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 Tuesday, November 03, 2009
A World Series with everything and then some ...
Posted by T.S.
I know it’s the first week of November, but there’s a part of me that doesn’t really want this World Series to end. Even with two teams involved that traditionally would pose rooting dilemmas for me because of my lifelong affiliation with the New York Mets, I gotta admit this one has been a doozy.
Obviously, that’s not particularly insightful, since I imagine that it’s a fairly widely held view. And I imagine that the television ratings have been strong as well.
But what I like best about it is that seems like so many classic story lines: kick-ass pitching, a red-hot hitter (think five home runs), a smidgen of controversy with a string of umpiring snafus, the usual flubs from the assembled throng because of the smothering media coverage, a heads-up play on the base paths from Johnny Damon that somehow has not taken place in the previous 100-plus World Series, and even a good old-fashioned slugger mired in a World Series calibre batting slump.
I don’t know if the parish priests had the good folks in the Diocese of Philadelphia praying for Ryan Howard’s resurrection as they did 57 years ago in Brooklyn for Gil Hodges, but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me.
As I write this on the travel day back to Yankee Stadium, I can’t help but assume that Mr. Chase Utley is not likely to see very many decent pitches for the remainder of this World Series, but then I am kind of surprised that he’s been pitched to as much as he has anyway. I think I’d move Howard down the batting order a tad and put Jason Werth behind him for a bit more protection. I don’t typically offer advice to MLB managers, but I’ll make an exception for the Phillies.
I also got a chuckle out of the news that the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a three-quarter-page advertisement for Macy’s featuring the Phillies logo, the Commissioner’s Trophy and the phrase “Back To Back World Series Champions.”
The Yankees held a commanding but presumably not insurmountable 3-1 lead on the day the ad was printed in the paper.
This is not precisely the same thing as a magazine creating a cover image of Tom Brady and a 19-0 blurb a couple of years ago, but there are similarities.
Tuesday, November 03, 2009 3:42:35 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00) 
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Thursday, October 29, 2009
A sordid saga of supposedly sex for Series tix ...
Posted by T.S.
I just hate it when blog fodder turns up that’s so exquisitely preposterous that you just want to have fun with it, and then you quickly realize that it’s way too serious a matter to simply giggle about it. Such is the case of the Philadelphia housewife charged by an undercover police officer with offering sex in exchange for World Series tickets.
Of course, my natural tendency is to laugh and – as a Mets fan in reasonably good standing – make tacky jokes about the grotesquely one-sided quality of a transaction that ostensibly would involve trading something so sacred and beautiful (sex) for an opportunity to take part in a truly squalid and tawdry spectacle (the Phillies in the World Series). If you’re a Phillies fan, go ahead and switch the items in parenthesis around – it works either way.
With the softball jokes taken care of, I offer this bit of background from the Associated Press (in italics), in case you missed it.
“I didn’t do anything wrong, so I’m not embarrassed about my actions. I’m embarrassed about how I was arrested,” Susan Finkelstein told The Associated Press a day after meeting at a suburban bar with an undercover police officer responding to an ad on Craigslist.
Finkelstein’s lawyer said his client is merely “a nice lady overcome with Phillies Fever.”
She might have dropped double entendres in her Craigslist ad but never explicitly offered sex, her lawyer William J. Brennan said.
The 43-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate student wanted to take her husband to a game between her beloved Philadelphia Phillies and the New York Yankees. The self-described “buxom blonde” said she was simply trying to score tickets online, as she had in the past.
Over a few beers at a suburban bar, she told a police officer she needed two tickets, one for herself and one for her husband. No price had been discussed, and Finkelstein and her lawyer stopped short of recounting specifics of what was said before several officers sitting at a nearby table came to arrest her.
“I was hoping to get cheap tickets,” she said, “maybe meet someone, and talk, and bat my eyelashes and maybe get some tickets.”
Finkelstein faces a preliminary hearing in Bucks County on Dec. 3. On the bright side, she’s been offered a pair of tickets to a weekend game in Philadelphia, courtesy of a radio station and car dealer.
I am sure the media will be all over this one, but I can’t shake the aggravation that somebody charged with allocating public resources for law enforcement would have made a decision to dispatch undercover officers to a suburban Bucks County tavern to engage with this woman.
Bucks County ain’t exactly the slums, but if they are so starved for suitable assignments for their officers that they get reduced to this then I would suggest the funds could be better directed elsewhere.
Go Phillies!
Thursday, October 29, 2009 7:35:06 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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Wednesday, October 28, 2009
If you are on the NYS Thruway on Saturday, pull over ...
Posted by T.S.
Now I realize that it’s pretty much a long shot that anybody could be reading my blog while traveling on the New York State Thruway (the Garden State Parkway, sure, but not the Thurway), but the headline is simply meant as a teaser.
But I can tell you that if I were within hooting and hollering distance of Cooperstown, N.Y., I would be sorely tempted to take my own advice. The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum will host the 13th annual World Series Gala at 7 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 31 in Cooperstown. This family event will feature a live broadcast of Game 3 of the World Series between the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Phillies, which will be played in the Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park and begin at 7:57 p.m.
The fun-filled evening will feature refreshments, trivia, raffles, prizes and more as fans watch the game from the Hall of Fame on the big screen in the Grandstand Theater. The World Series Gala is made possible by the generous support of New York Central Mutual Insurance Company. A ticket is required for this event and costs $10 for adults and $5 for children under 12 by calling the Membership department at (607) 547-0397.
Now just so I don’t get accused of plagiarism, those last two paragraphs are pretty much verbatim from the Hall of Fame press release, but this part isn’t. If you never been to the Grandstand Theater at the Hall of Fame, you’re missing a real treat, and I can’t even imagine how cool it would be to watch a World Series Game there.
When I was a young man I pretty much thought you couldn’t properly watch a baseball game without a half dozen or so Rheingolds or Ballantines, but I’ve managed to get past that particular requirement. I presume beer is not available in that setting (I checked and it isn't), but I can assure you it wouldn’t matter a bit.
Besides, it would make the drive along Route 28 or Route 80 just that much easier after the game, though I’d recommend staying overnight in Cooperstown anyway.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009 2:36:14 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Cards new hitting coach should get a break from HOF voters, too ...
Posted by T.S.
I was tickled to hear that Mark McGwire was coming back to MLB as a hitting coach for the Cardinals. From everything I’ve ever read or heard about him, he was/is an excellent student of the game and would have seemed a natural choice as a hitting coach.
Nearly a decade ago – McGwire was still playing – I was interviewing several friends of the great slugger, and you couldn’t help but come away from the experience impressed by literally every word you heard uttered about him.
I won’t pretend that all parties were completely unbiased, but the depth and unabashed sincerity about their comments made it clear that McGwire was not your typical millionaire professional athlete.
If we concede that his 2005 testimony in front of a cabal of grandstanding politicians was perhaps a bit ham-handed, it can also be stipulated that much has changed in the steroid landscape since then. When I was kid it was never even remotely acceptable to invoke the “everybody’s doing it” defense with my mother, but it may just have to suffice in our ongoing debate over the tainted era of, say, the late 1980s to 2003 or so.
It will interesting over the coming days to see what tack McGwire takes in dealing with the media behemoth that now confronts him. One suspects that the only reasonable strategy would be to offer some admission in an attempt to deflect a never-ending stream of questions, and then politely insist that the topic needs no additional rehashing.
Even that much of a concession I wouldn’t have typically endorsed because there was no testing when he was playing, but given all that has come out over the past four or five years, “taking the fifth,” – figuratively speaking – doesn’t seem feasible. And as much as it pains me to do so, I have to admit that Jose Canseco’s batting average in outing his doping colleagues has been way higher than anything he ever recorded on the field.
But saying Canseco’s been right quite consistently is not the same thing as saying he was right in what he did. If you concede that McGwire has already paid an extremely high price in terms of the public’s perception of his career, you can’t help but ponder that Jose may be facing an even more onerous tally for being the guy doing so much finger pointing.
I am convinced that McGwire is going to get a second chance with first the public at large and, over time, with the BBWAA. Canseco, it seems, is never likely to be forgiven by anybody – not so much for his steroid antics, but for all the squealing on buddies. I’ll just betcha that’s the part that keeps him from getting a good night’s sleep.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009 2:18:13 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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Monday, October 26, 2009
Lets Go Mets; Swoboda called on Saturday ...
Posted by T.S.
Working on Saturdays is rarely a treat, but this past one wasn’t too shabby at all, given that right around the middle of the day, I got a phone call from one of the true Flushing Meadows giants (Mets, really) of my youth. Ron Swoboda (shown at right in a photo from atop the Empire State Building – Ron Berg photo) , one of the darlings of the franchise from the mid-1960s at Shea Stadium, was on the line, calling from his car as he headed home to New Orleans where he’s lived for the past 15 years.
The occasion for this was fairly straightforward: Swoboda’s stunning catch of a Brooks Robinson line drive from the 1969 World Series is being commemorated in a 40th anniversary limited-edition photo that has been signed by both players.
www.nydailynews.com/catch <http://www.nydailynews.com/catch
I’ll have more on that in a later blog after I’ve written up the notes from the interview, but I wanted to take note of the special nature of Ron Swoboda’s relationship with Mets fans in the 1960s. A lifetime .242 hitter with 73 home runs in a nine-year career with the Mets, Expos and Yankees (mostly Mets), his place in Flushing folklore (try saying that quickly three times) is wildly disproportionate to his numbers. And that’s why it was a thrill to get the phone call.
As a teenager who would take in 15-20 Mets games a year from 1965-68, I was as taken with the young slugger just as much as the rest of the faithful. Swoboda arrived in 1965, with the Mets legendary mediocrity already established, duly exploited and on the verge of become tiresome.
Trust me, you had to be at Shea in those days to feel the excitement as the denizens of an almost brand-new stadium embraced a 21-year-old rookie who captured their hearts virtually from the first day. He socked 19 home runs and led the team, which obviously helped his popularity, but the affection from the fans really stemmed from something much less tangible than his stats (he hit .228).
Nope, we loved him because he was young, he played hard and seemed like one of the guys from the neighborhood who just happened to have the right stuff to get up to the majors. After three years of watching various old geezers that the Mets had tried to recycle from other National League teams (most prominently the Dodgers and Giants), it was cool – and hopeful – to have some of our own young guys coming up. Even in 1965, with a 10th-place finish by virtue of 112 losses, there were still plenty of NL retreads left on the roster, but there also were some young guys, too, like Ed Kranepool and a scrappy infielder named Ron Hunt. And Swoboda.
The very attributes that we so saluted in Rocky – blue-collar roots, hustle, determination and maybe even an ability to get a bit more out our talent than might be expected – were the same things we might have hoped for ourselves. There was hope for the future, it seemed.
After enduring 343 losses in three years, that was welcome, indeed.
Monday, October 26, 2009 2:55:24 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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Thursday, October 22, 2009
My bad. I ignored our own edict about commentary ...
Posted by T.S.
As readers may recall, after a hiatus of several months we opened up the blog for commentary from the readers, but we added an additional requirement for submissions.
So I pointed out that we would allow comments, but we would insist that a real name and city of residence be included with each entry.
And then I fumbled and allowed comments that didn’t comply with that request. The failure to do so was nothing more than the exigencies of the day-to-day workload, which often meant I simply got stuck in other areas.
But it was a sound idea then and it remains so today. Parts of what follows are verbatim from that earlier blog.
Including a name and address is essentially how letters to the editor have been handled for 100 years or more and I see no reason why the new rules of cyber mayhem should scuttle that basic requirement.
It should be relatively simple: no name and city address, no inclusion in the commentary section. Obviously, someone could simply utilize a pseudonym, but that strikes us as particularly damning because it suggests a near-total absence of willingness to take responsibility for what you write. Commentary received without name and city address will be deleted at our discretion.
So to the best of our ability, we’ll monitor the commentary with that in mind, and also simply to ensure that the observations are appropriate and suitable for inclusion under the umbrella of our website.
That doesn’t mean that the only thing a reader can do is comment in some fashion in reaction to something I’ve blogged about; indeed, we welcome the new ideas and suggestions that this kind of venue can provide. It does mean that we’ll maintain the site in a fair and professional manner with an eye toward open communication that doesn’t meander all the way into the kinds of excesses that define so many pockets of cyberspace.
It truly is – just as letters to the editor are in print publications – an important and well-read addition and complement to conventional online media offerings.
– T.S. O’Connell
Iola, Wis.
Thursday, October 22, 2009 2:03:11 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Check your drivers license to see who you are ...
Posted by T.S.
I ended up on a cool website the other day for Hourglass Antiques & Collectibles (www.tias.com), which along with zillions of antiques, had about a dozen original pen-and-ink and charcoal drawings of legendary sports figures, all of them autographed.
Now, just by my nature I tend to be more impressed with nice art than I am with autographs, but this had both, plus one other bit of whimsy that I kind of liked. More on that later.
Several baseball Hall of Famers are included in the mix, including Jimmie Foxx, Pie Traynor (both shown here) and Honus Wagner, among others. There’s much to like about the drawings, not the least of which is the style that was so identifiable to the 1930s when they were produced (and signed).
The catalog description notes that the drawings were done by Arthur Haas, a commercial artist and sports fan living in New York City, who took his drawings to the various games to get them signed in person. And now we get to the part that caught my fancy.
According to the catalog description, “The autograph has not and will not be ‘certified.’ This would require my sending it away so it can be looked over with a loupe, only to be told what I already know – that it is authentic.” The artist is the father of Evelyn Mancino of Hourglass Antigues, who wrote the item description.
Bravo! I am not against third-party authentication and can easily see all that it has brought to the modern marketplace, but I am a really big fan of common sense and can’t help but applaud every time it manages to push its humble little noggin’ up and out of the muck that is 21st century America.
Insisting that something like that be “certified” would be no sillier than my dragging myself out of bed tomorrow morning and requiring two forms of identification – one being preferably a driver’s license – to be certain that I am in fact whom I claim to be.
And in fairness to Hourglass Antiques & Collectibles, the catalog description does note that the buyer will have two weeks to have the autograph certified, if they so desire.
And don’t spank me about this tiny bit of whimsy. I understand that third-party authentication might still be useful here as the artwork moves away from its original ownership.
I just got a kick out of somebody saying the autograph has not and will not be certified. It’s my mavericky side.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009 3:30:03 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Ruth and Cobb overshadowed by Kim Novak ...
Posted by T.S.
When I was a kid growing up, nobody I knew had any more interest in baseball history than I did, but if you had offered me an opportunity to meet an aging Ty Cobb or a most thoroughly in her prime Kim Novak, I would have opted for the latter and never looked back (at Ty, that is).
Murray Garrett, the subject of my column this week in Sports Collectors Digest, got to meet both of them and a whole lot more folks in an almost mythical career as a celebrity photographer in Hollywood. Quite properly disdainful of the modern uber-aggressive paparazzi, Garrett traveled in Hollywood’s elite circles that included the likes of Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope, to name a few of his subjects in a career that spanned from 1946-73.
I had a ball interviewing the 84-year-old Garrett a couple of weeks ago, initially tipped off about three fascinating photos of Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb that Garrett took when he was a teenager. But when you talk to the genial California resident, it’s hard not to focus (pardon the lame pun) on his Hollywood photography, which is understandable enough, since it was that work that gave life to a pair of elegant coffee-table books and spectacular prints that he offers on his website (www.murraygarrett.com).
I enjoyed the interview as much as any I’ve done in more than 30 years in the newspaper and magazine business, and I was particularly tickled when he talked about Hall of Famer Bob Lemon, whom he talked about as one of his closest friends. Garrett reminisced about being Lemon’s designated driver, though of course he didn’t use that term.
I had understood his affection for the great pitcher and manager, who died nearly 10 years ago, since I had done a lengthy interview with Lemon several years before his passing. For the life of me, I can’t remember where it took place – what city, that is – though I do recall it was at a card show on the East Coast, maybe in New York somewhere.
Lemon had the same easy mannerisms – and bulbous red nose – that I had known from a lifetime of talking with guys who loved to tell a good story and did so often ... and virtually always under the influence. Lemon was one of the nicest guys I ever interviewed. And it didn't hurt that he reminded me of my dad, bulbous red nose and all.
Still, I would have traded that interview for a chance to meet Kim Novak.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009 4:20:03 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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Thursday, October 15, 2009
Card companies begin jousting with giveaways ...
Posted by T.S.
I’ve got a feeling that a year from now when we look back at the year 2010 in the world of modern baseball card collecting, things are going to look a lot different than they do right now. If I had much of a clue of what the landscape would look like, I guess I’d probably be in a different line of work. Like handicapping the ponies maybe.
The paradigm (I’ve always wanted to use that word) is going to be something far different than what we’ve been used to. The jockeying between Topps and Upper Deck for 2010 has begun in earnest already, with a couple of neat contests planned that figure to raise the collecting profile beyond the traditional outlets.
Upper Deck and MLBPA have teamed up for a revival of the National Packtime promotion that was popular several years ago, with a broad sampling promotion for March 6, 2010, being done through Upper Deck’s network of baseball card specialty shops.
Details are a bit sketchier from archrival Topps about plans to give away 1 million cards from 1952 to present, with a top prize of a complete 1952 Topps set. In this one collectors will find a code card in packs of Series 1 and Series 2 Topps Baseball next year and will be directed to a Topps website that will reveal what card they have won.
That kind of arrangement handily addresses the problem of inserting oversized 1952-56 Topps cards into standard-size modern packs, but more importantly provides Topps with an imposing way of rounding up a vast armada of e-mail addresses.
This latter promotion is reminiscent of the famous sweepstakes Topps did nearly 20 years ago to celebrate its 40th anniversary by inserting all of their cards into packs and then offering a sweepstakes where one collector – Jack Glenn of New York City – one the top prize of every Topps set produced up to that point.
With the jury still out on precisely how Upper Deck is going to respond to the new ground rules of Topps’ exclusive with MLB, it’s pretty clear that there’s going to be a lot of activity from both coasts in adjusting to our brave new world.
With apologies to Bette Davis, “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”
Thursday, October 15, 2009 5:14:41 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Hoping the Olympics do not get politicized ...
Posted by T.S.
I’ve tried for many years to resist the siren call to nationalistic hysteria when it comes to the Olympics, preferring instead to focus on the achievements of the athletes as opposed to whichever flag hey might be toting, but my parochial leanings do bubble up sometimes when the International Olympic Committee gets into the act.
With that backdrop, I found it more than a little disheartening a couple of weeks ago when Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Games received such a decidedly unenthusiastic response from that august body – go ahead and read a bit of sarcasm into that – and later from people in this country who roundly cheered at the news of the early demise of the Chicago bid.
I can promise you that the people (even political commentators, who are technically people, too) who so gleefully applauded the IOC’s officious dismissal of Chicago probably don’t know too much about the inner workings of that group. If you think the denizens inside the Beltway have the inside track on hypocrisy, deceit, pomposity and back biting, meet their European mentors who have refined all of that to an art form. You couldn’t even fantasize about making Hypocrisy an actual Olympic event, since the very best practitioners wouldn’t be able to compete because of a conflict of interest.
But what really frosted my grommet about all of this was the simple idea of Americans cheering at something so starkly disappointing to many of their fellow citizens. I fully understand that America is not the center of the universe and that from a global view it’s presumably exciting that the amateur athletics spectacle will be going to South America for the first time. That’s fine.
But I can’t ever recall another IOC vote in my lifetime where people cheered about an American city coming up short in a bid vote. Even if you are opposed the idea of a Windy City Olympics on more defensible grounds – like the possibility of staggering cost overruns being saddled on the local populace – that didn’t seem to be what we were witnessing in this case.
Gee, I’d hate to see the Olympics become politicized (Hint: more sarcasm).
Wednesday, October 14, 2009 5:25:50 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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