Tag: red sox

Your National League Champions

Oh, too excited to organize my post today. And still too busy at work. So it’s a list again.

1) I kept telling everyone all day that the Cardinals would beat Clemens. After all, he’d lost 190 games in the majors–26 of them in the post-season! No Cardinal pitcher has lost anywhere near that many (Now, I do think Jeff Fassero may have lost 190 games for the Cardinals in 2003 alone, but we shipped him off to Colorado.). We surely had the edge going in.

2) The last time the Cardinals were in the World Series, I was in the 7th grade. My history teacher, John Reker, a Cubs fan, was not very gracious when the Cardinals imploded against the Royals.

3) I will understand if some unreliable folks among you are rooting for the Bostons. I realize that no one in America outside of Cardinals fans and Yankees fans is rooting for St. Louis. But we’ve already won the title that has always mattered most to me: the National League Pennant. I’m with John McGraw on this one–who really cares what that upstart, pipsqueak beer league does? Sure, you want to win the World Series, but that’s gravy.

4) Brian Gunn of Redbird Nation (who isn’t just getting links here–the Wall Street Journal seems to mention his column a couple times a week these days) quoted Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated as describing the NLCS as “a glorified game of HORSE between Pujols and Beltran.” I guess Pujols, with his 4 homers and .500 batting average, ended up on top.

5) That catch that Jimmy Edmonds made is the biggest catch I’ve ever seen him make. Maybe not his absolute best, in a Platonic, form-of-perfect-outfield-catch kind of way, but definitely the most important great catch he’s made. I think it’s far more impressive than the Mays catch that’s always replayed: he covered a lot of ground, back to the ball, laid out full-length, and caught the ball over his shoulder while landing. It made the difference between 3-0 and 1-0, and might have singlehandedly saved the nation from a week of bad political metaphors on Fox sports.

6) And last, but not least: did someone put Scooter out of our misery? We haven’t seen him since his two appearances in game 6. I’m not complaining, mind you.

Y’all are welcome at the Rocketship on Saturday night for chili.

Original comments…

Dan: On point No. 2… You mean overwhelmed by the Twins (’87), right? Joaquin, specificaly, imploded in ’85, although I’ve heard way too many Cardinals fans blame it on the umps.

Levi: Oh, you’re right. I blame the 1985 implosion largely on Whitey Herzog. After that call, rather than calling a meeting and rallying the troops–as LaRussa would have done–he kept up the whining and basically conceded the Series.

Luke, hanger-on: I’ll have you know, Levi, that I was the Cardinals never lost a game that I watched while wearing a red shirt. I’ll also note that I wore red socks for the last two games of the ALCS.

I wouldn’t suggest either team owes me a share of their championship bonuses.

But I woudln’t say they don’t, either.

Hurrah for chili! Hurrah for the best postseason in history! Or at least this millennium!

Cushie: I’m a bit conflicted. Would love to be watching this series at the Rocketship with good chili, but I have to go with the Sox due to the whole New England thing going on. However, as I’m in Old England I am instead figuring out how nocturnal I’m about to come. If the games go six hours I’m totally screwed. You guys get worried when games go until 1am, my games start at 1am.

Levi: I spent the fall of 1996 in London, and I listened to any games that I could pick up on Armed Forces Radio, but that did mean being up at nearly 2 am for the first pitch. That made for one of the worse nights in my life as a fan, when the Cardinals gave up 10 runs in the first inning of game 7 to the Braves. Even worse, at work the next day, very few people even understood why I was having a bad day.

Levi: LaRussa’s got wa.

Jim: This year, it looks like the World Series is being carried live in the U.K. on Channel Five, and then repeating the next day during normal waking hours on a cable channel called, of course, North American Sports Network.

Cushie: Yes, Channel Five has it, and that’s regular network tv. It’s just damn late. It’s hosted by some serious meat-heads (one British, one American). The funny part is that even though this is commerical TV, they don’t show ads during all the long breaks. Instead, they kick it back to the meat heads in the studio for more dumb banter. But I shouldn’t complain- at least they’re showing it. And it’s good preparation for staying up all night next week for the election results.

Color the Series red

One final accomplishment from the trip in August: we saw both World Series teams, twice each.

I think we’re going to have a schism among the proprietors of this blog now, since I’m going to be rooting for the Sox.

Original comments…

Levi: I figured during our trip there was a slim chance that we’d see two of the teams that we saw twice end up in the World Series. And I didn’t figure those teams would be the White Sox or Dodgers.

Jim: You thought the Brewers and the Tigers were going to be in the Series?!

Two to go!

I feel bad that, at the best time of the year for baseball, I’ve been incommunicado. Work has just been too busy. But I couldn’t put off at least posting a few post-season thoughts.

1) I’ve always liked Jorge Posada, but I like him even more now that I learn (from Luke) that he buried Fox Sports’ absurd new “Diamond Cam” a few nights ago. The Diamond Cam answers a question that fans have been wishing they could see since before the invention of television: What would a hitter standing in the box look like if you were a zombie just about to dig his way out of his grave right by home plate? Bob deserves the credit for realizing that it was a zombie’s point of view that Fox was representing. He also deserves credit for groaning, zombie-style, every time the Zombie cam appears.

2) Last night, we had a nice little crowd at the Rocketship. Sarah brought her knitting and some fine, fine cobbler. Sandy brought his computer and some silicon chips, and Bob brought his appetite and his fine, fine zombie impression. Stacey fell asleep on the couch, but woke up for the good parts. And a couple of audience members had the confidence in our boys in red to go home before the end.

3) One point that I’m sure King Kaufmann is going to touch on in his Salon column today: one part of the three-headed cliche monster that Fox has saddled us with in this series said late in last night’s game, “One problem for the Astros is that they haven’t been able to get Brad Lidge, their best reliever, in the game.” Which, of course, is not true. The Astros have chosen not to get their best reliever in the game, because their manager, Phil “Scrap Iron” Garner, has not wanted to use Lidge except in a save situation. Only, if you bring in someone else to pitch to Pujols and Rolen in the 8th inning of a tie game, you’re not ever going to have a save situation. And suddenly you’re in a 2 games to none hole.

4) What can be said about the Red Sox? Sad, sad, sad. Here’s hoping that losing to the Yankees won’t make Johnny Damon reconsider his grooming habits.

5) Baseball Reference has the 2004 stats up. That was quick. Not that many of those links are to 2004, but you folks already know what happened in 2004.

The first games

I’m still busy busy busy at work, but I couldn’t let the first games pass with no comment, so here’s a quick post with no links, mainly designed to get other people’s impressions of yesterday’s games.

1) I know one game does not a series make, but I very much enjoyed the dazed look that Odalis Perez wore when he left the mound in yesterday’s Cards/Dodgers game. The last time a team hit five home runs in a game in a division series–wait–no team had ever done that before. It was a good start.

2) I was a bit bothered by the curtain calls at Busch Stadium yesterday, though. Curtain calls seem to me to be a bit disrespectful. I know players feel like the crowd is compelling them to come out, and they have to do it to shut up the crowd, but like a band after playing a perfunctory encore, they should just ignore the noise. Eventually it’ll go away. No matter how hard I stomped my feet at his show, Nick Lowe wasn’t going to come back out and play “I’ve Been Everywhere.”

3) The Red Sox did as expected. I expect they’ll do more of the same in games 2 and 3. And Johnny Damon’s hair seems to be even longer than before: it’s down past his shoulders.

4) I finally saw Scooter the Talking Baseball last night. Acting as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, Joe Buck said, “And now, to tell us some more about the change-up, here’s Scooter.” And there he was, unsettlingly flesh-colored, with a weird stitching mouth and backwards ball cap. Until that moment, I was still trying to make myself believe that he was a figment of Jim’s imagination. But no: Fox really does think kids are this stupid.

5) After the umpires took back the Sierra home run last night, deciding that it was foul after all, I decided that the only thing better than a Yankee making an out is a Yankee thinking he’s hit a home run, then making an out. I decided that every time a Yankee hits a foul ball–even just a grounder–the umpires should wave their fingers for a home run, make the hitter run the bases, then confer and send him back to the plate. Now that would be fun.

Original comments…

Levi: Oh, and how could I have forgotten the way the radar gun reading bursts into flames any time a pitch gets above about 92 mph? What a wealth of new excitement that brought to my enjoyment of the game! Thank you, Fox! Thank you!

maura: that near-hr was ruben sierra’s, actually. he promptly struck out.

Levi: Thanks, Mo. I fixed it.

Jason: When is Fox going to bring out the blue dot to follow where the ball goes? And when will we see Calista Flockhart eating a hot dog?!?!?

stacey: i was DEEPLY disappointed that sierra was not required to run the bases in reverse.

Boston pictures

The Fenway Park grandstands and the .406 Club (behind the glass)…

There’s a monstrous wall in left field, mostly painted green…

Home team batting order, with Johnny Damon at the top…

Johnny Damon in the field in front of us…

The right field foul pole, just kind of in the middle of the stands, which are at a very shallow angle at that point…

Moon rising over Fenway Park…

I can’t get away from Amtrak…

The final line…

I assume the headline would make more sense if I’d spent more time in Boston…

Bowing at the Altar of Damon

Some thoughts on Fenway Park and the 3-1 Red Sox win we saw.

1) It’s wonderful when something you’ve heard about all your life fully lives up to its billing. Fenway did. It’s a nearly perfect ballpark. Really, pharmacy there’s not a lot I could say about Fenway that’s not already been said elsewhere. Everything you’ve heard is true. It’s cozy enough that even from our seats 13 rows up in dead center, unhealthy we felt close to the action. The long rows and tight spaces discourage the sort of incessant milling around that the crowds at, say, Wrigley Field are prone to. And while the high walls and blocky upper deck block any view of the neighborhood, that means that once you’re in Fenway, everything is centered around the game. The ballpark maintains an enclosed, insular feeling such that even the drunk fans gave the impression of being at least somewhat attentive, and most fans were concentrating on every pitch. It was a wonderful place to see a ballgame.

2) The current ownership of the Red Sox, having decided that, rather than attempt to extort a replacement for Fenway from the city like the previous owners attempted to do, they would take advantage of having one of the best ballparks in baseball while still taking every chance they could to squeeze more money out of it. To that end, they’ve made some changes that I suppose might bother longtime Sox fans, but that I thought were actually pretty good. They added seats to the top of the Green Monster. They added some seats to the roof of the upper deck. They added (I think) another section of upper deck just past the end of the grandstand in right. And, to me the most surprising: they seem to have talked the city into letting them more or less take over Yawkey Way on game day. Turnstiles are set up in the middle of the street, and once you’re past them, you’re in the park. Towards the back of the outfield grandstands, it appears that they’ve actually moved the exterior walls of the park out onto what would have been the sidewalk, allowing the Sox to open up what had formerly been a cramped concourse under the stands. They’ve used the space to make navigating the park easier and to put up more of the things the contemporary fan is said to want: food stands, urinals, and more food stands. It’s a successful alteration, one that I think I wouldn’t even have noticed had I not been there on a non-game-day tour in 1993.

3) If I didn’t know that Paul Harvey is a Midwesterner, I would have thought he was working as the Red Sox public address announcer last night. The announcer had Harvey’s voice, inflections, tone, and cadences. Jim and I both expected him to end his announcements with “Good day.” Regardless, he was without a doubt the best PA announcer we’ve heard on the trip. Late in the game, with the crowd absolutely ecstatic singing along to “Sweet Caroline” between innings, he began to announce a pitching change for the Tigers. Noticing that the crowd was still shouting “Bump-ba-dah,” he paused, let the last notes of the song pass, and completed his announcement.

4) The guys behind us, four early twenty-somethings down from New York for their first Fenway game, were the sort of drunkies who tend to bug me a lot at Wrigley, in part because they’re always up and down and milling around. But these guys just didn’t bug me that much. They were loud, but a lot of their talk was about the game, and much of the time, when it was off-topic, it was fairly entertaining. Like when one guy was talking about Emeril, and another guy had never heard of Emeril, and the first guy spent ten minutes explaining who Emeril is, complete with a lot of: “You know–Bam! Bam! That guy–Bam!”

5) I do have one suggestion for PA operators at stadiums nationwide: just because a band records a song about your team/ballpark, you shouldn’t play it unless it also doesn’t suck. The only dissonant note in the whole night was the four minutes, pre-game, we had to spend listening to a terrible country (Country? In New England? Why?) song called “Having a Ball at Fenway.” It sucked more than the Blue Jays song; the only reason it wasn’t worse overall was that it wasn’t like spreading throw-up all over the seventh-inning stretch with a butter knife the way the Blue Jays song was.

That song aside, though, the organist and PA people were solid. The organist began the game with “Selections from Jim’s iPod,” which began with “Walk Away Renee” and went on to “Eight Days a Week” and “After the Gold Rush,” among others. Later, I–who usually am not excited all that much by stadium crowd singalongs–got a big kick out of hearing the crowd sing along to “Summer Wind,” then go absolutely brains-melting crazy over “Sweet Caroline.” It’s as big as “Hey Ya!”

It was odd for me to see Red Sox fans–who generally appear to be some of the most attentive fans in baseball–doing the wave and bouncing beach balls.

6) Everyone knows that the Red Sox are Yankee-obsessed. But Jesus, people. “Yankees suck!” chants cropped up without provocation, and anti-Yankee t-shirts were selling nearly as well as Johnny Damon shirts. It’s like the slacker kid in high school constantly writing mean things about the cool kids in his notebook. Sure, I’ve got sympathy, but at the end of the day, he keeps doing it, and he’s just using up space in his notebook he could be using to transcribe Violent Femmes lyrics.

7) The Red Sox scoreboard advertises a new service: if a fan feels his enjoyment of the game is being hindered by, say, drunk and rowdy fans nearby, he can, rather than wait for an usher to show up, call the security hotline on his phone. Not that I’m a fan of using the phone at games, but given that Wrigley Field ushers never seem to be around when drunks begin chucking peanuts at everyone in sight, I could imagine being able to phone security might be helpful. The trick would be avoiding getting a beer dumped on your head while you phoned.

8) And Johnny Damon got a couple of hits, stole a base, scored a run, made a couple of catches. And the Mike Timlin made another great appearance out of the Sox bullpen. And the Sox won, running me and Jim to 6-0 on the trip.

Toronto pictures

Parking ticket from our hotel, once we found the parking entrance…

Pro-Red Sox signs in the windows of the Skydome Hotel…

Ace the Blue Jay leading the Jays cheerleaders…

Levi noticed that this isn’t a foul pole, it’s foul netting. Also, in the background, you can see some of the Skydome’s neon…

Johnny Damon at the plate…

Orlando Hudson alertly pointing out Johnny Damon on second base…

Yes, there are other people in the world with Devil Rays caps, and one of them sat in front of Jim…

The final line…

A Change of Sox

Toronto feels far more like London that I would have expected. When I was here two years ago for a conference, I didn’t notice that because I didn’t get out of the immediate downtown area much. We made it into town early enough yesterday, though, for me and Jim to wander around a bit through what seemed to be kind of the Belmont area of Toronto. The businesses all keep their doors open, like in London, and the crowd–young, stylish, multi-ethnic–feels much more international than a similar crowd in, say, Chicago, would. The weather was beautiful, as it was on my previous trip, leading me to suspect that perhaps the weather is always great in Canada, but is painted otherwise by Canadians in order to keep Yankee fans from retiring there en masse. When I went for a short run this morning, I noticed another similarity to London: it’s hard to run on the sidewalks in Toronto because there are too many pedestrians. I guess it was good practice for the slow-runner-dodging required in the marathon–although this was like the marathon would be if, say, everybody but me decided to walk the race, except for a couple of people on bicycles.

But on to the game: Red Sox Nation descended on Skydome in force last night. I suppose we shouldn’t have been surprised–the combination of Fenway’s astronomical prices and limited seating must make an eight-hour drive to Toronto seem reasonable. So when Jim and I reached the ballpark, delivered by the TTC subway, there were a couple thousand Sox fans waiting outside the gates. Various psychologists and counselors were making a fortune wandering the line and taking appointments from long-suffering Sox fans. Every once in a while, a Blue Jays fan would wander by, seeming out of place. The atmosphere wasn’t quite as overwhelmingly Sox-positive as the pro-Cubs crowd at Milwaukee creates, but I have no doubt the audience was more than half Sox fans.

From the outside, Skydome looks less like a ballpark than a convention center or hotel or parking garage, its utterly nondescript concrete exterior looking out of place topped by the retractable roof, which was rolled back for the game last night. Inside, the décor—concrete, neon, pastel railings, futuristic logos on the food stands–reminded us a bit of EPCOT Center, which I posit is the most-quickly out-of-date design in the history of the universe. The only way Skydome could have seemed more mid-80s would have been if the ushers had been decked out in Members Only windbreakers.

Our seats, way down the right-field line, 21 rows up, are seats that are pushed back out of service when Toronto’s Argonauts play arena football, which I hear resembles hockey or curling or something. Remembering the worshipful articles about the glories of Skydome that appeared in every U.S. newspaper when the Jays were good in the early 90s, I went in search of interesting vegetarian food, and I found some. There was sushi stand, advertising sushi “Made while you wait.” In Canada, “Made while you wait,” must mean, “Taken from a stack of containers of pre-made vegetarian sushi while you wait.” It wasn’t the best sushi I’ve ever had, but it was, hands-down, the best sushi I’ve ever had at a ballpark. I followed it up with a vegetarian burger, which, like most of its ilk, was predictably bland. Jim had pizza and a bag of popcorn so large that the usher made him go buy it a ticket.

From the start of the game, the Sox fans dominated the proceedings with their cheering. Even the many children seemed to pay attention to the game. Tim Wakefield threw his “balle de papillon” past several Blue Jays early on, although one pitch which failed to knuckle—making it a 120-kilometre-per-hour fastball—was deposited by Orlando Hudson in the right-field seats. But an inning later, Doug Mirabelli knocked a “balle de c’est la vie” from Miguel Batista into the second deck in left to give the Red Sox a 3-2 lead. Chants of “Let’s go Red Sox!” swept the park. The game remained close, with Tim Wakefield, hoping to keep the crowd in the game, managed to load the bases with no one out in the 6th, forcing a reliever, former Blue Jay Mike Timlin–who wears a camouflage t-shirt under his jersey–to strike out the next two Blue Jays and get a groundout to preserve the lead.

When the seventh-inning stretch rolled around, the mostly-annoying P.A. announcer—who seemed to take his vocal stylings and enthusiasm from former “Double Dare” host Marc Summers—shouted to the assembled, “It’s seventh-inning stretch time, and you all know what that means!” Fool that I am, I thought I did. Instead of one of the two acceptable songs for this moment (I allow “Roll out the Barrel”), the Jays began playing some hideous song that mixed loud guitars and processed drums and banal lyrics about the Jays, the Skydome, the baseball, and how we’re all going to enjoy a day at the ballgame. It even referred to “the umpire’s call” as an element we might have been looking forward to, which I suppose we might, in the same sense in which we might look forward to hearing that our cancer is benign. It was a nasty little song–but I was given pause when I looked around and saw that the audience was kind of into it. They were making some kind of lazy gestures that were being encouraged by the Jays’ cheerleaders (yes, that’s another abomination that we won’t discuss) atop the dugouts. Maybe I was wrong? Maybe this was a good song, beloved by Jays fans? But then I remembered that half the audience were Red Sox fans, and we all know that Red Sox fans prefer pain and suffering to pleasure and happiness. They probably play the long version of “Feels So Good” at Fenway in the seventh. “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” was played following “Sucky Jays Baseball Song” so I guess no permanent harm was done. But the whole thing did nothing to lessen my feeling of being stuck back in the 1988-1991 period, a dark era if ever there was one.
The game was the longest we’ve seen on the trip so far, but it stayed close–5-4 Sox–to the end, so we didn’t mind. And, unlike the Sox fans who left–rushing back to their hotels to catch the latest medal count update?–in the 8th, we didn’t have anywhere we needed to be. When Keith Foulke struck out Eric Hinske to deliver the W for the Sox, a rousing cheer went up from the Hub fans, and, for one night at least, all was well in Red Sox Nation—though the situation among the Sox fans still didn’t feel quite healthy. After all, midway through the game, apropos of nothing, a chant of “Yankees suck!” made the rounds. Obsession is an ugly thing, as are festering inferiority complexes.

Oh, and Johnny Damon? He played a solid centre field, though one ball went over his head. Walk, groundout, single (complete with a stolen base and an advancement to third on a throwing error), strikeout. Sadly for everyone involved, neither his helmet or his cap ever left his head. If I assume that that’s Bud Selig’s fault (Maybe Selig ordered Damon to get some toques that fit?), is that a sign that my Selig hatred is becoming unhealthy?

Oh, well, on to Montreal! Oui, Monsieur!

Original comments…

thatbob: I was going to say that Marc Summers might be Canadian, but a little research shows that he’s a Hoosier. Still, there’s no reason the announcer couldn’t have been Marc Summers. What else is he doing?

Speaking of parallel universe song choices, did you sing along with “O! Canada! before the game at the top of your lungs? That’s *my* favorite thing about Blue Jays games. You have no idea how loudly I can sing “O! Canada!” No idea.

stacey: 1. marc summers is hosting a show on the food network. it only occasionally involves slime.

2. the version of “o, canada!” i hear most often is the hidden track on the end of cub’s “mauler” – and the words go, “o, canada! what’s wrong with you?” this is problematic for singing along at the ballpark.