A very minor Derek Jeter memory

Several years ago, my wife, in-laws and I went on a tour of the old Yankee Stadium as part of some package where you saw the stadium, took a bus tour around the Bronx and ate lunch at some terrific Italian restaurant the name of which I do not remember.

Needless to say, my main interest was in the stadium tour, although the bus tour was surprisingly interesting, and I already mentioned the great lunch. Unlike a tour I later took in Phoenix where the perhaps-teenage tour guide pronounced Robin Yount's last name "Yunt," our guide at Yankee Stadium was a longtime employee who closed the tour by showing us his World Series ring, which appeared to basically be a convenient play to store lots of diamonds.

It was during the off-season, and a pretty raw day as I recall, but we hit all the important spots, most of which are standard on a tour -- the press box, the edge of the field, the dugout, some of the behind-the-scenes hallways -- and, of course, since it was Yankee Stadium, we went out to Monument Park.

And we went into the clubhouse. With the exception of Anfield, it was like any stadium or arena tour I've taken since, where you can see the clubhouse or locker room, but don't go much past the inside of the door and stand behind a rope. Our guide pointed out all the lockers we'd be interested in, including Thurman Munson's unused locker, and then pointed out Derek Jeter's.

If I remember correctly, it was on our left, in the middle of the group of lockers on that side of the room. Our guide informed us that until September call-ups required its use, the locker next to Jeter's was left vacant in order to hold his fan mail. One of our fellow tour-goers asked if Jeter answered all his fan mail, and our guide's answer is etched into my memory.

"It is a physical impossibility."

The NFL wouldn't actually do this ... would it?

The other day, I came across a Sports on Earth post by Will Leitch in which he wrote that it's OK to watch the NFL and still be disgusted by the way the league has handled the Ray Rice, Greg Hardy, Adrian Peterson and Ray McDonald situations (although he doesn't mention McDonald by name).

I won't go too far into his argument (you should read the post for that), but he basically calls the NFL entertaining escapism and claims you can both enjoy the games and still want the league held accountable for basically doing everything wrong when it came to domestic violence among its players.

My feelings about the NFL have been conflicted in recent years. I still enjoy football, and I still enjoy watching the games, but the league's ridiculous, growing self-importance, aided and abetted by the media, repels me more than it attracts me. (I say that while admitting my fascination with both hockey culture in Canada and soccer culture in England, but then again, I don't live in either place.)

There's also the growing evidence that the players are maiming themselves for our entertainment and some fans' acceptance of it and even insistence that nothing be done to rectify it.

Between the two, I'm watching watching less and less than before, and that was even before the last couple weeks. However, my Chargers were on TV against the Seahawks Sunday, and I watched, and I enjoyed the win. I won't lie. I'm not like the friend of mine (who I don't think was wild about football to begin with), who not only won't watch the NFL, she posts photos on Facebook of whatever she's doing on Sundays while her husband watches football. It's actually quite entertaining.

And that was before recent events.

But then Leitch wrote this.

"We can't be so entranced by the games that we let things slide like we have in the past. You can already see how last week's events are going to be spun: It's not (commissioner Roger) Goodell -- who appears to have, in spite of it all, almost universal support from the owners, his bosses -- it's those unruly players. You're starting to see a narrative develop: Those players are out of control. It's time for the league to get tough. Ray Rice, Greg Hardy, Adrian Peterson ... they're just bad apples. The league just needs to police those players more. They need to come down harder."

When I read that, I thought, "They can't ... can they?" While Rice, Hardy, Peterson and McDonald are all at least allegedly very bad apples, the outrage has been that the league hasn't been tough enough by its own choice. Goodell could have come down on Rice before the in-elevator video was released, when Hardy was convicted, McDonald arrested or Peterson indicted, but he didn't, and neither have the teams absent public pressure.

To make this just about the players, while washing its hands entirely, would be a remarkable bit of verbal jiu-jitsu on the NFL's part.

What's worse, there's nothing to say they wouldn't get away with it.

You know it, and so do I.

Another reason for fans everywhere to hate Boston

"Missing: a seven-pound sterling silver symbol of football excellence. Owner: the New England Patriots. Information: our trophy has been misplaced since 2004 and despite a couple of close calls it has not been returned. The latest information indicates a Southern California surfer named Pete may have it in Seattle."

Just in case you don't get Chris Gasper's point in today's Boston Globe, the Lombardi Trophy belongs to the New England Patriots, even though they haven't won a Super Bowl in 10 years. (Fans in Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo and San Diego, among others, surely feel their pain.)

And the inclusion of the "Southern California surfer named Pete" is a nice touch, given that because Pete Carroll did not succeed as Patriots coach, he's high on the list of People Who Are Never Allowed to Succeed along with anyone from New York (self-explanatory), Joe Thornton (Bruins phenom who never panned out), Peyton Manning (because God forbid anyone dare think he's better than Tom Brady), Phil Kessel (left Boston for more money) and Drew Bledsoe ("He threw lots of interceptions!" "Brady's better!")

Funny thing is, once the entitled yahoo-ism subsides, Gasper points out relatively intelligently that the Patriots have to take advantage of opportunities to win, and this year could be a good one, given Darrelle Revis' arrival, Rob Gronkowski being healthy (for now), the wide receivers having another year of experience and the return to health of both Vince Wilfork and Jerod Mayo.

So maybe the part about the Patriots "owning" the trophy may have been just a rhetorical device designed to get people reading the column ... except for this at the end ...

"The 12-win seasons that are celebrated now will be painful reminders of championships that might have been if the Lombardi Trophy isn't returned to its rightful place at Patriots Place."

So clearly Gasper means it.

If you're a Boston fan and wonder why people who aren't from Boston hate you and your teams, it's stuff like this ... the belief that because your teams have had a pretty nice 10-year run, you're now entitled to championships. For more, see this from Deadspin. (In the interest of fairness, here's the one for San Diego, which made me feel ashamed to be a Chargers fan.)

But this isn't some idiot Patriots fan saying this; it's one of the lead columnists of the major daily in town.

Michael Sam would be a story if ESPN shut its doors tomorrow

I've seen several of these in the days since the Rams cut Michael Sam, especially since he hasn't found another NFL job.

ESPN keeps looking for excuses as to why Michael Sam is unemployed. Maybe they should look at themselves. Their coverage pushed teams away.
— Skip Bayless (@FunSkipBayless) September 1, 2014

(Yes, I realize I just posted from a fake Skip Bayless account, but it's both representative of what I've seen and not profane.)

Eric Wood of the Bills seems to think so, and so did whomever talked to Mike Freeman of Bleacher Report about it.

@RossTuckerNFL blame that on espn. No one wants the distraction
— Eric Wood (@EWood70) August 31, 2014

GM tells me: "Teams want to sign Michael Sam but fear the media attention." To me, that's cowardice. But that's just me.
— mike freeman (@mikefreemanNFL) September 1, 2014

However, the people who complain about ESPN's coverage of Sam are missing a couple of points, one of which is that plenty of other media outlets have spent time on him, including Peter King's The MMQB, but more importantly ... that Michael Sam, and his attempt to make the NFL, is a legitimate story.

Michael Sam is a fringe NFL player, drafted in the last round, cut in the final cuts of training camp, looking for a spot on someone's roster or more likely a practice squad. All of those are true, and not particularly noteworthy, but Michael Sam being openly gay is a big deal, at least for now.

The NFL has never had an active openly gay player. Jason Collins is the first one in the NBA, and that's just this year. Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League have never had one. So he's unique in that way, but there are also societal and cultural implications to a male athlete being openly gay in one of our major team sports, especially the biggest one and seemingly the symbol for so-called "manliness," the NFL, especially when there are a lot of people who want him to fail not because he's not good enough, but because he's gay.

Granted, ESPN's "shower" segment on Sam was absurd, and they, like any other news organization, can be guilty of beating a story to death, but if a team can't deal with the media coverage he'd bring at the beginning, that's on the team, not the media.

It will be a great day when an NFL, MLB, NBA or NHL player being gay isn't a story, the same way a WNBA player or a Hollywood actor being gay isn't really a story for more than a few minutes. (When my father and I were discussing the news that Jim Parsons of "The Big Bang Theory" was gay, something revealed as almost a throwaway line at the end of a larger profile in the New York Times, in spite of the way the Huffington Post reported on it, he almost dismissively said, "I thought everybody knew that already." He, like I, loves the show.)

But for now, it is a story, and for Collins and Sam, it probably will always be a major part of their story, because they were the first.

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.