playing at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which had been constructed for the Summer Olympics thirty years prior. (I’s the climactic setting for the screwball-comedy Million Dollar Legs.)

The Dodgers, of course, had been fanatically embraced by Brooklyn. There are no three franchise-settings more different: Ebbets Field, the Coliseum, Dodger Stadium—also known as Taj O’Malley for the redoubtable owner.

There have been few changes. How to upgrade perfection? No corporate name’s affixed.

There are 9 levels according to Keith Hernandez (other sources list 5) to the stadium, possibly 21 (!) to the terraced-parking lot(s), like the freeways’ interchanges, and uniquely, since the stadium is, for lack of a better term, “geologically constructed” like an ancient-Greek amphitheater, there’s no way, on foot, to circumnavigate the exterior on a single “ground level.” One parks the car (not the chariot) according to where one sits. In keeping with the film-industry, the arrangement is something like that of an unreal postwar drive-in theater or sandals-and-sand epic climaxing in the Eternal City.

The ca. 56,000 it holds at full attendance hasn’t much changed (as noted) either, along with the 1950s design by Emil Praeger. Beyond the fences, one takes in California-palm trees. The San Gabriel Mountains north of the bleachers are architecturally expressed in the stylized, undulating-peaked roofs covering these 2 stands. Its perfect lawn of Santa Ana Bermuda grass contrasts with pastel-shaded seats. The stadium remains 1950s-luxurious.

Uncharacteristically, more than two years ago a fan named Bryan Stowe fell victim to an ugly incident here. In 2018, a woman was killed by a foul ball. Following a baffling and inexcusable lifespan of 42 years, the 2022 All-Star Game was hosted at Dodger Stadium.

One of the allures of night baseball on the West Coast is to experience the completion of all games east of Phoenix and Denver well before the seventh-inning stretch (some maintain started by William Howard Taft).

Dodger Stadium is probably the neatest ballpark in the majors, and is the home of the famous Dodger Dog from those perfect concession stands.

In short, one could be transported in his or her sleep and realize he or she has landed in Dodger Stadium.*

*As of October 2018, the Los Angeles Dodgers have won the Western Division of the National League six straight seasons, tho this one required a one-game playoff against the Colorado Rockies to determine the division-winner. In the strange, truncated 2020 season, the Dodgers won a championship.

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The Great Ty Cobb

Posted on September 2, 2013 by rightoffthebatbook

Ty Cobb, pride of American baseball

Ty Cobb, pride of American baseball

I (Evander) found the following rare and graceful footage of Ty Cobb, including scenes with golfer Bobby Jones and Babe Ruth. Cobb seems like such a nice man!

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Tigers Need Scherzer(y)

Posted on August 25, 2013 by rightoffthebatbook

Max Scherzer: a record-setting pace

Max Scherzer: a record-setting pace

At 19-1, Max Scherzer of the Detroit Tigers is compiling one of the all-time Major League Baseball records in 2013. (For cricket followers: The record indicates this pitcher is credited with nineteen wins against one loss.) If the trend continues, Scherzer will better the 18-1 mark of Roy Face in 1959. Face was credited with this record completely as a relief pitcher, throwing something like a mere ninety innings. By contrast, Scherzer is a starter.

Other incredible-season performances follow.

Fifty years ago, Sandy Koufax went 25-5. Facing Koufax in the World Series, Yogi Berra quipped, “I can see how he won twenty five. What I can’t understand is how he lost five.” Yogi’s long-time Yankees battery-mate, Whitey Ford, was 25-4 in 1961, and Ron Guidry went 25-3 in his greatest season, 1978. In 1968, Denny McLain was 31-6 for the same club Scherzer pitches.

Perhaps no two-year dominance will equal Lefty Grove’s. In 1931, Grove was 31-4. In 1930, his won-loss record was 28-5. Grove won fifty-nine of sixty-eight decisions over two seasons in a decade better known for batting records.

In 1904, Jack Chesbro may have lost twelve games; but this was out of fifty-three decisions. His forty-one victories is almost as astounding as his forty-eight complete games, a mark no current starting pitcher will achieve over a career.

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