Skip to main content

Take me out to the ball park

By



I didn't follow baseball very closely this year, so it was a bit of a surprise to see three AL teams all crack 100 wins.  It is pretty amazing when one team breaks the century mark.  Houston, New York and Minnesota had great seasons.  Hard to say who will emerge as the AL champion.  On the NL side, Los Angeles nearly matched Houston's incredible 106 wins.

A big season doesn't necessarily translate into a World Series.  I found that out many years ago when the Seattle Mariners posted a staggering 116 wins only to lose to the Yankees in five games in the AL championship series.  The Yankees had won only 95 games during the regular season.  I keep waiting for the Mariners to return to form but after 18 long seasons I have pretty much given up hope.  It seems that magical season took all the air out of their sails.  The Mariners only won 67 games this year after getting off to a hot start.

You really have to be a fan to follow a team through all 162 games.  I've caught a few games over the years. You could buy a cheap seat for about 6 bucks back then.  One time I found myself sitting between two ardent Red Sox fans in Fenway Park.  Boston was about as hapless in the 80s as the Mariners are now, but this old man and young woman knew the stat lines for all the players and were shooting them back and forth across my bow, until I offered the woman my seat, so that they could better compare notes.  The game is a religion for some.  I used to be this way about football when I was a teenager, but in time I developed other interests.

The game is much better to watch in person than it is on television.  You have to have a view of the field to see all the different alignments a team makes for each batter and each situation.  Television focuses mostly on the duel between the pitcher and the hitter.  Still, it is a long slog and if you aren't versed on the game it can be quite boring.

You underestimate the athleticism of these players until you see one of those incredible catches by a short stop and throw to first base, or one of those leaping catches at the wall to save a home run.  I once tried to take a pitch at 90 miles an hour from a machine.  It wasn't even a blur.  I didn't see the ball at all.  Imagine facing Nolan Ryan, whose fast balls were clocked at over 100 miles an hour.

Baseball is a strange and mysterious sport.  It requires a devotion not like any other sport, as you prepare yourself for key moments when you have to deliver or shut up.  The concentration level is intense.  One momentary lapse and the whole season is lost as Bill Buckner found out in the 1986 World Series.  A moment he was never able to live down.

It's a bit frustrating to see the Astros vying for another World Series title, as I wonder why the Mariners could never put together a championship season given all the great players that have come through Seattle.  Probably their best chance was in the 90s when they had Junior, A-Rod and Big Unit on the team.  Seeing Pete Alonso break the rookie home run record made me think of a young Ken Griffey, Jr. pounding balls into the outer bleachers of the Kingdome.

The city invested heavily in a new stadium in the late 90s, only to see the Mariners come up short of an NL title, let alone a World Series.  Eventually Rodriguez and Johnson would win titles at New York and Arizona.  Anyway, here's to the Astros.  May good fortune smile on them again.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order

By
A quarter of a century, however, is time enough to dispel some of the myths that have accumulated around the crisis of the early Thirties and the emergence of the New Deal. There is, for example, the myth that world conditions rather than domestic errors and extravagances were entirely responsible for the depression. There is the myth that the depression was already over, as a consequence of the ministrations of the Hoover Administration, and that it was the loss of confidence resulting from the election of Roosevelt that gave it new life. There is the myth that the roots of what was good in the New Deal were in the Hoover Administration - that Hoover had actually inaugurated the era of government responsibility for the health of the economy and the society. There is the contrasting myth (for myths do not require inner consistency) that the New Deal was alien in origins and in philosophy; that - as Mr. Hoover put it - its philosophy was "the same philosophy of government which...
170 comments
Read more