All posts tagged: Baseball

A Great Week for Ballparks

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In my bucket-list quest of visiting all 30 major league ball parks, this week didn’t really move the needle…but it was a great week nonetheless. Two cities and two ballparks.  That’s the way I like to travel. Last Tuesday, I was in Denver wrapping up a set of meetings, and joined some colleagues at Coors Field for a Rockies vs. Nationals game.  Yes, my Nats were in town! This was my second visit to Coors Field – which means I didn’t get to check off another park from my list. But while the outcome was disappointing (the Nats lost this game, yet won the series), I did get to catch a wonderful Coors Field sunset over the Rocky Mountains.  Few stadiums have better views, and all of us – Nats and Rockies fans alike – marveled in the sunset. Then on Friday, I was in Boston.  Those of you who know the schedule will say, “Hey, weren’t the Red Sox playing the O’s in Baltimore this weekend?”  Well, yes.  (I am actually catching the last …

A Gem of a Day

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By just about any measure, it was a pretty wonderful day for a baseball game in the nation’s capital. Sunday of Memorial Day weekend…the start of summer. (Check.) Sunny skies with temps in the high sixties/low seventies throughout the afternoon. (Check.) A huge crowd at the yard.  Official attendance of 39,033.  (You look for these things when you’re scoring the game.) (Check.) Wonderful daughter along for the afternoon. (Check!) As we left home for the metro around noon for the 1:35 first pitch, Claire and I had on appropriate game-day attire.  (I think she still finds it amazing that someone who is 20 – her age – can play major league baseball, so I offered up the Harper shirt.) Strasburg was on the mound, and he was sharp! The Phillies were confused all day.  Eight strong innings and nine strikeouts later – with the only blemish being a balk on his next to last pitch allowing a man on third to score – he showed that despite the strange 3-5 W-L record this year, he’s …

Opening Day Finally Arrives!

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A quick lunch break shout-out for the arrival of opening day!  Let’s go Nats!! I’m part of a season ticket group, so the “coordinator” of the group gets – as it should be – the opening and closing games of the season.  Tom’s photo from 20 minutes ago is at the top of the post.  But come Wednesday night, for game #2 of 162 (and more!) this year, Candice and I will be in these same seats ready to cheer on Gio and the rest of the boys of summer. I know that the first day of the season was actually yesterday when the Astros played the Rangers, but it was just weird to see the Astros as an American League team. I was glad to see former Nat Rick Ankiel get the key home run.  Maybe when a recent N.L. doormat roughs up a recent perennial A.L. playoff contender, it just shows that the N.L. has passed the A.L. in playing quality baseball.  But I digress. It has been a long winter since our …

Angels Stadium

My personal preseason

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This is my second installment of the things I do to get ready for the baseball season…which is necessary because pitchers and catchers report tomorrow. Why’s he calling me meat?  I’m the one driving a Porsche. Relax, all right? Don’t try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring! Besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls – it’s more democratic. The world is made for people who aren’t cursed with self awareness. You just got lesson number one: don’t think; it can only hurt the ball club. You’re gonna have to learn your clichés. You’re gonna have to study them, you’re gonna have to know them. They’re your friends. Write this down: “We gotta play it one day at a time.” Man that ball got outta here in a hurry. I mean anything travels that far oughta have a damn stewardess on it, don’t you think? (Nuke) I ain’t pissing nothing away. I got a Porsche already; a 911 with a quadrophonic Blaupunkt. (Crash) Christ, you don’t need a quadrophonic Blaupunkt! What you need is …

Hope Springs Eternal

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With less than two weeks until pitchers and catchers report (11 days to be exact, but who’s counting?), it seemed like a good time to get into baseball shape…with a visit to the bookshelf. I had picked up Dan Barry’s 2011 book Bottom of the 33rd:  Hope, Redemption, and Baseball’s Longest Game while on a recent trip to Politics and Prose bookstore (home, by the way, of one of the best baseball sections of any bookstore in the Washington area).  I thought it looked like a fun read – a story about the longest game in baseball history. But what I found was much more – a little gem. The game began at 8 p.m. after a 30 minute delay due to faulty lighting on April 18, 1981 – Holy Saturday – and was extended until 4 a.m. on Easter morning, April 19th, when the game was suspended after 32 innings and 8 hours with a 2-2 tie.  Two months later, on June 23rd, the Rochester Red Wings and Pawtucket Red Sox resumed the game …

R.I.P. The Earl of Baltimore and Stan the Man

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Baseball lost two members of the Hall of Fame this past weekend:  Earl Weaver and Stan Musial. There’s much that could – and has – been written about these two baseball greats.  I’ve linked to Joe Posnanski’s blogs above, but I could just as easily have sent you to read Tom Boswell’s column on The Earl of Baltimore or George Vecsey on Stan the Man. I won’t go on about Weaver’s baseball genius – decades before Moneyball made his theories all the rage – or Musial’s quiet consistency – to the point where he was widely considered to be the best ballplayer of the postwar decade. No, I’m going to focus on their nicknames. Baseball has the best nicknames. Period.  In Why Is Baseball So Much Better Than Football, Boswell touches on the topic in multiple ways, but he sums it up here: Reason #85:  Baseball nicknames go on forever – because we feel we know so many player intimately.  Football monikers run out fast.  We just don’t know that many of them as people. Then …

Guitars and Baseball

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James Nash once gave some good advice to aspiring guitarists: Rule #1 for learning to play fast:  don’t practice while watching the ball game.  Well, tonight…I’m guilty.  Two hours after starting, I’ve finally put the last instrument back on its stand.  I was watching baseball the entire time. However, I suspect that the San Francisco-based Nash would approve of my choice of ballgame, as the hometown Giants are in the World Series against the Detroit Tigers. And while I didn’t get any real practice in tonight, it sure was fun to multitask around two things that I love.  (Note to regular readers:  Candice, who has become a baseball fan this year with the emergence of the Nats, is out-of-town. I wasn’t ignoring her.) I grew up as a Giants fan.  The Braves hadn’t moved to Atlanta, so we didn’t have a MLB team in the South.  And Willie Mays is, to my mind, the most complete player in the history of the game.  He was so much fun to watch as a young kid in …

Scorebook

2012 N.L. East Division Champs!

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Like Michael Morse – shown here grinning as he steps to the plate to lead off the bottom of the 9th in a 2-0 Nationals loss to the Phillies –  I don’t think I’ve ever had this much fun in a ballpark after a loss. Best. Losing. Night. Ever. Candice and I were at Nationals Park on Monday, October 1st, hoping to watch the Nats clinch their first ever National League East Division championship. It didn’t happen the way we hoped, with a Nats victory. But since they played so well from April through September, this loss on the first day of October didn’t keep our boys from clinching. About 10 minutes before our game ended, the Pittsburgh Pirates (bless their hearts) defeated the Atlanta Braves. With a magic number of one, the deed was done and the outcome on the field was anti-climatic. For the third time this year, I made the big screen, this time holding up a pair of Champs banners that our seat mate had brought to the park. Let the …

High and Tight or High Lonesome…It’s All Good

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Last evening felt like an embarrassment of riches. The Nationals were mowing down the hated Phillies on the road, to maintain the best record in baseball and lower their magic number to 3.  There were some high and tight pitches thrown. Michael “The Beast” Morse hits a home run “nine million feet” into the Nat’s bullpen in right-center field where reliever Tom Gorzelanny catches the ball in his cap, eliciting whoops, cheers, and raised arms all around. It was fun to watch. But the International Bluegrass Music Association awards (IBMA) show was being live streamed on Bluegrass Today’s web site from the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville at the same time, with appearances by Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers, Doyle Lawson, and many others. What’s a bluegrass loving Nat’s fan to do? Simple…multi-task. Zap goes the mute button. I’ll “listen” to Bob and F.P. on closed captions. Next, I turn on the live stream on the iPad and we’re off to the races. Loved the tribute to Ralph Rinzler and the story of how …