Salon.com > Baseball

Alabama baseball team to hold gun raffle

Fri, 28 Jun 2013 21:13:00 +0000

A few lucky fans of the Huntsville (Ala.) Stars, a minor league baseball team affiliated with the Milwaukee Brewers, could win guns during an upcoming "2nd Amendment Night." As reported by AL.com:

Stars general manager Buck Rogers said today there will be no guns given away at the game, only the raffle tickets redeemable at Larry's Pistol and Pawn. Guns are prohibited at all Huntsville Stars games.

Rogers said several organizations routinely raffle off guns.

"And since everybody's buying guns hand over fist and Larry's Pistol and Pawn wants to get involved in some sponsorships and they had a line out there a mile long (to buy guns)," Rogers said. "We're having a Second Amendment night to talk about things anyway. It's an educational night. No guns coming to the game. Nobody is giving away guns."

Rogers said the timing of the promotion -- the day before Independence Day -- is the ideal time to hold a Second Amendment celebration.

After some in the media decried a gun giveaway, the team clarified the nature of the promotion:

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Mainstream America paid in peanuts and cracker jacks

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 18:07:00 +0000

It was in The San Francisco Examiner on June 3, 1888, 125 years ago this month, that there first appeared a poem titled, “Casey at the Bat, a Ballad of the Republic.” In the decades since, “Casey” has become the classic ode to baseball as the all-American pastime; its stanzas once memorized by school kids, its lines recited and recorded by everyone from James Earl Jones to Garrison Keillor. So poignant and evocative is its tale that Albert Goodwill Spalding, 19th century professional pitcher, team owner, and co-founder of the sporting goods company that still bears his name, wrote, “Love has its sonnets galore. War has its epics in heroic verse. Tragedy its somber story in measured lines. Baseball has ‘Casey at the Bat.’”

The melancholy account of the vainglorious power hitter Casey stepping to the plate, his Mudville team down 4-2 at the bottom of the ninth with two men on base and two outs, epitomizes baseball as the game that will break your heart, especially in its immortal final lines:

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout,
But there is no joy in Mudville — mighty Casey has struck out.

Baseball’s war on drugs going about as well as government’s

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 12:51:00 +0000

Major League Baseball is going to suspend all its players forever, according to a blockbuster report by ESPN. Or, at least, that is the slightly exaggerated version of the story of how MLB decided to grant a scummy "anti-aging clinic" operator immunity from civil action in exchange for an excuse to suspend 20 current players for, in some cases, 100 games.

Tony Bosch, the clinic's founder and a man for whom there aren't enough synonyms for "shady," is ruined and broke. There's not much doubt that he was selling a great deal of banned substances to a large number of professional athletes. What's unclear is whether the sworn testimony of a longtime liar -- a make-believe doctor who kept handwritten notes detailing his illegal activities for some reason -- is enough to actually suspend 20 players over. Something that's very clear is that MLB approached the investigation, built around a lawsuit against someone the league knew couldn't afford to defend himself against an army of well-paid attorneys, as if it were an arm of the federal government. This, for example, sounds more like an FBI sting than a civil action:

Not all San Francisco Giants workers basking in victory

Tue, 28 May 2013 14:00:00 +0000

Patricia Ramirez has been working concessions for the reigning world champions of baseball, the San Francisco Giants, for 13 years. She takes a bus 30 minutes from her home in Oakland and then walks five blocks to AT&T park, where she works as a culinary aid in the fourth-floor kitchen. She says her favorite part of the job is, “when I am able to give [the fans] an amazing experience. Giving them good service, great hospitality because they give it back.”

While she is able to work almost year-round at the park, she says she is “the exception, one of the few.” Most concession workers are seasonal and while their hourly wages may be some of the highest in the country, the average pay is $11,000 a year, below the poverty line. Many of the concession workers live in low-income housing, they can travel up to two hours each direction in order to work an event, and they have multiple jobs to supplement their income. Their job with the Giants, though, gives them the healthcare insurance they otherwise would not have.

Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays: The best rivalry of baseball’s golden age

Mon, 27 May 2013 21:26:00 +0000

Tom Hanks may have thought there was no crying in baseball, but as the summer of 1951 approached, the sport’s two most highly prized rookies were weeping.

Major league pitchers are a community within a community, and word quickly got around that 19-year-old Mickey Mantle had weaknesses. From the right side it was high fastballs, slightly up out of the strike zone, which for some unexplained reason he simply couldn’t lay off. From the left side it was low outside curves or other breaking pitches. Mickey began striking out — in bunches.

Mantle’s shyness had, up to this point, masked a ferocious temper. After striking out six times in a doubleheader in June, he began assaulting water coolers again, a serious enough offense when committed at Yankee Stadium, but downright unacceptable when it occurred in other ballparks around the league. After fanning twice against the St. Louis Browns, Mickey destroyed the cooler in the visitors’ dugout, much to the amusement of Hank Bauer and Yogi Berra, who did not truly understand how frustrated their new phenom was.

Is the knuckleball an optical illusion?

Tue, 14 May 2013 18:14:00 +0000

STANDARD baseball pitch—slider, curveball, fastball—seems to slavishly follow the laws of physics, making it possible to predict where a ball will go and how it will get there. The knuckleball is different. It appears to dip suddenly, dart to one side or the other, or—when you least expect it—to float in straight over the plate. Hitters are left flailing desperately at it. On a six-game streak last season, pitcher R. A. Dickey struck out sixty-three batters and gave up a single unearned run. And yet Dickey, who joined the Blue Jays this season, is the only active knuckler in the major leagues. When he won the National League Cy Young Award in 2012, he was the first knuckleball pitcher ever to do so.

Returning to Chicago three decades later

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 14:00:00 +0000

My previous dispatch from my cross-country road trip driving Miss Sadie to New York left off as I headed to a baseball game – my San Francisco Giants just happened to be in Chicago, and I’d bought great tickets, between the Giants dugout and the bullpen. It turned out to be the perfect place to marvel and kvell and lament and celebrate my life since I left Chicago, not quite 30 momentous years ago.

Chicago isn’t technically along I-80, but I had to make the detour, since my trip west to San Francisco 28 years ago began there. I knew I could stay with my friend Jim Rinnert, who has an amazing house with his partner Brent. Long ago they gave me an invitation to stay with them that wouldn't expire. Jim and Brent are dog people – they always have several adorable, eccentric rescues, and they were excited to meet Sadie. “You’ve always been a dog person – without a dog!” Jim tells me once he sees me and Sadie together. It's true -- I loved Jim's dog Bo when he used to take him to In These Times. The company of a dog compensated for the sometimes delay in paychecks. And Sadie utterly loved Jim and Brent.

Waiting for the gay Jackie Robinson

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 16:00:00 +0000

Whoever the gay equivalent of Jackie Robinson will be – and according to some sources, we may get several of them at the same time – he (or they) is almost certainly already playing professional sports, and may well be an established star. Robinson’s history-making Major League Baseball debut in 1947 was enormously dramatic, of course, but lacked that level of shadowy intrigue: No one wondered whether Stan Musial or Ted Williams might abruptly announce that he’d been black the whole time, like the tormented hero of a Faulkner novel. (Although, given the bizarre history of race in America, who really knows? There were a handful of earlier cases when baseball teams tried to “pass” light-skinned African-American players as Native Americans – and that’s a terrific movie idea if I’ve ever heard one.)

How baseball saved me from Rush Limbaugh

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 18:01:00 +0000

Well, it was another day of my cross-country car journey with my dog, Sadie, with stops to throw the ball. Before I explain how baseball saved me from Rush Limbaugh, first a Sadie update: She misses Boulder, but found nature in this little patch of land behind La Quinta:

She thought this drainage ditch was another creek and made a run for it (I put her back on the leash):

One stop came in lovely Newton, Iowa, the childhood home of Charles Murray – I won’t hold that against Newton -- as well as Maytag headquarters. We had Sunset Park to ourselves in a cold rain:

So, at one point I broke down and listened to Rush. You know, even the paranoid Sean Hannity sounds a little jauntier. Rush actually seems depressed. He was inveighing against Michelle Obama comparing herself to Hadiya Pendleton, the 15-year-old Chicago girl killed in gang violence in January. Obama’s speech was incredibly moving; NPR played long clips of it and she sounded as though she was fighting tears; listening to her, so was I.

Even a Mets fan can be optimistic on Opening Day

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 16:12:00 +0000

It was sunny and clear on Monday for Mets Opening Day, with no noisy planes overhead, so we could hear every bit of the conversations around us. The lulling pitter-patter of “fucks” in row 3 bemused our whole group—not just my father, who was new to Mets baseball, but the veterans of the trip to Flushing. I was there with my old roommate; we used to live in Flushing and walk to games along Roosevelt Avenue, through the carbon monoxide haze above the Whitestone Expressway and past the Iron Triangle's auto repair shops and psychotic guard dogs, restrained from tearing you to pieces by chain-link fences that also allow you to look into their eyes and see the contempt you’ve earned. Getting to the game in this way can be loud and gray and windy and sticky and dirty all at once and altogether disorienting, which is why almost nobody does it. Arriving at the park doesn’t seem like you’ve reached paradise, or that you’re free of any of this filth and misery—these are the Mets we’re talking about, after all. In terms of misery and pride, it’s hard to know where the team ends and the rest of Queens begins, except on Opening Day; then, for three hours, people are happy. On Opening Day, Flushing is a place transformed, all smiles and radiance in a generally fraught place just across the way from where your stolen car’s radials are being hawked at a chop shop.

Opening Day: Spring’s other religious holiday

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 22:13:00 +0000

Of the many names assigned to the Jewish holiday of Passover, one of the best — maybe, most hopeful — is hag h’aviv, “the holiday of spring.” I spent this past week in Cleveland, celebrating the holiday midst evening snow and near-freezing temperatures, thereby necessitating some serious meteorological-temporal-phenomenological leaps to try and ring in the new, but by no means arrived, season. Though the Jewish liturgy and tradition speak to spring, for those of who grew up on the shores of Lake Erie, Passover often played the ironic foil, laughing at our seasonal affect from the depths of biblical eternity.

What always (truly) signified spring was baseball; you knew the weather was going to get better when kids skipped class for opening day’s afternoon first pitch, even if you wore the down parka only a few days before. It is thus fortuitous, and arguably a saving grace, that both Passover and Easter fall during the last week of spring training this year. The furious overanalyzing of the starting rotation, bullpen, and outfield, paired with final calculations of home runs batted into palm tree strewn outfields, can give those of us in the north some solace.

MLB sues Florida clinic for doping its players

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 20:52:00 +0000

MIAMI (AP) — Major League Baseball on Friday sued a now-shuttered South Florida clinic and its operators, accusing them of scheming to provide banned performance-enhancing drugs to players in violation of their contracts.

The lawsuit in Miami-Dade Circuit Court seeks unspecified damages from Coral Gables anti-aging clinic Biogenesis of America and its operator, Anthony Bosch. Several other Bosch associates are named in the lawsuit. A phone message left for a Bosch representative wasn't immediately returned, and associates have previously said Anthony Bosch is out of the country.

MLB contends the clinic's operators solicited players to use banned substances knowing that would violate their contracts, specifically the drug prevention and treatment program that became effective in 2003. That program, part of baseball's collective bargaining agreement with players, includes a list of banned substances, lays out penalties for violations and imposes testing requirements.

Because of the alleged conspiracy, the lawsuit contends MLB has suffered "costs of investigation, loss of goodwill, loss of revenue and profits and injury to its reputation, image, strategic advantage and fan relationships," attorneys Allen Weitzman and Matthew Menchel wrote in the complaint.

I took my dead father to a Red Sox game

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 15:00:00 +0000

I took my dead father to see the Boston Red Sox play a major league baseball game.

I don’t mean that I took my father’s cremains, as they’re known in the parlance of modern undertaking. His cremains are gone. We dumped those in the lake where we always went for vacation when I was a kid. He really liked it out there, and my mother thought he might still, even though he’s no longer a person but rather a few pounds of ash that have the appearance and feel of fresh cat litter.

Well, actually, he was a few pounds of ash. I don’t know what he is now, since we dumped him in the lake. He probably no longer looks and feels like cat litter. I’d imagine that, in keeping with the spirit of scattering someone’s cremains in a body of water, he melded somehow with the lake, broke down further into the constituent parts that, combined, made him corporeal in the first place. Maybe by now he’s been transformed into a bit of aquatic flora, or else gobbled up into the creepy appendage-like mandibles of a crayfish that was, in turn, eaten by one of the chain pickerel my father and I used to catch when I was a kid, and so on.

My father is now part of the lake. Or parts of the lake.

Philip Roth’s retirement lesson

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 12:39:00 +0000

Last July, Philip Roth, the author of 26 novels and one collection of short stories, told a French interviewer that he had not written a word of fiction in three years and that he did not intend to write fiction again. Roth is 79. He told the French interviewer that he no longer felt “the fanaticism to write” that had driven him for close to six decades, and that he was “tired” of “all the work” that writing demanded. Not only would he no longer write fiction, he said, but he also would no longer read it. (Four months later, in an interview with The New York Times, Roth confessed to having recently read a novel by Louise Erdrich — under the covers, as it were — while adding that most of his reading now was in fact nonfiction.) He said he didn’t feel “any sadness” about his decision. When the French interviewer expressed dismay and wondered if Roth might not take up novel writing again, Roth said that if he were to write another book, it would “very probably be a failure,” and “Who needs to read another mediocre book?” Roth didn’t say how he would “fill the hours” (to use a phrase used mordantly by “the most famous literary ascetic in America,” Roth’s E.I. Lonoff in The Ghost Writer), other than to note that he would help his biographer, Blake Bailey, sort out the facts of his life. (Bailey is the author of a critically acclaimed biography of John Cheever, whom Roth refers to in the French interview as a friend.) It’s hard to imagine the retired Roth taking a cruise in the Caribbean, participating in the onboard karaoke nights — almost as hard as it is to imagine him tweeting — but it is possible to picture him watching sports on TV, especially baseball. In the early 1970s, he wrote a novel about baseball — he called it The Great American Novel, a title that is 95 percent ironic and five percent dead serious — and it is, among other things, the work of a baseball fan. “What,” asks the narrator of this novel, “are the consolations of philosophy or the affirmations of religion beside an afternoon’s rich meal of doubles, triples, and home runs?”

MLB to expand blood testing for human growth hormone

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 21:15:00 +0000

PARADISE VALLEY, Ariz. (AP) -- Major League Baseball will test for human growth hormone throughout the regular season and will step up efforts to track the use of artificial testosterone.

Players were subject to blood testing for HGH during spring training last year, and Thursday's agreement between management and the players' association expands that throughout the season. Those are in addition to urine tests for other performance-enhancing drugs.

Under the changes to baseball's drug agreement, the World Anti-Doping Agency laboratory in Laval, Quebec, will keep records of each player, including his baseline ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone, and will conduct Carbon Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometry (IRMS) tests of any urine specimens that "vary materially."

Also Thursday, owners approved the transfer of control of the Cleveland Indians to Paul Dolan, son of owner Larry Dolan.

Bonds, Clemens must be forgiven

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 15:28:00 +0000

The members of the Baseball Hall of Fame's class of 2013 will be announced around noon today. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are among those new to the ballot this year, but I’m guessing that no one will make it this year -- because baseball writers are divided on nearly every issue surrounding eligibility, including what those issues should be.

The major issue, of course, is steroids, a subject on which everyone has an opinion but scarcely anyone has any hard facts. Except for a handful of players, we can’t be certain who actually took steroids. We can’t agree on whether taking steroids really constitutes cheating – if there weren’t any rules against taking a certain substance, many feel, how can you actually say someone cheated? Or so some arguments go.

We don’t even agree on what actually constitutes steroids. The truth of the matter is that very few of the sportswriters weighing in on the subject really know much about them. We lump all performance enhancing drugs under the heading of “steroids” in an effort to sweep them aside and brand them as evil; after years of reading about them, I am still not sure why human growth hormones are bad or why they’re banned. (I know there’s a rational answer to a question I have often asked, namely if HGH heals injuries faster, why is it wrong to use it? But no one has yet given me an answer I can understand.)

Baseball goes sci-fi

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 13:01:00 +0000

Possibly the most impressive thing to be said about Ryan Woodward’s comic/app “Bottom of the Ninth” is that it got me to read about baseball, a subject I usually exempt myself from due to extreme indifference. True, the story is set in a slightly sf future (the characters play, or follow, a game called New Baseball) and the central figure is a pitcher who’s the first young woman to play in a professional league, two elements that somewhat softened my resistance to it. But still: baseball, and the way some writers go absolutely sappy over it? Not for me.

Derek Jeter injured as Tigers win ALCS opener

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 13:04:00 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) — Delmon Young doubled home the go-ahead run in the 12th inning after New York's Raul Ibanez hit another stunning game-tying home run during a four-run rally in the ninth, and the Detroit Tigers outlasted the Yankees 6-4 Saturday night in an AL championship series opener in which Derek Jeter was helped off the field with what appeared to be a serious leg injury.

Jeter rolled over his knee when he dove in an attempt to glove Jhonny Peralta's grounder up the middle in the 12th. Unable to move, he flipped the ball toward the mound. His leg was dangling as he was assisted to the dugout by manager Joe Girardi and trainer Steve Donahue.

Detroit was coasting to a 4-0 win before the Yankees rocked Tigers closer Jose Valverde in the ninth.

Three batters after Ichiro Suzuki hit a two-run homer off Valverde to cut the Yankees' deficit in half, Ibanez connected for his second tying drive of this postseason, a two-run shot to right-center.

Ibanez started his powerful week pinch-hitting for Alex Rodriguez against Baltimore Orioles closer Jim Johnson in the ninth inning on Wednesday to send Game 3 of the division series to extra innings. He won it with a homer in the 12th inning.

First in war, first in peace, first in the National League

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 16:28:00 +0000

It’s a blazing hot Sunday afternoon on Half Street, Southeast, just outside of Nationals Park. The heat is nothing new for D.C., though. Washington’s summer scorchers were well known to even the capital’s earliest residents — an assemblage of land speculators, slaves, and government workers — but this Sunday feels especially sticky and unbearable. Not even the breeze off the Anacostia River helps. Despite the weather, packs of baseball fans crowd Half and First and N streets, many clad in sweat-stained jerseys and red wool hats stitched with a curly “W.” Vendors mill around makeshift tents and collapsible tables set up along the sidewalks; some stands teem with T-shirts and jerseys, some with bottled water, “ice cold, ice cold,” and some with the traditional peanuts and Cracker Jacks. Unanchored entrepreneurs roam the area, their arms lined with knockoff caps, hawked to the tirelessly repeated tune, “Five dollars, get your five-dollar hat here, five dollars.” Streams of potential buyers file off the humid, underground Navy Yard Metro, up the station’s escalators, and out into the daylight. Scalpers wade through the crowds chirping, “Tickets, tickets, tickets.”

I’ll always hate the Yankees

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 17:20:00 +0000

Recently, a few friends sent me links to a paid obituary notice in the Daily Courier-Observer (“Serving the communities of Massena and Potsdam, New York”), eulogizing local woman Marylou Belles. I didn’t know Marylou, but she quickly became familiar to me: “She loved cats, and shared her life with four rescues from Save a Sato,” read the obit. “She was also a lifelong NY Mets fan though surprisingly, that wasn’t what killed her.”

If humor is a moat to protect us against the advancing armies of pain, it’s no wonder Mets fans like to laugh at themselves and their team, which has a legacy of stupidity, ineptitude and cursed luck. I can’t imagine a similar obit written for a Yankees fan, because Yankee fans are usually humorless — they’re in it for victories, not chuckles. As a result, I’m pretty sure Mets fans (I’m one) are morally superior to Yankees fans.