The Infield Dirt with T.S. O'Connell - Tuesday, November 10, 2009

   I got a chuckle out of a couple of things from the national sports arena over the last several weeks, events seemingly unrelated but in my view at least peripherally connected by one fairly significant element: the all-seeing, relentless video camera.

   In the MLB postseason, the umpires were confronted with what seemed like an inordinate number of botched calls, evincing the usual cavalcade of breast thumping about how video review needs to come to the rescue here or cameras need to be installed behind home plate to handle the balls-and-strikes duties that now seem to be beyond the capabilities of mere mortals. Phooey.

   This is one area where Commandant Selig and I agree completely. He’s against the kind of intrusion into the game of baseball that all the instantaneous camera review has brought to the NFL. And I’m pretty sure that he dismisses out of hand the idiotic notion of having cameras and computers call balls and strikes, as well he should.

   I don’t think baseball needs hardly any tinkering in that area: the bulk of the uproar stems from the enhanced scrutiny that television gives from every possible angle and in mind-numbing slow motion. There seemed to be a lot of balls and strikes missed during the postseason, but I suspect most of that comes from having those graphics installed by the television networks that seemingly show up the umps as borderline clueless.

   I don’t think they are; missed calls have been part of the human element of the game since the beginning, and while aggravating at the moment of occurrence, are probably more palatable than the fundamental alteration of our beloved game that would come from turning the umping duties over to technology.

   And for those of you keeping score at home, I am convinced that the final pitch of Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series was a ball. So sue me.

   The other event that prompted this blog was the soccer player from New Mexico who yanked another gal to the turf by her pony tail. I suspect this will be further examined in a separate entry, but I am convinced that the heightened scrutiny of multiple cameras and the ability to then install the images in cyberspace is a huge part of our outrage. The camera's knack for removing things from context and thus distorting our understanding obviously predates Rodney King from nearly 20 years ago, but the oppressive nature of the all-seeing magic eye is getting more onerous every day.

   OK, and I concede it made me giggle. I'd suspect myself of being a male chauvinist pig if it weren't so retro.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009 3:10:37 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

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Thursday, November 05, 2009

Coping with a distorted view of Yankees dominance ...
Posted by T.S.

   The first five World Series I can remember seeing even snippets of on television featured the New York Yankees squaring off against five different National League teams, none of which were my beloved Milwaukee Braves.

   From 1960-64, the Yankees battled against Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, San Francisco, Los Angeles and St. Louis, and by the time the Cardinals upended the Yankees in Game Seven behind Bob Gibson, I was more than a little ready to see my National League guys tangle with anybody other than the Yankees in the Fall Classic.

   And though I hardly consider myself the center of the universe, I got my wish. For the next three decades, the Yankees would win a total of four more pennants; admittedly, they would engineer a phenomenal streak of four World Series titles in a five-year span starting in 1996, but taken in the aggregate, it’s hardly been oppressive.

   So why does it feel like I’ve spent a lifetime under Bronx Bomber dominance? I just realized it’s because I’ve read so much and spent so much time through our hobby linking with the Yankees’ ridiculous streak of 14 pennants in 16 years (1949-64) that I tend to distort what the impact has actually been.

   A couple of other things I realized: I almost certainly shortchanged the modern Yankees in the Legendary Yankee Stadium book that our company released earlier this year. It wasn’t intentional, but more the result of us having a wealth of cards, memorabilia and stories from the earlier dynasty at our disposal. I did intentionally try to mitigate that a bit by including chapters on Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez, but I am probably still quite vulnerable to the underlying criticism.

   And the final observation: despite the fact that enough small-market teams have managed to wiggle their way into the postseason to make crabbing about team payrolls seem kind of reactionary, I can’t shake the idea that having teams with $200-million payrolls playing teams with half or even less than that total is not a good idea.

   Even if the vagaries of sport conspire to blunt the effect of those disparate salaries, it still ain’t right. I wouldn’t want to get on a airplane where the crew was paid 50 percent of what their colleagues were getting on a competing airline parked 500 feet away.

   Probably just jitters over a Sunday afternoon flight in my future.

Thursday, November 05, 2009 4:56:57 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

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Wednesday, November 04, 2009

An homage to the King of the Wild Frontier ...
Posted by T.S.

   I don’t typically interact with a lot of teenagers – usually limiting my exchanges to providing odd payment amounts at fast food restaurants in a kind of sadistic desire to watch their heads explode as they try to do math calculations in their heads – but I did run into one the other day and the subject of Davy Crockett came up.

   I can’t remember why Crockett’s name came up, but I do recall that I was absolutely stunned the teen in question had no recollection at all who he was. Mentioning the Alamo didn’t help: there was no recollection of that, either, and when I tried to describe it he looked at me as though I was trying to pull a fast one on him.

   This is not some screed about the quality of public education, but merely an acknowledgment of the usefulness of companies like Topps and Upper Deck mixing historical figures into some of the card offerings the way they have in recent years. Apparently, it’s much needed.

   And it’s also a fairly transparent way of recounting the details of the apex of my amateur musical career – the modifier is wasted, since there has been no professional version – which took place nearly 55 years ago.

   The youngster with the coonskin cap and the bow and arrow, as legend would have it in the O’Connell Family archives, allegedly sang the Ballad of Davy Crockett at a Madison, Wis., nightclub called “Smokey’s,” not far from the University of Wisconsin campus.

   While the number of verses changes in the annual retelling, my 85-year-old mother has always insisted that the number was in double digits, and always intended to suggest that all possible verses were duly memorized and included in the rendition.

   In researching for this blog entry, I was stunned to find out that there are actually 21 verses, which casts a bit of doubt over my mother’s power of recollection. For a guy who can’t remember what he had for lunch yesterday, that seems like an awful lot of memorization, though the abuses that I was to submit my limited number of brain cells to certainly hadn’t been a factor at age 5.

   But mostly I just can’t believe that patrons in a restaurant/night club could sit there and listen to that much for that long. Alcohol can dull the senses, for sure, but that seems a bit extreme.

Wednesday, November 04, 2009 3:53:09 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

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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.

Swoboda Empire State .jpg

   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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