Yankees legends ... then and now

Pretty much the first thing you see when you get to Yankee Stadium.

You can't be a Yankees fan, or even be aware of the team, for more than about five minutes without being exposed to the history.

A major reason for that, of course, is that there's so much of it between the World Series wins and the number of great players who have worn the pinstripes, but a lot of it is that the team itself puts so much emphasis on its history.

From Babe Ruth Plaza outside the stadium, to Monument Park, to the retired numbers to the fact that Joe Girardi wears No. 28 because that will be the number of the team's next World Series win, the Yankees want you to know this is not a baseball team, but an institution.

Only one single-digit number left, and that'll be gone soon.

My wife and I went to Yankee Stadium yesterday, which coincided with Joe Torre's No. 6 being retired and him getting a monument in Monument Park. Between seeing players like David Cone, Paul O'Neill, Bernie Williams, Hideki Matsui, Jorge Posada, Tino Martinez and Andy Pettitte and the video highlights of Torre's years with the Yankees, the ceremony was a reminder that those teams from 1996 to 2007 were really something special.

And yet my wife constantly accuses me of hating Joe Torre. She has a point ... kind of.

No doubt, I have my issues with how Torre managed the team his last few years because I think his calm nature, which was such a positive attribute for years, became laxity. It angers me greatly that he didn't have the Yankees bunt on a one-legged Curt Schilling in the 2004 ALCS, or that he didn't come out of the dugout and do ... something ... when the bugs were eating Joba Chamberlain alive in Cleveland.

And I will never understand why a man who had Bob Gibson as a teammate let pitchers, particularly Red Sox pitchers, hit Derek Jeter over and over with no hint of retaliation.

But with all that being said, Torre was a great manager for the Yankees, their most-successful manager of my lifetime. He's more than worthy of both the Hall of Fame and his place in Monument Park, and I enjoyed seeing him receive the latter.

It's hard to see him, but the passenger in the front of the cart is only one of the handful of greatest catchers ever.

On most other teams, Yogi Berra, who rode in the golf cart with Torre and his family from Monument Park, would probably be the first or second guy you thought of if asked the greatest player in the team's history. With the Yankees, you'd probably think of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle before you thought of Berra, even though Berra is probably one of the three to five greatest catchers who ever played the game. (If you want to say Johnny Bench was the best, who else would you say before Berra? If you have any names, you probably don't have many.)

His biographer Allen Barra goes one further, writing in his book "Brushbacks and Knockdowns" (which I recently reread) that Berra was the most valuable team player in any sport of the 20th century, based on his own success as a player, his team's success and the number of pitchers who had their best (and sometimes only good) years pitching to Berra.

And oh yeah, he was part of the D-Day invasion, so not only is he one of the last surviving links to great Yankee teams of decades past, he's one of a dwindling number of surviving World War II veterans.

Simply put, Yogi Berra is a national treasure. Hopefully, he'll be around for quite a few more years to come.

An all-time great, and I saw him from the start.

Derek Jeter didn't play yesterday, since it was a day game after a night game. All the fans saw of him was him escorting Don Zimmer's wife to her seat for Torre's ceremony.

When I stop long enough to strip away all the debates about how good a fielder he was, the fawning articles about his Jeter-ness or the mocking of same, I realize that for the past 19 years, I've watched the career of someone who's going to be remembered as one of the all-time greats of the game. He's not at the very top of the list with Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron or that class, but he's in that next group or two below.

Once he retires at the end of this season, he's going to be sixth all-time in hits, behind five guys named Pete Rose, Ty Cobb, Hank Aaron, Stan Musial and Tris Speaker. That's pretty decent company.

While there have been better players than Jeter both throughout the history of baseball and over the course of his career -- the thing that has made him so great is that he was somewhere between very good and outstanding for a long time -- I'm not sure we'll see a star like Jeter for years to come. 

His career has been a perfect confluence of factors: the greatness on the field, all the postseason success, his being in New York his whole career, the good looks, the lack of controversy ... and that's going to be hard to replicate. Mike Trout, who is both a phenomenal player and has "All-American boy" written all over him, is probably closest, but he needs to get himself to October.

For Yankees fans, he is the final person still playing who gave those Torre teams (plus the 2009 team) their identity. Those were the teams of Jeter, Pettitte, Williams, Posada, O'Neill, Cone, Martinez, Matsui and Mariano Rivera, and once Jeter is gone, none of them will be left.

On the field, the Yankees, with Stephen Drew at shortstop, beat the White Sox 5-3. Yet I wonder who will provide the identity of the next great Yankee team, when and if that happens.  

Back to the Cape

The Cape Cod League on a summer evening... happiness.

Reason why my wife is the best wife in the world No. 2372 ... as we were leaving the gym last Friday night, out of the blue, she suggested going to Cape Cod for a baseball game the next night.

Needless to say, I required no convincing.

We chose Falmouth's game against Orleans at Guy Fuller Field, in part because we like going there and in part because it was the game closest to where we live outside of Boston, and we didn't want to hit any more traffic than we had to, although it still took us 90 minutes to get there. (Coming back, it took an hour.) Also, due to repairs to the lights, the game started earlier, meaning we wouldn't get home late.

Just chillin'

My wife and I used to live on the Cape, and while there are a lot of things I don't miss about it, Cape Cod Baseball League games are near the top of the list of what I do miss. 

Not only is it a chance to see some of the best college baseball players in the country for free, the atmosphere (for the fans, anyway, but probably not the players) is relaxing, almost like a picnic where there's baseball being played. 

All the fields are at schools or other municipal parks, and while there are bleachers, if you want to hang out by the fence, walk around, go get some food or grab some space in a lawn chair, go ahead. 

When I worked in Orleans, one of my favorite things was how on nights the Cardinals (now the Firebirds, thanks to the copyright issue that also turned my Hyannis Mets into the Harbor Hawks and the Chatham A's into the Anglers) played at home, fans came out early in the morning to put their lawn chairs, blankets and whatever else they needed to claim spots on the terrace at Eldredge Park and left them there all day. (Eldredge also hosts a summer pops concert where spectators who aren't at a table near the stage do the same thing.)

With the exception of a couple sports, Falmouth isn't as good for bring-your-own-seating, but we like the small bleachers near the third-base dugout, so we settled down to watch the game there. Fortunately, I did not meet the same fate as a couple years ago, when an ill-timed wind gust combined with walking past the Commodores' flag-bearer resulted in me wearing my ketchup-covered French fries.

Some days you play ... some days you handle the 50/50.

As for the game, Orleans jumped out to a 4-0 lead, and was cruising along up 4-1 in the bottom of the seventh when Falmouth's Sam Gillikin got hit in the arm hard enough to have to leave the game.

And thus began the saga of Boomer White.

Boomer when in to pinch-run -- and as I noted to my wife, you don't see a lot of pinch-runners named Boomer -- but given the time it took for him to get to first base after Gillikin was removed, it's almost like he wasn't expecting to play that day. Cape League rosters aren't that big; it's not like there were a ton of other options to play the outfield.

We quickly became fascinated with Boomer, and a quick search on my phone revealed that he's quite good, so good that his impending transfer from TCU to Texas A&M was kind of a big deal in college baseball circles, to the point where rival fans actually speculated about the reason.

Falmouth rallied in the bottom of the eighth, and had tied the game at four when our man Boomer strode the plate with the go-ahead run on base. It was your basic 29-hopper through a drawn-in infield, but he got a single to put Falmouth up 5-4 during what wound up being a five-run rally and a 6-4 lead.

After a top of the ninth where Boomer appeared to be tossing something in the outfield to keep himself amused (gum, maybe?) Falmouth held on to win 6-5.

Our hero ... Boomer White

One man's quest for Liverpool tickets

My wife and I are planning another trip to England for this fall, and we decided to try to get Liverpool tickets.

We made sure that we each had a membership (I had one from last year that I had to renew, but she had to get one of her own because membership only allows you to buy one ticket, although multiple people can arrange to buy them together) and found a home game that fit within our timeframe.

It wasn't one of their biggest games, which actually fit even better, because as new members with no ticket history, we weren't allowed to buy tickets for those games, anyway. Tickets for the game went on sale at 8:15 this morning (not only are games limited based on ticket-buying history, tickets only go on sale for groups of games at a time), and we were ready to go.

Hold on ... did I mention that's 8:15 a.m. England time ... as in 3:15 a.m. here on the East Coast of America?

But if it meant getting up at 3 a.m., getting up at 3 a.m. was what we were going to do, and so I was in front of the computer, ready to hit the button at the stroke of 3:15 ...

... to get put in a queue ... a queue that was going to last more than an hour.

Oh well, I was already up and didn't have anywhere to go, plus ticket availability was very good. Of course it was; it's not exactly Manchester United coming to Anfield.

So I did a little surfing on the Internet, tried to find something to watch on TV and realized that TV at 3:30 a.m. is pretty much crap. My wife abandoned the pursuit fairly early, going back upstairs into bed and telling me to let her know if anything changed.

About a half-hour or so into it, I noticed that ticket availability had been downgraded to good, but I wasn't too worried. After all, I had been queued up for a while, and there were still plenty of tickets left. With a little patience, I'd be all set to work on my rendition of "You'll Never Walk Alone."

Then the good news and bad news hit at roughly the same time. The estimate of more than an hour dropped to less than 30 minutes, then less than 20. That was the good news. The bad news was that ticket availability had been reduced to very limited. Was I actually going to get up at 3 a.m., sit online for more than an hour ... and not be able to get tickets?

Yes, yes I was. With fewer than five minutes left in my wait, the ticket status changed again ... to sold out. I let the timer run out (what the hell, I had waited this long), and was sent to a page saying that all the tickets were sold out except limited and extremely limited view. which I have to imagine is the different between sitting near a pole and directly behind it. No thanks, if I want to pay through the nose to sit behind a pole, I can do that right in Boston.

I was somewhat miffed at this news, not now-I'm-going-to-become-a-Chelsea-fan miffed, but somewhat miffed.

Up at 3 a.m. to buy @LFC tickets. In queue when it opened at 3:15. Waited more than an hour. Sold out while I waited. #wasteoftime #thanks
— LastHonestSportsFan (@LastHonestSport) July 16, 2014

So now we (and by "we" I mean "my wife") have been looking at options. There's some sort of game-and-lodging package where the only disadvantage is that it would cost an arm and a leg. Apparently, unused season tickets go on sale the week before the game, and Liverpool is on the road toward the end of our vacation.

We'll see what happens.

A day with the Brockton Rox

Easy enough to see from the parking lot

"Do you know where you're going?"

That's what the parking lot attendant at Brockton High School asked as he took my $5 when I pulled in for a recent Brockton Rox game. I think he was a little taken aback when I pointed to Campanelli Stadium, which was just a couple hundred yards to the left, because he said something like "Well if it's your first time ... ."

It actually wasn't my first time. A few years ago, my wife and I went with a friend to a Rox game and parked in some tiny lot near the ballpark, so the high school parking lot was already an improvement.

This is what $5 gets you ... not too bad.

Tickets are the Rox are $5, $8 and $12, and I know the park is small enough so there aren't really any bad seats, so I decided to take my chance with a $5 ticket. I confess that I didn't expect to be right behind third base.

According to Wikipedia (grains of salt being tossed), Campanelli Stadium has a capacity of 4,750, and the box score for the Rox game against the Seacoast Mavericks listed the attendance as 1,268. It seemed like the ballpark was less than a quarter full (when the family in front of me left partway though the game, I had four rows to myself), but maybe it was. 

It's a nice little ballpark, all seats and no bleachers. On a hot day, I was hoping there were some seats under cover, but one advantage of a small crowd was that I was able to move into some seats that had been covered by shadows toward the end of the game, and I watched the last couple innings from the concourse area, which has a roof over it.

Even though it's a baseball stadium, there are plenty of nods to Brockton's most-famous sons, Rocky Marciano and Marvin Hagler, from the team name, the boxing mural on the wall of one of the men's rooms, to the mascot being named K-O. Beyond the right field fence was the high school football field, for the Brockton Boxers.

What do you get the mascot who has everything? Apparently, a T-shirt gun.

After having been an independent minor league team for several years, the Rox are now members of the Futures Collegiate Baseball League. By league rules, at least 13 players on each team must be from New England or be attending a New England college. 

The league tries to provide a "family friendly, affordable and fun experience for the communities that we play in, in a minor league style setting," and that was one thing I noticed at the Rox. As summer collegiate leagues go, the FCBL doesn't have nearly the history or reputation of the Cape Cod Baseball League, but as opposed to Cape Cod, where they basically just play the games, the Rox definintely provided summer-league ball with a minor-league flair.

There were minor-league stables like the dizzy bat race and having children race the mascot around the bases, but the big promotion was that it was K-O's birthday. Other local mascots came to join the party, and the celebration culminated with the mascots dancing on top of the dugout, a cake and a T-shirt gun as a present.

It was a bit of a rough day for the man behind the plate.

The Mavericks rode a five-run sixth inning to an 8-5 win, and there were a few calls -- a balk, a pitch or two that could have been called a strike, the Rox first baseman pulling his foot off the bag -- that left Rox manager Bryan Stark a little unhappy. At one point, he got into it with home plate umpire Matt Le Mear and I was convinced he would get thrown out.

But he wasn't, and when a Rox player struck out looking to end an inning, Stark began marching toward home plate, I'm assuming to give Le Mear another piece of his mind, but the umpire very subtly walked about 10 feet up the line toward first base and stood there, and Stark made the right-hand turn into the third-base dugout.

I don't know if Le Mear did that to avoid a confrontation (he also did the same thing during a mid-inning pitching change), but it was a nice piece of umpiring.

An inning or two later, Le Mear took a foul ball off his collarbone, chin or something else that wasn't covered by padding, and was clearly in pain. Who was the first person on the scene to tend to him?

Bryan Stark was. (After a few minutes, Le Mear wound up being OK, by the way.)

Not a lot of people watching, but a pretty good place to watch a game.

It's pretty silly that I've only gone to a couple games in Brockton. It's hard to beat the price, and it's only about 10 miles from where I live. I'll have to get there more often.

  

Some thoughts about what whole soccer thing

Now that the United States has been eliminated from the World Cup, we can now concentrate the soccer story that really matters ... by which of course I mean the question of What It All Means For Soccer In The United States.

To be honest, I have no idea. I don't think the ratings (including non-U.S. games) and watch parties mean soccer is finally destined to leap into a lead spot on the U.S. sports landscape -- I have, at times, noticed that soccer has been the sport of the future for 35 years -- but they have to mean something. It's just a matter of what.

If I had to guess, the audience has been part rooting for the United States, part people who are soccer fans already and part loving big events, but it's hard to believe that the World Cup hasn't resulted in any new fans at all. Maybe they'll take in an MLS game (which by the way, I never have, not in person, anyway, and I haven't watched much on TV, either) or stop on NBC Sports Network this fall if Everton is playing because they remember that's who Tim Howard plays for.

In short, this year's World Cup will probably mean another incremental increase in the sport's popularity in the United States, that soccer will be a little closer to "success" and "arriving" here, whatever either of those two terms mean.

I just wish people would realize something I've said at least a couple times on Twitter already ... that liking soccer doesn't preclude someone from liking other sports, because sometimes I wonder if people realize that. Take, let's say, a certain sports columnist in Boston whose ability to make people hate him is so sublime he should be the hero for every professional wrestling heel working today.

While I've long thought his act had elements of shtick to it (depending on the situation, he can play idiot Boston fan, guy who mocks idiot Boston fan, troll and, once in a great while, columnist who writes something that makes sense), I do sometimes feel the "I don't like soccer and you can't make me" attitude that he and people like him have is a fear that appreciating soccer means they can't like baseball or football or whatever they like.

So they trot out "there's no scoring in soccer" (not always in baseball, either, and baseball has a lot more standing around when literally nothing happens) or "you can't use your hands" (quick, other than walking, running or kicking things, are they any activities that aren't easier by virtue of using your hands) or my new favorite, "you can't tell how much time is left" (because when does a baseball game end, exactly, and not knowing when the ref will call for time can sometimes make things more dramatic, not less).

I just wonder how they would do in a place like England, where soccer is basically the only major sport there is, where being able to see most any American sport, including the precious NFL, would be a novelty.

But they're not in England; they're here, and if they don't like soccer, they're still allowed to like whatever they do like.

There are just more people all the time who think they have it wrong.

Those stupid kids ... screwing it up for their parents

A lot of what passes for "anger" among sports fans is actually passion. Sure, I get upset when the Yankees don't hit, or Syracuse chokes, or Jose Mourinho parks the bus against Liverpool or the Chargers make stupid mistakes or whatever, but it's fleeting and there's a distance to it. The anger is that I, as a spectator, did not see the ending I had hoped for.

But this Boston Globe article made me angry, not sports-fan angry, but actual, want-to-slap-these-people-upside-the-head angry.

"'I hate to hear we’re playing at Evans Field,'” said Patrick Fitzgerald, casting an accusatory glance at the Southie field’s towering lights, beloved by grade schoolers for their power to extend games after dark, dreaded by some parents for the same reason.

“'It’s good for him to be part of a team,'” Fitzgerald said, “'but he also plays hockey, and that is guaranteed one hour, which is kind of nice.'”

Yes, parents are unhappy that their children's Little League games ... take too long.

I don't have kids, but I was a kid once upon a time. And I loved Little League. I loved the games. I loved the practices. My brother's four years younger than me, so his first year in Little League was my last, and I loved his games and practices. I just loved being at the ballfield.

And unless something urgent got in the way, my parents were always at the games, just like they were always at basketball games (mostly mine, even when I wasn't going to play), soccer games (my brother's), concerts (both) and school musicals (my brother's).

They did, because they could.

"As Andover mom Tracey Spruce put it in a Facebook post: 'I love my son dearly, but I have to say that watching a second-grade Little League game may very well be the Tenth Circle of Hell.'”

"Reached by phone before a game, Spruce expanded: 'The kids are picking flowers, and it seems completely disorganized. Let’s say you have a kid who actually gets a hit, then the shortstop misses it, four kids bump into each other. Someone throws it to first base, but it’s an overthrow . . .'”

Does she realize these are little kids? Hold on, and try that again, this time in your best Lewis Black voice, "DOES SHE REALIZE THESE ARE $%@&//* LITTLE KIDS!"

"But as every parent knows, pokey behavior — on the field and off — can be hard to regulate, a reality some parents deal with by doing one, or all, of the following during games: communing with their phones, chatting with other parents (often missing their kids’ at bat), grocery shopping, running home to do laundry.

'You can get stuff done during the game,' Lauren Downey, the mother of two White Sox players, said as she watched Sunday’s game at Evans Field.

'I’ve read a couple of James Patterson books,' said Anne Spence, the mother of a player for the White Sox’ opponents, the Dunkin’ Donuts Mets."

Again, I don't have kids, so I'm sure schedules can be rough ... but from what I understand, that comes with having kids. But apparently, it's too much of a burden on these poor parents to actually watch their children play sports for more than an hour.

And it really, really made me angry to read that.

The game is the thing ... at least FIFA hopes so

If you've seen John Oliver's epic "Last Week Tonight" segment on the horribleness that is FIFA (and if you haven't, it's right there ... watch it), you know that before and after he lays out in great detail just how horrible FIFA is, he says he's incredibly excited for the World Cup.
He presents it as a conundrum ... loving an event while knowing the people in charge of it are loathsome. But it's not really that much of a conundrum, and it's not something that can be ascribed to the "religious" aspects of soccer.
After all, the most-popular sport in this country is one in which we are learning more and more that its participants are maiming themselves for our enjoyment, but woe unto anyone who tries to do anything about it, or even say it's happening.
In March and early April, millions of people may actually stop obsessing over the spectacle that is the self-maiming to watch a basketball tournament in which the "student-athletes" miss days of classes to play for the championship of an organization that believes the players can receive an education at the school they play for and absolutely nothing else, even as the billions keep rolling in.
And earlier this year, the youth of the world gathered to compete in a country run by a man who could generously be described as perhaps a bit autocratic, and not only did people complain when one of the television hosts of that event dared to bring it up (because, you know, he said something about guns once), they complained when they couldn't see those competitions as they happened.
This is sports. This is what sports does. We want our games, and absent something truly catastrophic (stadiums falling in, natural disasters, people dying), we don't want anything to intrude on them. Yes, sports provide a welcome distraction from whatever crap is going on in the world, and my good friend Cy Nical would tell you that's especially true for people who don't want to have to think about anything.
But it's not just that. Lots of people are perfectly capable of understanding the real world and its implications on sports, who know that the NFL, NCAA, Vladimir Putin's Russia and the International Olympic Committee that awarded this year's Winter Olympics to him are flawed, at best, but we still love the games.
Why?
Because they're fun!
In just this World Cup alone, there are so many questions, and it's going to be so much fun to see them be answered? Will the United States get out of group play, and if not, will Landon Donovan be able to restrain himself from shouting "I told you so!" on air?
Will Spain be able to defend its title, or will Brazil lift the trophy on home soil? Or will Lionel Messi become the hero for Argentina that he is for Barcelona and lead his country to glory? Will Luis Suarez and Cristiano Ronaldo be able to play? If so, how effective will they be? 
How will England mess it up this time, and who will be blamed when they do? Will it be Roy Hodgson? Wayne Rooney? Steven Gerrard? The guy who missed the key penalty kick in the shootout?
Those are the ones I came up with off the top of my head. I'm sure there are a lot of others people far better-versed in the World Cup could come up with.
So enjoy the games. Just don't be blind about it.