All posts tagged: Baseball

With Willie at ATT Park

Willie Mays and America’s oldest professional baseball park

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Growing up, I was such a Willie Mays fan that my friends called me “Say Hey” in honor of the Say Hey Kid.  In those pre-Internet days it was tough to live in Tennessee and keep up with late-night baseball in San Francisco.  However, many was the summer morning I called the sports department of the Daily News Journal to ask for the previous evening’s scores off the wire.  This was serious business.  Many years and games later, I still believe Mays was the best, most complete ballplayer to play the game. So I was thrilled recently to see the new book Willie’s Boys:  The 1948 Birmingham Black Barons, the Last Negro League World Series, and the Making of a Baseball Legend by John Klima.  The title tells what’s in store.  This is a book about the difficult period when major league baseball was undergoing integration and Birmingham – that hotbed of both baseball and racial segregation – was at the center of the story.  In 1948, Mays was a 16-year-old rookie on the Black …

What a Glorious Day…There’s More Baseball to be Played!

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Game Five of the World Series was what we’ve been waiting for and, as a result, there’s more baseball to be played. Hallelujah! As Dave Sheinin wrote in this morning’s Washington Post, “The Yankees still hold a 3-2 edge in the series, but it feels exponentially smaller than it did 24 hours ago.” In his Washington Post column, Tom Boswell has a wonderful piece on how this has turned into an “Old School Series.”  How right he is.  And he nails the landing: Once back in New York, Matsui and Posada will be back in the lineup. Pettitte will be set to pitch a game that might be Exhibit A on his Hall of Fame résumé someday. Utley will take aim at Reggie-Reggie-Reggie. A-Rod has a chance to be MVP and own New York for decades. Girardi won’t sleep for the next 48 hours. Martínez has a chance to reverse the “Daddy” chants for a day and bring baseball a Game 7 that would raise the hair on heads from coast to coast. This is …

It breaks your heart

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A. Bartlett Giamatti said it best. “It breaks your heart.  It is designed to break your heart.  The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.“ Giamatti – the former president of Yale and the great commissioner of baseball who banned Pete Rose for life and then died of a heart attack 8 days later – was writing about an earlier Red Sox loss on the last day of the season many years ago.  But the “breaking your heart” line applies in all sorts of baseball situations. Friday evening, on the last day of my summer vacation before heading back to work, the MLB-worst Washington Nationals played the division leading St. Louis Cardinals like they were equals.  Young Nationals “ace” John Lannan matched recently acquired and crafty veteran John Smoltz pitch-for-pitch through a well-played ball game that took only a little over two …

The Sun Shines and the Nats Sign Strasburg

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I went to bed last evening around 11:40 p.m. after checking to see if the Washington Nationals had signed #1 draft choice Stephen Strasburg.  They had not. I awoke this morning and checked the Nats icon on my blackberry to find…YES, they pulled it off!  And for ONLY a little over $15 million.  The sun is indeed shining over baseball in the District today. Writing in the Washington Post, Tom Boswell talked about Washington’s baseball redemption. Few teams have ever needed a watershed event more than the Nationals. And no town in baseball has needed a validation and a fresh start more than Washington. On Monday night, at 11:58:43 p.m., both the team and the town got their wish. Just 77 seconds before a witching midnight deadline, the franchise that so often gets kicked when it is down and the town that is constantly accused of baseball’s original sin (being Washington) proved that it could do something big and difficult and right. The Nats signed Stephen Strasburg, probably the most heralded young pitcher of the …

Great Week to Be a Nats Fan

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With the Washington Nationals heading into today’s game with a chance to sweep a home stand AND extend a winning streak to eight in a row,  I just couldn’t stay away from Nationals Park.  So when friends made plans to join me, it was a done deal – humidity and a hot sun notwithstanding. And am I glad I went.  Sixteen hits!  Adam Dunn’s 30th home run!  J.D. Martin’s first major league win!  Zimmerman gets 3 hits and scores 3 runs!  The offense continues to come through with timely hit after timely hit!  Happy friends and fans all around! A 9-2 romp. (How often do you get to use the words “Nats” and “romp” in the same column?) What a great week to be a Nats fan.  At the end of 25 straight games without a break, the Nats find their inner ballplayers and go on a tear.  As a vacationing bachelor this week (with Candice and the twins away), I’ve also had every opportunity to catch the games on TV and in person. You …

What’s Gotten Into Our Nats?

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On a beautiful night for baseball in the nation’s capital (81 low-humidity degrees at game time), the Washington Nationals continued their mystifying ways – by winning their 6th in a row! Our boys have been playing error-free baseball with sparkling defense since Rockville’s own Jim Riggleman took over as manager more than 20 games ago.  Combine that with a new-found timeliness with their hitting and a rebuilt and generally effective bullpen and – while we may see a bunch of bush-league politics in this town – all of a sudden we’re seeing major league baseball in the District of Columbia! With Candice and the twins in Florida visiting her family and tonight’s promise of beautiful weather, I made up my mind early to take in the Nats-Diamondbacks game.  I was worried that my presence at the ballpark would jinx them, as I’ve been to 4 or 5 games already this season…and all have been losses (if you throw out the 10-10 tie that was won about two months later).  When I barely missed a batting …

Summer Saturdays

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As summer Saturdays go, this was a pretty good one. First of all, I’m focused on moving things off my desk so that both my head AND office are cleared to begin vacation on Monday.  So I went into work this morning.  That may not sound like fun on a summer day, but if no one’s around and you can put on the Bluegrass Instrumentals playlist off the iTunes site and crank up the sound, it makes for a great setting for getting things done. I didn’t stay too long, however, as I wanted to catch the championship game of the Cal Ripken, Sr. Baseball League, featuring the Bethesda Big Train.  My colleague at work (and fellow baseball enthusiast) Dolores and her son Noah joined me at Povich Field where – after the strangest “sun downpour” (this was more than a shower) – the Big Train played a stellar game and beat the Maryland Redbirds 7-0. to cap a 31-10 season with both the regular season and playoff titles.  The Big Train pitcher had a …

Brooks, Big Train, and The Onion

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I’m not sure it is a good sign when New York Times columnists begin showing up at Bethesda Big Train wooden bat league baseball games. Tonight I was at Shirley Povich Field for the Cal Ripken, Sr. League playoff game between Big Train and the Herndon Braves when I look down my aisle to the right (of course) and there sits David Brooks, conservative voice of the Times editorial page and PBS’s Newshour with Jim Lehrer.  Brooks is a commentator who says enough sane things (e.g., see comments about Sarah Palin) to make some believe he’s bi-partisan.  I’ll reserve judgment on that…but I usually agree with how his columns are “interpreted” by the Daily Kos Abbreviated Pundit Round-Up (e.g., David Brooks recycles another “we’re all going to die” column). Nonetheless, I’m not picking on conservatives.  Heck, I’d be concerned if it was Maureen Dowd sitting down the row in the bleachers from me.  Part of the fun of college wooden league baseball is that it really has that small town, family feel.  Kids throw out …

Modernism and baseball stadiums

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My colleague Dolores recently pointed me towards a springtime blog rant by long-time preservationist – and baseball fan – Clem Labine.  Entitled Hey Nick – Get REAL, the blog goes after New York Times architectural critic Nicolai Ouroussoff for panning the two new baseball stadiums in New York City by saying that “American stadium design has been stuck in a nostalgic funk, with sports franchises recycling the same old images year after year.”  Read it for the writing, if nothing else.  (Clem was the founder of The Old House Journal eons ago and you’ll see his way with the written word.) Camden Yards in Baltimore (photo at the top of the post) began the trend toward throwback stadiums. Having attended many a ballgame there (and in other similarly inspired parks), I agree with Clem that these ballparks work AND give the fans what they want. But my recent trip to Kansas City gave me the chance to visit one of the first of the good modernist sports venues – Kauffman Stadium.  The architects here show …