Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Boston Red Sox, Bud Selig, Fukushima, Hank Aaron, Japan, Japanese baseball, Manny Ramirez, milwaukee braves, mlb
In Uncategorized on April 25, 2011 at 5:29 am
It has been awhile since I have written anything. Living here in Tokyo we endured the earthquake of March 11 ( what is now being referred to here as ‘3-11″ ) and have been collectively paralyzed by everything that followed, most notably Fukushima. But life is slowly getting back to normal here: the trains are packed during the morning commute; the spate of post-disaster TV news programs, some of them very good, have given way to the insipid variety programs that define Japanese TV; people are thinking about foreign travel, hot springs and food again. So when I received an email the other day from a friend bemoaning Bud Selig’s plan to expand the playoffs I realized it was time for the Sports Purist to get back to “normal” too.
Since the season opened, there has been a lot to opine about including the Barry Bonds trial, the brutal beating of a fan outside Dodger Stadium , Manny Ramirez’s very un-graceful “retirement.” But let’s start with Bud Selig.
I have never understood Bud Selig. Selig has always been a self-professed baseball fan, frequently talking about his love for those great Milwaukee Braves teams of the late 1950s while a kid growing up in Milwaukee. He has been a lifelong friend of Henry Aaron which means that he can’t be all that bad. Or at least you would think. Yet Selig has done more to ruin the game during his tenure than any commissioner before him. Under Selig we have seen:
– Inter-league play which deprives the World Series of considerable mystique.
– World Series games frequently played into late October, early November.
– Rampant drug use.
– A gimmicky winner-takes-all format for the all-star game.
– A tie in an all-star game.
– Hallowed baseball records broken by ball players on steroids.
– Two Red Sox World Series championships ( right there that tells you that something is out of kilter)
– A disastrous players strike in 1994, until the strike one of baseballs most exciting seasons ever.
– Regular season games played on foreign soil including an “opening day” in Tokyo
– An astronomical rise in players salaries and ticket prices so that the demographic in any major league park nowadays is decidedly white and middle class ( Dodger Stadium is not a ballpark. It is a drug-infested neighborhood).
Anyway, I can do without Bud Selig. Even if he is a friend of Henry Aaron’s.
back in the day, Cactus League, Dodger Dogs, Giants, Mets, Roger Angell, spring training, The New Yorker, Tom Seaver, Willie Mays, yankees
In Uncategorized on February 18, 2011 at 5:42 am
I was talking to a friend in Hong Kong yesterday and he mentioned that it was the first day of Spring Training. Whenever someone talks about Spring Training, I cannot help but think of a wonderful Roger Angell essay, “The old folks behind home,” first published in the New Yorker in 1962 and re-published in Angell’s collection of baseball essays, The Summer Game. Angell’s is a wonderful essay that describes the adagio pace of spring training as it once was, games played in front of sparse crowds, fans -many of them retirees rich in their knowledge of the game – and players mingling in casual proximity as if in the produce section at a local supermarket. I love this essay and read it every March, for this is how I remember Spring training as well.
How different is spring training nowadays. Most games are sold-out, attracting crowds in some parks that would equal crowds during the regular season. A crowd of 15,000 for a Grapefruit League contest, for example, would have been unheard of when I was a kid but it is routine today. As the attendance figures have escalated, so have the ticket prices. In the 1960s a spring training ticket cost $ 0.50. Today when I looked on EBAY there were over 5000 listings for tickets and the going price seemed to be about $ 25.00. Regrettably, the Grapefruit and Cactus Leagues are no longer names that resonate as teams are wont to schedule some spring training games in their regular season ballparks or even abroad. It is not uncommon nowadays for teams to play an exhibition game in Tokyo, of all places. Worst of all, teams have fantasy camps to go along with the big-league camp which means that at some point during the spring you have to suffer images of your boyhood idols wearing anachronistic polyester uniforms that do not conceal the comestible excesses of retirement.
In essence Spring Training has become every bit as bad the regular season. The only difference is that games don’t count in the standings.
Who knows that will probably change soon as well.
Aaron Rodgers, Democracy, Egypt, Green Bay Packers, NFL, Super Bowl
In Uncategorized on February 12, 2011 at 6:53 am
The Super Bowl was last weekend. I watched the game and cringed at the halftime show, as I suspect did many others of my generation who grew up when the halftime show at the Super Bowl was a marching band-and nothing else. This year’s halftime show was a cross between Disney on Ice and a Kiss concert. The word that comes to mind is gross.
Say what you will, but the Super Bowl has quite simply become a MONUMENTAL monument to American bad taste. If the Super Bowl were personified it would be Jerry Seinfeld’s father, overweight, vulgar, loud, brazen and in-your-face. Hagar slacks and white belt to boot.
And it just seems to get bigger – and worse – every year. In fact, the game nowadays seems secondary to the garish, pyro-spectacular halftime show that we have to sit through while we wait for the 3rd Quarter to start. I often wonder how the older football fans – people of my father’s generation, who grew up on a steady diet of Glenn Miller and Count Basie – must react to the invasion of rock and roll into American professional football ? And how insufferable it must be to actually be there ! ( at least if you are watching on TV you can get up and go get something from the fridge). Moreover, this year we not only had to endure a bad halftime show but a scandalously rendered national anthem as well. No one talked about the game on Monday, but instead the headlines were about Christine Aguilera’s “performance” during the National Anthem. Even if she had not botched the lyrics, her rendition was enough to make one reach for the remote. For such is the Super Bowl nowadays.
And they want American Democracy in Egypt ?
Bill Mazeroski, Crosley Field, Forbes Field, Horticulture and baseball, Joe Mauer, Metropolitan Stadium, Trees
In Uncategorized on January 29, 2011 at 4:11 am
I saw in the MLB headlines today that the Twins have decided to remove the the 14 pine tress that grace the centerfield area at Target Field. The reason: batters complained that the trees provided a poor backdrop against which to hit. Joe Mauer was quoted as saying : “First year in the stadium and it was pretty bad.” Why this is “news” I have no idea. Maybe because it is February and we are in that odd week waiting for the Super Bowl when there is nothing else going on in the World of Sports. Nevertheless, I have plenty to say about this story.
First of all, I have always loved baseball parks with trees. Some of the classic ballparks in the annals of the game, Forbes Field, Crosley Field, Milwaukee County Stadium, Memorial Stadium in Baltimore, Dodger Stadium, and in its early years even Candlestick Park had trees beyond the outfield fences. The trees in these ballparks lent a picturesque quality to the playing field and for that reason the ballpark was always a pleasant place to waste an afternoon, akin to spending a day at the neighborhood park. I suspect that the architects who designed the parks meant the landscape to reinforce this feeling of leisurely retreat. .As the small ballparks gave way to gargantuan, multi-purpose, cookie-cutter stadiums ( as the stadiums of the 1970s and 1980s came to be called) ballparks with trees were put on the endangered species list. A few teams, like the Twins, have sought to revive the aesthetic but as the news today shows we live in different times now. Trees no longer belong in a ballpark apparently.
I also thought it was interesting how Twins management was quick to accommodate Mauer and others by removing the trees. This is typical of the mentality of management nowadays, when every fickle demand of a highly-paid player is granted. Did players complain about this sort of thing thirty or forty years ago ? Of course. But parks were what they were and players accepted this, happy just te be playing in the majors I suspect.
Then again, what do you expect from Joe Mauer who grew up in Minneapolis in the shadow of the Metrodome, where trees never grew.
1972 Playoffs, 1972 Raiders vs Steelers, BCS championship, Franco Harris, Frenchy Fucqua, Immaculate Reception, Instant Replay, Jack Tatum, NFL, Pittsburgh Steelers
In Uncategorized on January 12, 2011 at 4:53 am
I didn’t watch the National Championship game the other night. Mainly because I live in Tokyo where the game was not broadcast. I did check the final score, however, and watched some of the video highlights online. Once again, a big play in college football (or professional football for that matter) hinged on instant reply. This is another reason I rarely watch pro football anymore and watch only a handful of college games in any given season: instant reply.
What is it about instant reply that I don’t like ? Instant reply slows down the game considerably. Some reviews drag on for as much as 5-10 minutes while the officials huddle under what looks ridiculously like a circa 1953 voting machine. It is a process that is seriously flawed, for the TV replay usually tells us immediately if a play has been called correctly or not. I have never understood why the NFL just doesn’t post an official in the press box.
Instant replay also attempts to impose perfection where there can be none. Professional athletes, in spite of their skills, are not androids, and if you scrutinized the play on the field you could probably find violations of one sort or another e.g. holding, illegal formation on every play. Yet these infractions are never called usually because they occur on the line of scrimmage, away from the ball. Big games are often decided because a hold or a false start went unnoticed by the officials. Instant reply gives the false impression that the game has been decided fairly, when it most likely has not.
Most importantly instant replay deprives the game of considerable lore. Ask any sports fan about a controversial play they remember well and they will probably recount several for you. What is the most controversial play of all time ? The Immaculate Reception of course. Did the ball bounce of Frenchy Fucqua or Jack Tatum ? That question is part of our fascination with the play some 39 years after the fact. And it is a question many people in Oakland and Pittsburg will ask themselves up until their last day.
Thankfully instant reply was strictly for TV in 1972.
1957 World Series, 1958 World Series, AA, Alcoholism, NY Yankees, Ryne Duren
In Uncategorized on January 8, 2011 at 3:10 am
Ryne Duren passed away the other day. Duren was a fireballing right handed reliever for a host of major league teams from the mid- 50s through the mid-1960s. In the days before speed guns, Duren was one of the legendary hard-throwers in the game, known for the fear he struck into opposing hitters with a combination of good velocity and poor control. That he wore a pair of coke bottle glasses every time he took the mound added to the trepidation hitters felt as they stepped into the box to face Duren. As his manager on the Yankees, Casey Stengel, once said: “I would not admire hitting against Ryne Duren, because if he ever hit you in the head you might be in the past tense.”
Duren was a mainstay on the Yankees 1957 and 1958 World Series teams but was traded in the middle of the 1961 season because of alcohol-related excesses. He chronicled his struggles with alcoholism in the book, I Can See Clearly Now. The opening of the book is memorable. Despondent over the downward spiral of his life – both his baseball career and marriage derailed because of alcohol abuse – Duren had decided to commit suicide. Accordingly he walked into a lake in Michigan intent on drowning himself ( needless to say he was drunk at the time) but decided he needed another drink and headed for the nearest tavern….drenched in the waters of the lake.
I Can See Clearly Now is a wonderful book, probably the most inspirational baseball book I have read. It recounts the glory days of the Yankees and baseball in America and the unfolding plot of Duren’s surrender to alcoholism and his eventual recovery. In Duren’s day the worst a player did was to show up at the ball park drunk or hungover unlike today when hardcore recreational and performance enhancing drugs have have invaded and severely tainted the game.
Duren became a spokesperson for AA and helped many players who faced similar problems with alcohol. He was a truly inspirational figure to hundreds of people.
Thanks for the memories, and for all the people you helped, Ryne. You will be missed.
back in the day, David Stern, Dennis Rodman, NBA, NBA and tattoos, NY Yankees, tattoos
In Uncategorized on January 7, 2011 at 8:29 pm
With just one game remaining in the college football season and the NFL playoffs underway, I begin to anticipate the dreary month of February. February is always the worst month for me because there is no football (even though I do not consider myself a Pro Football fan anymore – See Sports Purist archives- I do watch the playoffs and the Super Bowl) and baseball has yet to start. In February there is only basketball. And in basketball these days it seems that there are only tattoos.
I can no longer watch the NBA because the tattoos, diamond-stud earings and bling have quite simply become an eyesore. I think this all started with Dennis Rodman about twenty years ago, but there are very few players on the hardwood nowadays who do not sport elaborate and often cryptic tattoos. If you just looked at the bodies -and the attitudes- on the court you could easily imagine that you were walking the streets of gang-infested urban America, not watching a professional basketball game. It’s funny but I was talking to my sister, a rabid sports fan, recently and she said that she no longer watches basketball for precisely the same reason. I have a feeling we are not alone. Are you listening, David Stern ?
What happened to the hair and dress codes that were once so ubiquitous in American professional sports? I think the New York Yankees are the only professional sports team nowadays that requires its players to look like gentlemen (do people even use this word anymore ? ). When you are paying someone millions of dollars a year to project your brand into the community I would think you would have all the right to expect them to act – and dress – with decorum, as the Yankees do. And I often wonder why the NBA, in particular, has not seen proper to limit self-expression in the form of tattoos, especially given the association in American culture of tattoos with gangs. I am sure money is involved somewhere.
I have never understood the appeal of tattoos anyway.
back in the day, College Football, Joe Paterno, NCAA football, Outback Bowl, Penn State
In Uncategorized on January 3, 2011 at 1:38 am
I just got back from a short New Year’s trip here in Japan and I wanted to check the NCAA football scores, forgetting as I did that most of the traditional New Years games are now played several days to a full week and a half after January 1st. Alas. All for Television of course. Among the college football headlines today I could not help but see that Joe Paterno is planning on coming back for his 46th season at Penn State. Although I think Paterno has long outlived his effectiveness as a head coach, I think it is wonderful that he still wants to coach and that Penn State continues to support him in this role. To give you an idea of how long Paterno has been at the helm at Penn State consider that when he took over the head coaching job of the Nittany Lions LBJ was president, President Obama was five years old, and the Super Bowl was not even part of the American lexicon.
In these days of a win–at–all costs mentality in college sports, when head football coaches are routinely lured away from very lucrative professional contracts, that a major program like Penn State would choose to employ an 84 year old coach speaks volumes about their loyalty and integrity. Can you see this happening at USC or Ohio State ?
Anyway, I am looking forward to seeing Joe Paterno on the sidelines again next year. If for nothing else Joe Paterno gives us occasion to recall what was once a better time in college football.
AFF, back in the day, Fred Biletnikoff, Kansas City Chiefs, Oakland Raiders
In Uncategorized on December 31, 2010 at 6:32 am
Abstract.
A mainstay on NFL football uniforms from the early 1960s through the late 1970s the single bar face mask was worn with less frequency by the mid 1970s and had become obsolete by 1987. Our data set indicates that the three underlying vectors for this change were as follows:
1.) The empowerment of woman in the American workplace.
2.) An increase in the female viewership of prime time television owing to the popularity of shows with women in leading roles e.g. The Flying Nun, That Girl, The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
3.) The debut of ABC’s prime time Monday Night Football in September of 1970.
The convergence of all three vectors in the American cultural landscape resulted in a concomittant shift in female behavior with more American women than ever viewing prime time professional football telecasts, beginning in the early 1970s. We analyzed Nielsen ratings of American Professional Football ( NFL) telecasts from our data bracket 1967-1981 and clearly established a pattern where the number of single bar face masks worn in the league declined ( from 48 in 1967 to 3 in 1980) as female viewership for professional football telecasts increased ( women were 5% of the viewing audience in 1970 but 27 % by 1981). Much of this was owing to the increasing popularity of Monday Night Football which by the late 1970s had become one of the most popular programs in prime-time American telvision. We theorize that as more women tuned into watch professional football, the league aimed to reduce levels of violence hoping to make the game more appealing to this new and growing market segment. Our data seriously contradicts our initial hypothesis that the single-bar face mask was was phased out by the league as it sought a sleeker image for itself in post-Nixonian America ( Wilcove and Collingworth 1986).
Sherman L. Peabody PHD
Winston Collingworth PHD
Reddenbacher Institute for Sports and Gender, University of Tulane
1965 MInnesota Twins, 1965 World Series, american culture, back in the day, baseball, Harmon Killebrew, Jim Perry, Metropolitan Stadium, Minnesota Twins, world series
In Uncategorized on December 29, 2010 at 6:07 pm
The Metrodome has been in the news lately. The roof collapsed after a heavy snowfall in the Minneapolis-St Paul area earlier this month forcing the Vikings to move their remaining two home games to another venue. And I read today that hundreds of high school and college baseball games, as well as the Twins winter workouts, will have to be moved or subject to cancellation because the damage will not be repaired until March.
I have always regarded the Metrodome with particular disdain, one reason being that it displaced a venerable stadium in Metropolitan Stadium. Metropolitan Stadium was home to the Twins and Vikings for many years and the scene of some memorable Games including the 1965 All star game and World Series, as well countless Vikings playoff games. It was one of those picturesque stadiums of the 1960s, with grass and fences, as opposed to astro-turf and walls, a look which came to dominate stadiums in the mid-1970s and 1980s. For this reason, Metropolitan Stadium was always one of my favorite venues for the NBC Saturday Game Of The Week.
The great Vikings teams of the 60s and 70s were synonymous with Metropolitan stadium. When I think back to those teams I see the barren playing field, the snow piled up on the sidelines and Alan Page’s vaporized breath as he stands in the huddle.
I never understood why Metropolitan Stadium ceased to be good enough for the Twins and why the Vikings suddenly could no longer play in cold weather. By 1980 the stadium was in need of repairs but renovations -along the lines of the the old Yankee Stadium remodeling from 1973-1976 – could have been undertaken. Instead Metropolitan Stadium fell victim to the civic craze for domed sports and entertainment facilities.
I have often considered re-locating to Minneapolis. I am not sure Tokyo is right for me and California, my home state, is in crisis. In Minnesota I am sure I would find solid midwestern, American values, good schools and affordable home prices. The cold winters do not bother me. Were Metropolitan Stadium still in use I would be there in a heartbeat.
As long as the Metrodome stands, however, the move is on hold.
The Sports Purist 