All posts tagged: Baseball

Baseball Pilgrimages (Continued)

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It was a night when you wondered if Noah was nearby, putting the finishing touches on his ark. Lightening and thunder in rapid succession. Rain that lashed at the body if you were unfortunate enough to be outside. Howling winds. Waves lapping at the shore. And I was in Tampa, not to help rewrite the Republican national platform, but for something much more consequential: to catch a baseball game. In most cities it would have been a wasted opportunity. But the Tampa Bay Rays play in St. Petersburg’s Tropicana Field, one of the few remaining domes still hosting major league baseball on a daily basis. And for this night, I was glad to have a roof over my head when Ray’s ace David Price threw that first pitch right on schedule. Tampa Bay was #14 on my journey to visit all 30 major league ballparks.  It promised to be a special night.  The Rays were on a hot streak, winning five games to close the gap with the first-place Yankees to four games. Their ace …

Baseball Pilgrimages

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Say Hey!  Check another ballpark off the list!! About five years ago I made it a life goal to take in a game at all the Major League Baseball stadiums across America.  I wanted to achieve this goal by 2015 – when I reach the big 6-0.  It may be tough to meet that timetable, but what are goals for and I have hit a bit of a jackpot in the past six weeks. It is time for an update. I do have some rules for this quest. First of all, I have to actually see a game.  I can’t just drive by, or I could put the Ballpark in Arlington, among others, in my checked off category. I use to buy a hat of the local team to prove I’d been there, but Candice thinks I have enough caps – and she’s probably right.  So that’s no longer necessary.  Finally, demolitions have wrecked havoc with these plans. I decided – in a totally arbitrary way, since I am the umpire – that if I’ve …

You Know Your Team Has Had a Rough Day…

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You know your team has had a rough day when the President’s Race is the best thing on the “Nats Highlights” reel at the end of the day. Yes, Thomas Jefferson wiped out George, Abe, and finally Teddy with a series of pretty impressive body checks before crossing the finish line at the head of the pack. But on a beautiful Father’s Day in Washington, the home-standing Nationals couldn’t match  Tom’s effort and come up with the timely hits they needed.  Unfortunately, they also  made a couple of uncharacteristic blunders that led to a 4-1 Yankees win and a sweep of the weekend series. But I was enjoying the weather, the sell-out crowd…and my daughter Claire. So all-in-all it was a pretty wonderful day. And as is true with any day at the ballpark, you’ll always see something you’ve never seen before. Today (besides Tom wiping out Teddy just before the finish line), it was fun to watch 19-year-old phenom Bryce Harper rap out a double… …and then spend the next minute or so chatting …

Hot Stuff at the Ballpark

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Every baseball game has a better than 50-50 chance of showing you something you’ve never seen before. After yesterday afternoon’s “Hot Stuff” game, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Yes, I played hookey from work yesterday afternoon to catch a day game with a friend at Nationals Park.  (Question:  can it be hookey if  you tell your boss and your assistant…and wear blue jeans to work with a Strasburg t-shirt underneath your regular shirt?) When I chose that game from my season ticket pool, I had no idea that Stephen Strasburg would be pitching! It was a muggy and overcast day, and I arrived just in time to see three Nats stand in left field and let a routine fly ball from the first Padres hitter  fall between them for a “double.” (Where is truth-in-scoring?  That was an error. Just assign it to someone and get over it.)  Jeez, these guys are in first place? But that was just the beginning. Stephen Strasburg (he of the miniscule ERA and over-powering stuff) looked uncomfortable …

Changing Seasons

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I love March Madness.  After a boring set of games on Thursday (although I’m glad Vanderbilt’s game was somewhat pedestrian), Friday finally got us in to the “madness” part of the event.  Two 15s beating number 2 seeds on the same day – that’s as good as it gets! But as much as I enjoy these weeks of one-and-done basketball, I had an experience this afternoon that really gets me excited – sitting down with a friend over a glass of wine and choosing games out of the Washington Nationals season ticket package we’d purchased together.  Now I’m pumped! Basketball is fun, but baseball is on another plane.  So in honor of the distribution of the season tickets, I give you a smattering of baseball quotations to bring a smile to your face and anticipation to your heart: There are two theories on hitting the knuckleball.  Unfortunately, neither of them works.  (Legendary hitting coach Charlie Lau) It doesn’t take much to get me up for baseball.  Once the National Anthem plays, I get chills.  I …

Baseball in America (Academic Edition)

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I have found a place in America where February baseball lives! For the Presidents Day holiday, I’m in Southern California for Family Weekend at Claire’s college.  We’re new to this whole Parents/Family Weekend deal, but if today is any indication I could definitely get use to these trips! This morning, I visited two political science classes that were very interesting.  One compared the works of Luther and Calvin; the other focused on the U.S. Congress.  Claire joined me for lunch at her favorite dining hall  (most of her classes – of the science variety – weren’t open to parents).  But as she prepares for the conference championships this weekend for her swim team, I’ve found myself with choices for how to spend my time that are entirely up to me. Which takes me to Baseball in America. That’s the title of the class I attended after lunch.  It was a synopsis of a fall semester interdisciplinary class that was designed to introduce freshmen to the rigors of college-level writing.  Taught by a life-long Dodgers fan …

Best Month of Baseball – Ever!

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The period from September 28 – October 28, 2011 is already being proclaimed the  best month of baseball in the history of the game. But like the Greeks, who add two months that don’t exist to the calendar so they can pay workers higher wages and claim to stay within monthly pay limits, I want to add a few days and take the personal view that September 25th – October 28th is the best month of baseball – ever! I go back to the 25th of September, because that’s when our Washington Nationals wrapped up their own surprising September and closed out the home season with a thoroughly satisfying win over the Atlanta Braves.  On that day the Nats – rather than playing out the string – took the rubber game of a three game series from the Braves and did their part to help the World Champion St. Louis Cardinals even make it into the playoffs. Then of course, there was the ridiculous night of September 28th when within minutes of each other the …

World Series Game - October 25, 2019

Church of baseball: Part three

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This post…to follow-on the last two and last evening’s crazy night of baseball…will be even shorter. Joe Posnanski wrote one of the best columns about last evening’s games, baseball and life, that I’ve read in a long time.  Do yourself a favor — pull up a chair and read it.* It begins with this thought: “Baseball, like life, revolves around anticlimax. That, in many ways, is the beauty of it. I realize that’s a hard thing to explain to someone who doesn’t love baseball. No, more than hard, it’s an impossible thing to explain, because many people want sports to be more than life. They follow sports to jolt them out of the steady rhythms of the shriek of alarm clocks, the monotony of morning meetings, the rush to get the kids to soccer practice by 4 p.m. They want sports to be bigger than life. What’s the point, otherwise? There is nothing in baseball as jarring as a blind-side hit, as jaw-dropping as a perfect alley-oop, as tense and heart-pounding as a breakaway. And …

Church of Baseball – Part Two

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The River Styx and one chance in 278 million.  Baseball writers are amazing, but they go to a whole ‘nother level when you have nights like last evening. The baseball gods must have loved my last post, because we were all rewarded with the most improbable and dramatic final day of the season.  It was so incredible even Bud Selig couldn’t screw it up.  Three of the four games critical to the wild card races in each league were on our local cable system – conveniently located on channels 41, 42, and 43.  The only one we couldn’t watch was the least dramatic:  the Cards drubbing of the Astros.  But for five delicious hours, Candice and I sat by the television, switching between games almost on a pitch-by-pitch basis in the last two hours, to watch the monumental collapse of not one, but two proud franchises (Boston and Atlanta), and the incredible comeback of the Tampa Bay Rays from too many near-death experiences to count. Baseball writers will opine about this evening for some time …

The Church of Baseball

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“I believe in the Church of Baseball.” So begins Annie Savoy’s opening monologue in the movie Bull Durham.  And after going through all the religions she has tried, comparing baseball to sex, and talking about bad trades (“Who can forget Frank Robinson for Milt Pappas for God’s sake”) she ends up with: It’s a long season and you gotta trust. I’ve tried ’em all, I really have, and the only church that truly feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the Church of Baseball. Today I needed the Church of Baseball, and it didn’t fail me.  Oh, I did get up and go to the 8 a.m. service at my other church…especially since we were meeting our new rector after an interminable period of transition.  But I’ll freely admit that I went to the cathedral at Nationals Park today to feed the soul. The Nationals have been on a tear.  Heading in to the home finale, they had won 11 of 14, including sweeps on the road of the Mets and the Phillies.  Tom …