Medium Cool is a weekly series related to popular culture, mostly film, TV, and books, with some music and games thrown in. We hope it’s a welcome break from the anger, hate, and idiocy we see almost daily from the other side in the political sphere.
Arguments welcomed, opinions respected, fools un-suffered. We’re here every Sunday at 7 pm.
Tonight on Medium Cool, let’s talk baseball!
It’s part of our culture. Is it still America’s favorite pastime?
Baseball movies.
Baseball memories.
Baseball rivalries.
Baseball divisions.
The first pitch.
World Series.
Little League.
Baseball anything.
Who’s gonna throw out he first pitch comment?
geg6
Frist! And I came to say I hate baseball in all formats. Exception for A League of Their Own.
prostratedragon
@geg6: Thanks.
mrmoshpotato
2016 World Series! Woo!
Rachel Bakes
@geg6: yup.
went to 1 pro baseball game (Cleveland around 1987). I will say I enjoyed it more than the Browns game I attended a few days later.
Last summer our daughter went to a minor league game and spent the whole time reading Night Watch and counted it a better time than watching the game.
eclare
I moved to ATL in 1991, the year the Braves went from worst to first. I bet I watched at least 140 games that season. Pretty much quit after the 1994 strike.
And now with wild cards and playoffs, does the regular season even matter anymore?
MagdaInBlack
My father was a big baseball fan, and I recall listening to it on the radio with him, yet I just never caught the bug. For any sport, honestly.
But yeah, the memory of sitting on the porch on a summer night, listening to Jack Brickhouse is a treasure.
Jim Appleton
I was lucky enough to see many games of the SF Giants in the late 60s early 70s era of Willie Mays, McCovey, Marichal, Bonds …
Not lifelong fan, but those were formative experiences based on the superior performance.
Thanks, dad.
TBone
OT post in the Women On Fire Department – Stevie Nicks knocked it out of the park with her new song last night on SNL.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m1PpthYqJks
Scamp Dog
I was totally inept at the sport, but our house was across the street from an empty lot, so our backyard was the neighborhood baseball lot for a while. Then we got strong enough to hit the ball across the street, and somebody built a house on the empty lot, so we had to find someplace else.
This was the late 60s, early 70s, so quite a while back.
mrmoshpotato
@mrmoshpotato: Also, congrats to the record-setting White Sox.
mrmoshpotato
OT – the Cowboys are sucking.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
I read somewhere that the most well known athlete in the US these days is Lionel Messi…so I suspect that baseball has been supplanted as America’s passtime by soccer. Honestly as a GenXer it was second fiddle to American football for me for most of my life and at times both basketball and hockey have outranked it.
Still, I do love the way it’s woven into American history and mythologized. I WANT to be a baseball fan because of that. And I am a casual fan especially of the Tigers. I have the MLB app on my phone and use it to get home radio broadcasts of Tigers games here in the DC area. I don’t by any means tune in for every game but catch some throughout the summer when it’s convenient to tune in.
I think what made it America’s passtime is it’s a sport made for radio and also for attending in person on nice summer days. Back when it became America’s passtime there was no TV so you either went to the park or starting with the advent of radio broadcasting you could listen on the radio. I think that started in the early 1920s and Babe Ruth and the other first wave Yankee superstars were in their prime.
TBone
@mrmoshpotato: heh.
MagdaInBlack
My father grew up with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Si_Johnson
They were lifelong friends and played on local small town teams together so my father has a reason for his love of baseball
Gloria DryGarden
@TBone: oh man, Stevie nicks on snl!
re sports, figure skating please. And gymnastics.
we played girls softball and indoor baseball in pe in high school, and my biggest memory of it is chatting in franglais with my bestie, and giving the other girls in line cuts, please go in front of us. We said, “vas-y, nous ne jouons pas de beisbol.”
TBone
My nephew was born during the World Series when the Phillies won. At the very end of the game, during the win! On the way to the hospital for first meet n greet, I got him a teddy bear dressed in a Phils’ uniform that says “Coach.” The crowds were celebrating all over the place and souvenier stands had popped up all over like mushrooms after a rain.
A few months later my brother and I and SIL were having dinner at Limoncello in West Chester and the pitcher, Cole Hamels! 😍 walked in with his party, and we all had a nice supper quietly remembering and whispering his name so as not to disturb his meal.
World Series MVP Pitcher!
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
I think the first baseball season I sorta kinda started to follow was the year Mark “The Bird” Fidrych had his spectacular rookie season. I could tell from the older folks that something special was happening.
2liberal
The Yankees suck. That is all.
stinger
I saw Field of Dreams when it first came out, and kept thinking, This is stupid, this is stupid. Kevin Costner just seemed stupid. Then James Earl Jones, sitting in the stadium, SAW IT. He didn’t speak, not a muscle in his face twitched, and yet I knew he saw it. I became a believer at that moment too, and enjoyed the rest of the film. What an actor.
Doc H
If anyone is in the mood for a v good baseball movie, I can recommend No No: A Dockumentary. There was a lot more to Dock Ellis than just pitchin’ while trippin’.
piratedan
for me the best Baseball movie is The Natural, in that it’s an homage to the game and the players and to sport, but not to money.
I grew up watching the woeful Washington Senators and despite that baseball can still be magical, as a kid I played and understood the meaning of teamwork and repeating skills to obtain proficiency. To understand the decision tree that would be followed depending on where the ball was hit. Bonding with my dad over those things.
The Ken Burns homage to the sport was a kind of affirmation in how it was imprinted on me.
Are there better ways to spend the time, depends, but I also am aware that there are worse ways as well.
Good luck to the underdogs, may dame Fortune smile upon you.
mrmoshpotato
Oh! The Sandlot!
James Earl Jones
Baud
Who’s on first?!!!
Gloria DryGarden
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?: my dad used to say he needed to grab his little radio to “watch” the baseball game. He was a synesthesia kind of guy, but that always amused me.
My friend lisa, dead from breast cancer, used to explain baseball to me. If I could have gone to a game with her, and have it narrated the way she explained things, I think I might have caught on, or found it at least a bit more interesting. She explained all those body gestures and adjustments they would make in the field, as strategy signaling.
dad and the neighbor used to go around and around about the white Sox vs the other Chicago team..
Betty
I love hearing stories from people who talk about becoming fans of their team because they grew up listening to or watching games with their dad or a grandparent. In our family, four of the five of us children became devoted Phillies fans. As any Phillies fan knows, that’s a guarantee of much excitement and much disappointment. This year was no exception. Funny twist to our family story is that my mom never watched a game until after my dad died and then became a die-hard fan.
mrmoshpotato
@Baud: So he’s not.
TBone
@Gloria DryGarden: isn’t she simply amazing! What a great anthem, gives chills down my spine. “I wanna teach you to fight. You got to play the game!”
realbtl
I remember listening to the Dodgers when they first moved to LA and were playing in the Colliseum and for quite a few years after. Had one of the first tiny transistor radios by my bed.
Jackie
Baseball games and transistor radios… Back in the day – before tv media kidnapped baseball from day games – during the NL/AL championship games I snuck my transistor radio to school and hid it in my desk. I tried to keep the volume to low enough I could barely hear it, but I got caught. Instead of having it confiscated, my teacher leaned over and whispered “What’s the score?” Then periodically came by my desk for updates.
Those were the days!
JMG
Nice there are other Phillies fans on the board. Not that I’m old, but the first game I ever saw was at old Connie Mack Stadium against the Brooklyn (!) Dodgers and Jackie Robinson was playing. I was six.
OHJo
@Scamp Dog: We were lucky enough to live near a park with several ball fields, and I recall the summertime neighborhood games almost daily during the 60’s. Even for someone who spent more time practicing piano than playing ball, it was a good experience to be included, when everyone played…ages 8 through 17, no one was left out. Really help build a sense of community.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Doc H: My favorite baseball movie Is Bull Durham. Also like Eight Men Out and even though it’s very lowbrow Major League. Part of my affection for Major League is I have (or had) an Aunt and Uncle and three cousins in Cleveland so I’ve been visiting there all my life. The cousins have all moved elsewhere but the Aunt and Uncle are still there. They’re Indians/Guardians fanatics so despite being a Tigers fan I have a soft spot for the Cleveland baseball team and Cleveland in general.
Gloria DryGarden
@Jackie: your teacher asking what’s the score. I love it!
TBone
Sixth grade, Aronimink Elementary had a Teachers versus Students softball game. I was an outfielder, and so proud I’d made the team!
During the last half, very important inning, a teacher hit a pop fly directly to me. The sun was in my eyes! Oh! IT LANDED IN MY MITT YAY!
But no, the damn thing hit my mitt and THEN popped up right out of my mitt and rolled away while I stood there in shame, wanting to melt. I felt what Charlie Brown felt. DANG.
TBone
@Jackie: 😂💪
Steve LaBonne
Go Guards! Beat the Stankees!
Quaker in a Basement
The very best baseball movie of all is John Sayles’s Eight Men Out. It’s the story of how the 1919 Chicago White Sox threw the World Series in collaboration with a couple of different factions of gamblers. It’s an excellent period piece and has a wonderful cast including John Cusack, David Strathairn, Charlie Sheen, and a cameo by Studs Terkel as Chicago sportswriter Hugh Fullerton. Director Sayles even puts in an appearance as sportswriter Ring Lardner and Christopher Lloyd has a small part also.
The storytelling is excellent and the portrayal of this defining era of baseball corruption just can’t be matched. It’s one of my all-time favorites among all movies, not just baseball flicks.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?: I remember our next door neighbor when I was a kid in suburbia (mid-60s), mowing his lawn and listening to the Giants game on the radio on a Saturday afternoon. Very nice memory. But I’m not really a baseball fan, although the duels between pitcher and hitter can be interesting. I do remember watching some playoff and World Series games for some of the great As teams of the 80s, with Dennis Eckersley and Dave Stewart .
jackmac
Lifelong White Sox fan here, born and spent my formative years about four blocks from old Comiskey Park. This past season started off pretty rough for many of us diehards, but after one of their interminable losing streaks I had enough of suffering.
I decided to embrace the awful, rooting for the Sox to be REALLY BAD. And they didn’t disappoint, eclipsing the legendary 1962 New York Mets to set the modern day record for most losses in a season.
Gloria DryGarden
@geg6: not much into baseball either. We did play it in the middle our street, all of the neighbor kids. We just stepped to the side when a car came through, the reconvened under those giant arching elm trees that lined our street.
That was 1965-1973. Things might be different now.
Scout211
Some good movies mentioned, all very good. But a family favorite of ours has always been Major League. When the kids were teens we just loved to watch silly movies. Bob Uecker and his famous, “juuuust a little outside” always brings the giggles in the family. It was a very silly movie but we watched that many times and always had so much fun. The 80s really had some silly movies.
CliosFanBoy
I grew up a Reds fan during the era of The Big Red Machine. I followed the Reds every season, even when they sucked. But baseball has gotten so imbalanced with the rich teams using the small market teams as glorified farm teams, I’ve pretty much given up paying much attention. Why spend the emotional energy when your team will just have to sell off their best players to the rich teams and start “rebuilding” all over again? I didn’t watch more than an inning of any game on TV this year, and went to one game when the Reds played here in DC. A very sloppy, sloppy game by both teams. UGH.
WaterGirl
I just realized that I forgot to tag this as Medium Cool, so WordPress assigned it Open Threads, which is what it does if you don’t pick at tag. I just corrected that and removed Open Threads. Sorry for the confusion.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Gloria DryGarden: I think watching all sports benefits from knowing more about what you are watching! Football can be a very subtle game as well, despite all the brute physicality on the field.
TheOtherHank
I lived in Saint Paul, MN when the Twins still played at the Metrodome. We went to a couple games there and it was baseball. But while we lived there some folks started up the Northern League, an unaffiliated, Single A minor league team and the Saint Paul Saints played at a little stadium in walking distance of your apartment. We went to quite a few games there. Minor league games are fun and you’re close enough to the action that you feel like part of it.
There was a furniture store that set up a little deck butting against the left field fence. It had a couch, comfy chairs and a cooler full beer. You could enter a raffle at the store and win tickets to watch the game from their deck. We won twice. That was the most fun I’ve had going to baseball games.
Lord Fartdaddy (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
I’ll go along with Eight Men Out. Best baseball movie ever, I think. Part of it us that for some reason, growing up about 15 miles west of Philadelphia, I’ve been a lifelong Phillies fan, and also for some reason, a White Sox fan.
Almost Retired
Almost Retired
My sons were born and raised in Los Angeles. When we took them to a Twins game when we were in Minneapolis for a family wedding, they were shocked that people didn’t leave during the 7th inning to avoid traffic.
Trivia Man
My fondest wish is that the Giants got good a few years earlier. Why couldn’t they win a word series when I was 14 and it would mean so much more? Still happy they had that good run. I was a Giants fan because my older brother liked the A’s.
My grandpa rode the train from SLC to see the World Series, his lifelong dream. He’d been a baseball fan from Hawaii and California and Utah when the closest team was in St Louis – the FIRST true “America’s Team”. Took me to minor league games in SLC and taugh me to keep score. Really wanted to get a job in the summer at the ball park but dad told me it was “too rough” for a naive child like me. Being an obedient child, I dropped it. Sigh.
Favorite player was Willie McCovey, even got to see Willie Mays once – I think he was on the Mets that year. Also went to or drove past many of the stadiums that are no longer around as I traveled the country. Kingdome, Comiskey, Tigers, Candlestick… good times.
Quaker in a Basement
As for my personal baseball fan story: I grew up in the Florida panhandle. My dad would take me to see the Pensacola Senators, a class D minor league team in the Alabama-Florida League. The stadium was old and rundown. On a good night, there might be 500 fans in attendance. Before the 1962 (I think) season, the league folded because the team owners refused to knuckle under to demands from their major league sponsors to allow integrated teams to play.
So I didn’t see any live, in person games for many years after and my interest in baseball waned. Then, one night in 1975, I was walking past the campus pub at the University of Florida student union. They’d just installed a projection TV and had placed a sandwich board outside reading: World Series Tonight. I had some time, so iI wandered in. It was game 6 of the Boston-Cincinnati world series, the game that featured Carlton Fisk’s dramatic clutch home run in extra innings to extend the series.
I was hooked again. I started going to college games. My parents had moved to St. Louis, so when I visited them, we’d go see the Cardinals. And a few years later, I landed in Kansas City where a young George Brett was leading the Royals to division championships and league pennants.
I’ve been a devoted fan ever since.
HumboldtBlue
Fuck the Mets.
I watch nearly every single Phillies game. I say “watch” but what I mean is, the game in on, but it’s on in the background, that’s the way baseball “watching” has always been if you’re not at the actual game.
A baseball game has its own pace, its own rhythm, that makes it perfect for background listening. I’m not focused on every pitch, but when the big moment happens you stop and listen, and then go back to what you were doing. These days, that involves a series of text messages between me and my brother as well.
Baseball is seasonal, it begins just as spring blooms and wends its way through the summer and into the first chilly days of autumn. It has its own sound, its own smell, its own aura, it’s comfortable, and entertaining and endlessly romantic.
Each at-bat is its own mini-drama, each pitch a note in the symphony of baseball played out on beautifully manicured grass contrasted with the brown of the dirt and the colors of the uniforms and the backdrops of the fans.
Like many things that grabbed my interest as a boy, baseball has HISTORY, a deep, rich, history, as muddled and as beleaguered by social ills as any other institution this nation created, and yet it still retains its charm, it still retains that sense of escape for two-and-a-half-hours where all that matters is whether the pitch was ball or a strike or whether the batted ball was a base hit or an out.
It also has its own, idiosyncratic and wonderful song…
Trivia Man
After they cancelled the word series I became a very sporadic and casual fan. If they don’t care about the history, why should I?
Almost Retired
@Almost Retired: duplicate deleted
karen marie
@geg6: I hate baseball in all formats, including A League of Their Own. My one exception is that if I see kids outside with a bat and ball, I make them let me borrow the bat to hit a few balls. I love hitting a baseball. That thwack is like magic.
Trivia Man
My pet theory: Fuck Bud Selig. I contend that he personally blocked George W from HIS lifelong dream of being commissioner. If W had that job, my bet his he would never have cared to even try and run for president – sparing us all 8 years of misery. Second worst president ever and I blame Bud.
Gin & Tonic
Rivalries? I have lived in New York, Boston, and places in between, and you can’t get much more of a rivalry than that. I’ve always appreciated and enjoyed baseball, but have never identified myself with a team. My son, however, was in high school when the Red Sox beat the Yankees and went on to win the Series, and that may have been the high point of his life until that time.
Scout211
As for the game itself, I played a lot of sandlot baseball in my neighbors’ backyards with an assortment of neighborhood kids, boys and girls of all ages. I loved playing the game. We often played until it was too dark to see the ball. So much fun.
I went to many professional baseball games with my dad to watch the major league farm club that played in our town. That was really a fun experience, too. But watch a major league game on television? Unpossible. It does not translate to television, IMHO.
Phylllis
@Quaker in a Basement: I grew up in Bradenton, where the Pirates hold Spring training. We loved going to the games as kids, but loved hanging out on 9th Street on our bikes to catch foul balls almost as much. William Zinsser wrote a terrific book, prosaically named Spring Training, about the Pirates, their history in Bradenton, and the old McKechnie Field.
And baseball is best listened to on the radio, with announcers who describe the action so well, you can almost see it happening.
zhena gogolia
@stinger: OTOH, Bull Durham was great.
I also liked Bang the Drum Slowly but haven’t seen it in many years.
mrmoshpotato
@Gloria DryGarden: Car! Game on! Game on!
Any memories of windshields or house windows getting busted?
Scott S.
Let’s Go Mets!!!!!!
Gloria DryGarden
@TBone: Im so very sorry to have missed this mornings thread, about the Catholic Church enabling child SA, and hosting a repugnant anti-moral candidate, and the pope saying “killing babies”.
I’d like all those catholic clergy rapists and enablers to have to watch hours of interviews with those former children, survivors, about how far-reaching the effects of that were, in their lives. They can watch that instead of any sports games they might like to watch.
and babies. That pope has never been pregnant, or watched a loved one go through it. Our language says “ expecting a baby”, or going to have a baby. It is NOT a baby yet, for crying out loud.
Stevie Nicks’ song is gonna help..
randy khan
Baseball long ago stopped being America’s favorite sport to watch or play, but I think the idea that it’s American’s pastime still works. It’s more or less the only sport where you can dip in and out any time you want – when you play 162 games over 6 months, it’s almost like your team is playing every day. (And if it isn’t, a bunch of other ones will be, except during the All Star break and the end of the playoffs.) Not to mention that, until soccer started growing (and it’s still not as popular as baseball), baseball had a big chunk of the summer to itself once the NBA and NHL playoffs were over. So a ton of people have had it as the background of their summers for their entire lives.
As for me, I’ve been a fan since I was about 7. I started with the Yankees – proving that my Cleveland-born mother loved me because she actually agreed to go to Yankee Stadium – but that was one of their fallow periods under the ownership of CBS (yes, really), and 1969 came around and it was hard for a baseball-crazed kid in the New York area not to fall in love with the Mets, who that year actually *were* amazing. I’ve stuck with them ever since, despite feckless owners and management.
This year, though, is like a gift. They weren’t supposed to be good, then they actually were worse than predicted, and then the Lindor-called team meeting, or Grimace, or Iglesias and OMG, or just looking around and realizing that there were a bunch of good players there, or whatever turned things around. And here they are four wins from the World Series, something they haven’t sniffed since 2015, and the evil Braves are sitting at home. It is, as Martha Stewart would say (although I bet she’s a Yankees fan), a good thing.
Gloria DryGarden
@mrmoshpotato: no windows were broken. Isn’t that a miracle? I’m almost sure.
p.a.
yesYesYES to 8 Men Out. Also Bull Durham, A League of Their Own.
Sneaking transistor radios into school to listen to daytime World Series games. For the love of the TV dollar (night championship) the sport lost 2 generations of potential fans. #nottheonlyreason
Jackie
Early ‘90s we moved to Seattle area while I went to college. My son was eight and loved, loved, LOVED the Mariners and Ken Griffey Jr was his hero. My son was a Little Leaguer at the time and already had an arm plus speed, so he rotated from center field to SS depending on the other team. We lived in an apartment complex and “everybody” knew my son’s love for the M’s.
The M’s weren’t very good so tickets were basically free, so many times whenever our neighbors got a pair of tickets, they gave them to us. Bus rides to the Kingdome and nosebleed seats… After the 5th inning we were allowed to scoot down to the lower levels if there were empty seats😊 We must have attended 10 or more games per season while we lived there. Such good memories!
HumboldtBlue
Seeing that overhead shot of Dodger Stadium, where I would watch the Phils on their West Coast swing each season when I lived down there, reminds of how beautiful that ballpark is. And it also reminds of the history of how that ballpark got built, and it’s not a particularly pretty story.
As I mentioned above, baseball comes with its own history, saddled with the same racial and social baggage as every other institution we have created, and the creation of Dodger Stadium is no different.
Trivia Man
@Steve LaBonne: they are DUE! NOBODY denies Cleveland a title 70 years in a row!
frosty
Finally! Some baseball games I can see without cable or a ridiculously expensive streaming service. And what do I get? Yankees. Dodgers. Mets. Guardians. I reckon I’ll give it a pass.
Lots of baseball memories though. Listening to the 1960 World Series in 4th Grade because we had a male teacher and he played it during class. He also took us out every Friday afternoon for games – baseball, soccer, what have you. Co-ed. He was a great guy.
Major leagues – Becoming an Orioles fan in ’79. Watching them blow a game in the middle of the season and bemoaning the fact that my Dodgers had been in the Series the last two years and now I had to watch this minor league team. At the end of the season I ended up taking my (eventually to be) wife to the 7th game of the Series – our first real date!
Memorial Stadium. A student ticket cost $1.50 and I was taking a class at Hopkins! Also, you could bring in your own beer. And if you sat downwind of Section 36 you also got a contact high.
Dodgers. I was watching a game in ’78 with my housemates. My dad was on a business trip and came by the house. He said something like “The Dodgers were my team when I grew up; I used to see them at Ebbets Field.” I had instant cred from my housemates!
Best First Pitch: Joan Jett with the Orioles in (I think) 1988. She wore leather everything with an Orioles jersey over top. She grew up in Rockville and was a fan all her life.
Trivia Man
@TheOtherHank: I once won tickets to a AAA hockey game – in a hot tub rinkside. Could only find one friend willing to come along in a tub that seated 12. Still had fun.
p.a.
We would call out before the start of a sandlot or street game, “chips” or “no chips”, whichever was called first held. (Players chip in on broken windows, or no chipping in: the hitter paid for repair by himself.)
mrmoshpotato
@HumboldtBlue: Hahaha! Well done, Bill!
But let’s not forget Go Cubs Go!
frosty
@geg6: When my eldest was 2 or 3 he settled on two movies we watched daily. One was League of Their Own. It didn’t matter which part of the movie was on when I walked into the room; I sat down and watched it to the end.
It’s also the only baseball movie I know of that doesn’t end with a home run or a strike out:
“She dropped the ball! She dropped the ball! Dottie Henson dropped the ball!”
Trivia Man
@HumboldtBlue: agree, fuck the Mets. But… I recall no playoff game more exciting than those from Shea. Mid 80’s maybe? The electricity in the air, especially in tight situations. As exciting as an OT playoff hockey game.
Gloria DryGarden
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): have you seen the Andy Rooney football slow motion film clips, set to ballet music? You can see the athleticism and grace in these players.
i played in marching band, and during those high school games, I watched the cheerleaders, because it was like dance, and I understood.
if I’m going to watch a team sport, I’ll watch soccer, or hockey.
Or, team gymnastics, which is more an aggregate of individual competitors. I hear the team approach to college gymnastics is what saved Kaitlin Ohashi. She is endlessly good to watch. And so uplifting for all the majority of women who are not pencil thin, nor under 23. So Nourishing in many women’s lifelong battle with body scrutiny and criticism.
Craig
The Giants 3 ring run from 2010 was spectacular. I’m generally sort of sports agnostic, but damn that was a tremendous time to be in SF. The way they would win, skin of the teeth small ball, lights out pitching, my favorite bar full of friends helping the team over the hump on our livers. Magical.
lashonharangue
@JMG:
I remember being at a game at Connie Mack Stadium during the infamous late season slump that knocked the Phillies out of the pennant race in 1964.
lashonharangue
@Craig: That’s why I can’t watch today’s game – all strike outs, home runs, and designated hitters in the NL. Doesn’t have the drama of those SF seasons. Get off my lawn.
Brant Lamb
Was a Cubs fan in the middle to late sixties, as my mom was, too. Loved Ernie Banks. The Cubs had Ron Santo, a bum who either struck out, or very occasionally hit a home run, but almost never anything else. My mom didn’t live long enough to see the Cubs win a series.
prostratedragon
“It’s Acuña”
Honus
@eclare: Pirates fan here. 1991, ugh. BTW, today is the 64th anniversary of Mazeroski’s walk off home run in the seventh game of the 1960 series.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
That’s what I’m trying to find out!!
Look, when you throw the ball to first base, you throw the ball to who??
persistentillusion
@jackmac: Me too. We had season tix (split between 3 or 4 of us. Got to be good friends with the cops in our section. Because there weren’t that many other people at old Comiskey. New Comiskey sucked.
Dorothy A. Winsor
There are a lot of good baseball books. I like Bang the Drum Slowly and David Carkeet’s The Greatest Slump of All Time
Dorothy A. Winsor
@stinger: Have you been to the field of dreams? We went when we lived in Iowa. We took my mother, who was visiting. She was a big baseball fan.
geg6
@Gloria DryGarden:
We were into touch football (sort of, there was much tackling involved if parents weren’t looking) about the same time in my neighborhood. Most of our houses had plenty of yard space and it was both girls and boys. Obviously, we girls were very much tomboys and we often made the boys cry. 🤣
Spanish Moss
I don’t care for baseball itself. I’ve been to two games in my life and was bored out of my mind. But I do love baseball movies! 42, Moneyball, Bull Durham, The Natural. Perhaps because they emphasize baseball’s mystique and role as a national pastime, and the game shots are exciting rather than lot of balls and strikes.
Yutsano
Ah baseball! It was (and still is) THE sport in my family. My earliest memories of baseball are Padres games in San Diego. Then once we got to Bremerton WA there was always a yearly pilgrimage to the Kingdome for watching the Mariners live. To this day we commiserate in our family chat about most sports but the number of texts about Seattle baseball is huge.
Not to mention the Japanese word for baseball (野球) is pretty cool too.
Craig
@lashonharangue: Nice. I still go to games and have fun. My buddy has great seats. But yeah, the extra innings runner, the DH, UGH.
NotMax
Obligatory?
;)
Annie
OK, I am late to this party (helping a friend with an art show). But I have to say something, because I love baseball.
I saw my first pro game at age 11 in Phoenix; the Diamondbacks didn’t exist yet, the Phoenix Giants were San Francisco’s Triple A team. Before we went to the ballpark, my stepfather had drawn a sketch of the diamond, entered the position players, explained what each one did, so I enjoyed the game more. So we went more often. Then, in 1973, he took me to my first major league game, Red Sox versus Oakland As at Fenway. Luis Tiant held the As to one run; unfortunately whoever pitched for the As shut out the Red Sox. I went to Mariners games when visiting relatives in Seattle — and at one of those got to see Ken Griffey and Griffey Junior play the outfield together.
I followed the game closely til the 1994 lockout but got back into it in 1998. at that time, I was a paralegal in a litigation firm, and always had twice as much work to do as I had time for. So I needed something in my life in which time was not a factor and baseball is one of the few things in which that’s true. (It’s still one of the reasons I love it.) Sometimes, when I came home exhausted from the law firm, I wouldn’t have the energy to watch a game, so I’d just let the radio broadcast wash over me, almost like a meditation.
Wherever I lived I always followed the Red Sox, and in 2004 I spent the playoffs and World Series half watching, half with my eyes shut, terrified that the Red Sox would find a way to blow it again. (I remember 1975 and 1986 all too well.)
Now, living in San Francisco, I follow the Giants, but I still root for the Red Sox too, and have been delighted that Carl Yastrzemski’s grandson is on our team.
I’ve found that baseball repays as much or as little attention as you want to give to it. If you want to be a stat geek and track how well hitters do on Wednesday games when the weather is cloudy, you can do that. Or, as I did when I was in the law firm, you can just let the game wash over you.
Pitchers and catchers report to spring training in mid-February. I can’t wait.
Zelma
First baseball memory: rooting for the Whiz Kids in 1950. I can still name most of the players. Worst baseball memory: the Phillies collapse in 1964 when my father had tickets for the World Series. Most recent tragedy: last Wednesday.
David 🐝KHive🐝 Koch
Sidd Finch – the pitcher who could throw the ball 168 mph (link)
The most delightful baseball sex scandal that had a happy ending (link)
The time George Steinbrenner fired his coach on live tee vee (link)
the Deep Throat of major league baseball (link)
marv
I played a couple months in the big leagues a long time ago. The two teams I played for happened to have a number of future Hall of Famers. The one home run I hit was in Oakland, and an old friend was kind enough to send a small group email recently “commemorating” the event when the Coliseum was officially closed. The next day Pete Rose died, and I found myself writing back not about the long-lost home run but how his death had impacted me more than I would have thought. Wrote more about it than I would have thought. It’s typically sad that he was pretty much unquestionably the one superstar from my era who would have continued as a baseball guy, coaching, managing, etc. Regarding his lifetime ban, a lot of people have been forgiven for a lot more.
I lost interest in major league baseball in the early 90’s when salaries went over a couple million a year. It wasn’t a philosophical thing – it just kind of made me sick. Hardly surprising, though. It took 100 years for money or greed to wreck baseball. Just a couple decades at most for the internet. (And I am not blind to baseball’s other fundamental flaws in those earlier years.)
randy khan
Okay, I see baseball movies popping up, as they should:
Yes, please, give me more
Bull Durham
Major League
Field of Dreams
Damn Yankees (the stage version, too)
The Natural
Oh, please, why?
For the Love of the Game
Never had any interest
Bad News Bears
hueyplong
@Trivia Man: I left day 3 of the Calif bar exam two hours early so I wouldn’t miss the first pitch of a Giants game (they were in last place at the time).
Just so you know how cool he was, when I was a casino dealer Willie McCovey waited several minutes for me to buy a birthday card at the gift shop for my brother and then he signed it.
UncleEbeneezer
The Natural is still one of my fave baseball movies, though I also loved Eight Men Out and Major League. Never saw Bull Durham and A Field of Dreams always looked too sappy for my taste, though The Natural is pretty sappy too.
I had a chance to go to Jim Rice’s last game at Fenway, but didn’t go because I didn’t wanna spend the day with the kid who had the extra ticket. I did get to go to a World Series game in Anaheim, the year that the Angels won it in the early 2000’s. That was pretty cool.
Craig
@Annie: nice. I watched the Red Sox beat the Yankees in 2004 with my friends from Providence, and was horrified and played with them. Fun to watch the curse lifted. I was still recovering from the Giants blowing 2002. Related I have a friend who had season tickets for the Giants for thirty odd years and she kept a book, I have pictures of her 2002 book where you can see the Giants lose as Dusty Baker pulled Russ Ortiz in the 6th
hueyplong
@Craig: It took all three 2010s titles to make up for 2002.
NotMax
@randy khan
Did someone say Damn Yankees?
:)
moonbat
@mrmoshpotato: Long time Cubs fan here and, sadly, I have always associated their breaking the curse of the goat in 2016 with Trump winning the presidential election the next month. Since, as long as TFG is floating around out there, I have low key been okay with their not doing so well.
Of course that has been helped along a lot by Ricketts breaking up the team and giving away our best players. Grrr…
UncleEbeneezer
@Craig: Not only breaking the curse, but that ALCS with the Sox coming back from 0-3 to win it, was one of the most dramatic comebacks in sports history. Especially since they had lost a heartbreaker to the Yankees the year before.
mrmoshpotato
@moonbat:
Oh great! This fucking bullshit is back!
And what political shit will the Ricketts be blamed for? BTW, fuck the Ricketts and what they’ve done to Wrigley Field.
prostratedragon
Baselball All-Star games can be a fun introduction to the sport, because the relatively low injury chances allow the players to go close go all out, while their excellence means lots of unusual good things happen.
Chris
I mostly didn’t live in America until I was twelve, which probably helped make me indifferent to American sports (I still like soccer best). Even so, if I have to pick, give me baseball over American football any time. Not entirely sure why, but it’s more enjoyable to me.
My biggest baseball memory, however, isn’t from attending a game. It was driving up to Boston with my parents in November 2004 to look at universities. We arrive late at night, I, asleep in the backseat, wake up to a raving lunatic banging on the window and screaming with joy. That was how I learned the Red Sox had finally broken their curse.
moonbat
But to the original post, I love baseball. I learned it from my grandfather who always had a game on the TV on a Sunday afternoon. (He was a Braves fan so TBS always had that team on.) The pace of the game let you get to know the players, their personalities, idiosyncrasies, and individual styles. You pulled for them as individuals, not just as guys on your team.
The game itself contains all the accidental symmetry, poetry, pathos, and joy that everyday life does. Like life, baseball is not an easy game. You fail more than you succeed. In what other sport would a player be considered great for hitting the ball three times out of 10? It is a game about resilience.
I think it’s sad how much baseball has been required to “speed up” in recent years. I think of it as a sort of a sorry testament to how little free time we have to enjoy these days. Taking an afternoon to go to ballgame is somehow seen as some massive imposition instead of a leisurely way to enjoy family, friends and community…and maybe the occasional hotdog with mustard.
moonbat
@mrmoshpotato: Amen. It’s more of a betting complex than a ballfield these days.
Chris
@Baud:
I think that might be a contributor in me liking baseball better than football. Football never made as fantastic a contribution to pop culture as “who’s on first.”
Baseball also gave us that DS9 episode, with Odo as a hardass umpire and Worf screaming “death to the opposition!” Not to mention how it was a whole facet of Sisko’s personality, to the point that the baseball in his office ended up being his personal totem. (“He’s letting me know… he’ll be back.”)
Oh yeah, and baseball is also an automatic callback to Steve McQueen from The Great Escape. Bouncing that ball all day every day he was in the cooler.
You know what, yeah, baseball is just all wrapped up in our culture in all the best ways.
As far as movies specifically about baseball, 42 from a decade or so ago was quite good in an old fashioned sort of way. I knew the main character’s story, but Harrison Ford as Branch Rickey was a surprise; possibly the least action hero like character he’s ever played, but very recognizably him.
mrmoshpotato
@moonbat: Oh the whoring out of the Addison red line stop…
And the rest of these fucking betting dens…
Wonder who lobbied to legalize this shit.
mrmoshpotato
Dodgers’ organist just played part of Iron Maiden’s Run to the Hills.
moonbat
And no one is reading anymore probably, but a recent movie entitled Reverse the Curse, an independent film directed by David Duchovny based on his novel, is about what I was talking about earlier — failure as a recurring theme in baseball and life. It was originally released under the book’s title Bucky F*cking Dent, but the studio made them change it on wider release.Takes place, as you might guess, during the 1978 baseball season when it looked like the cursed Red Sox might finally beat the Yankees.
It is a funny, sweet film about fathers and sons, missed chances, and, of course, baseball. I think you can find it on Prime.
prostratedragon
@Chris: Yes. It’s the American game, not to say it hasn’t had a great effect on several other cultures. It may also be more than us, but it’s definitely us.
Trivia Man
@hueyplong: awesome!
David 🐝KHive🐝 Koch
In all seriousness, the greatest baseball movie ever wasnt even a baseball movie (link)
Craig
@UncleEbeneezer: the ESPN 30 for 30 of that series is great sports TV.
Tehanu
I first got actually interested in baseball in 1998, during the Mark McGwire – Sammy Sosa home run contest. My husband, a lifelong baseball fan, started pointing out things to me, and then I discovered Greg Maddux, who at the time was still wearing glasses, and I was hooked. To me, baseball history is divided into B.G. and A.G. — Before Greggy and After Greggy; I do know a little about the B.G. period (what every American kid knows, Babe Ruth / Lou Gehrig / Ty Cobb / Mickey Mantle / Stan Musial / Reggie Jackson, etc., plus my two favorite B.G. players, Walter Johnson and Bob “Death to Flying Things” Ferguson) — but I’m really only into A.G. This year I was hoping for Royals vs Padres in the Series, alas, but both teams were so good this year that next year looks bright.
I think what I like best about the game is the quietness of it, at least, if you’re not in one of the stadiums that bombards you every second with “entertainment” — the ability to think about what’s going on and talk about it between plays with your seatmates — and how it varies between nothing much going on and thrilling action. And knowing that in almost every single game you watch, something will happen that never happened before.
UncleEbeneezer
@Craig: Yup. A fantastic watch that really captures how crazy that series was.
Craig
@mrmoshpotato: I love that college football bands routinely play A Night on Bald Mountain and Carmina Barana.
UncleEbeneezer
@Tehanu: This is one of the things I love about tennis too. People gripe about there being too much time between points but I actually love it. The players have to feel the tension in big moments while the crowd goes silent just before they serve. I totally oppose the proposals to let the crowd scream and holler during points like in college and international play (Davis/Fed Cup). To me that deafening stillness and silence at Wimbledon right before a huge point is a big part of what makes the sport so special.
HumboldtBlue
@Craig:
College football has great music across the sport.
Virginia Tech walks in to Metallica — Sandman.
Wisconsin welcomes the 4th quarter with Jump Around
mrmoshpotato
@Craig: Magnificent baldness!
mrmoshpotato
@HumboldtBlue: Enter Sandman
HumboldtBlue
@UncleEbeneezer:
I would recommend both Bull Durham and Field of Dreams. They both have a lot of character and both provide scenes and characters that live on.
Lollygaggers
lashonharangue
@moonbat: I think it was in a Ken Burns documentary that someone said Football is like rock and roll, Basketball is like jazz, and Baseball is like opera. The speed up and focus on home runs has taken some of the drama and tension out that is a part of opera.
Joseph Patrick Lurker
Favorite baseball song
Centerfield – John Fogerty
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xq3hEMUeBGQ
Favorite baseball comedy routines
Who’s on First – Abbot and Costello
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYOUFGfK4bU
Casey at The Bat – performed by Penn and Teller
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF_zT6hmcGo
The difference between baseball and football – George Carlin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIkqNiBASfI
Favorite baseball meltdowns
George Brett’s pine tar incident
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbEHAsZxRYo
Earl Weaver getting ejected
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrhmUGRaOwY
Don Zimmer getting ejected
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mICMIRf7xmE
Billy Martin getting ejected
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkPUCn5ulf8
Billy Martin arguing with Reggie Jackson in the dugout
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHctFAj1ywI
Favorite baseball hits
Hank Aaron’s 715th home run
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjqYThEVoSQ
Luis Gonzalez’s 2001 World Series walk-off hit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNt3UuDTBz8
Joe Carter’s 1993 World Series walk-off home run
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JaG9FQSzLY
Kirk Gibson’s 1988 World Series walk-off home run
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4nwMDZYXTI
Carlton Fisk’s 1975 World Series walk-off home run
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4P3n2TCgEE
Jackie
One of the best things about baseball is the game’s not over until the final 3rd out. No running out the clock or taking a knee while the clock ticks down. You gotta get that third out before there’s a winner.
pthomas745
Big baseball book “collector” and fan. Not as much as 20 years ago, but I have a nice selection of baseball fiction, first editions of “Shoeless Joe”, where the movie “Field of Dreams” came from, etc. A movie and a set of books often overlooked is the “Henry Wiggen” series of 4 books by Mark Harris. The second book of the set is “Bang the Drum Slowly” and…it is one of those baseball books (and movie) that is covered in baseball, but not really a baseball movie. One of the movies that got Robert DeNiro noticed. Mentioned several times in this thread.
This week, an author named Robert Coover passed away. Rather famous literary writer, he wrote a book called “The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop”. For those of us of a certain age, there used to be baseball board games that were quite popular (Strat-o-Matic, APBA, lots of others). Before fantasy baseball, you could play these board games play seasons, etc. Or, like us, simply pass the time playing a board game!
Coover had J. Henry Waugh take this idea to dizzying heights: Waugh invented his own game…with his own players…and as he played his own “seasons” he invented whole lives for his fictional players: wives, sons, foibles, fans…etc. Coover writes the “baseball” parts of the novel from the perspective of the players in the Association…..that are living only in Waugh’s head. A stunning book, one of the best books on baseball. Read it when I was much younger, and came across Coover’s work again when I finally went to college in the 80s’, and learned about post modernism and metafiction and all that.
The Natural has been mentioned: the Bernard Malamud book is another excellent “book about baseball not really about baseball”. One of the first “serious” baseball novels, Malumud’s book is a very nice read.
Thanks to: Moonlight Graham, Henry Wiggen, Bruce Pearson, Damon Rutherford, and Roy Hobbs for making this comment necessary.
moonbat
@Tehanu:
I share your love of The Professor! An absolutely brilliant player who masterfully owned Clemens before he retired. The only baseball jersey I own is a Maddux jersey. :)
Love your description of the game too.
moonbat
@lashonharangue: A lovely analogy. Only now they are trying to hurry things along so the fat lady sings quicker! lol
WaterGirl
@Wyatt Salamanca
More than 7 links in a comment throws you into moderation. You can add those in sets of 7 if you like.
Hungry Joe
@pthomas745: Mark Harris’ Henry Wiggen books are amazing “The Southpaw” and “Bang the Drum Slowly” hold up after all these years — about 70. And I should know, because I re-read them both Judy a year or two ago.
Paul in Jacksonville
In 2003 I lived in Miami, a few miles from the Stadium formerly known as Joe Robbie, the year the Marlins beat the Yankees 4 games to 2. I attended Game 4 in Miami, which the Marlins won in extra innings. The next day I flew to New York to participate in the Wine Spectator Magazine’s annual Wine Experience. I watched game 6 at the ESPN Zone in Manhattan. I still remember how good it felt supporting a team with no baseball history that beat the Yankees at Yankee Stadium. I did keep my excitement to myself.
Annie
@moonbat:
this x 1,000
Annie
@NotMax:
Not sure, but someone should have!
wjca
In other shocking news, water is wet….
prostratedragon
@Jackie:
What could go wrong? Part 1 of at least 12.
prostratedragon
@moonbat: I think Maddux pitched a 78-pitch complete game shutout. Amazing.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
I suspect many people will disagree with my sentiments on baseball.
My mom learned a lot of her English by listening to Phil Rizzuto (along with Frank Messer). I grew up in and around New York City, and became a Yankees fan during the lean years of the 1980s. The first World Series I saw, the Yankees lost to the Dodgers. The Yankees championship of 1996 was something I’d never seen before.
Yeah, they got full of themselves, but I remember 2004 as well. When I worked for the Kerry campaign’s office in New Jersey, there was some good-natured ribbing – how could someone support a Massachusetts icon and still be a Yankees fan?
Then came the ALCS. I actually wrote in LiveJournal when the Yankees were up three games to none: be kind and generous in victory, because you never know when the shoe will be on the other foot.
History has, of course, recorded what happened next.
And I remember the reaction of Sports World:
Laugh at their tears, because they had it coming. Mock them. Belittle them. Celebrate their pain, because they deserve it and you are better than they are.
And when Bush was re-elected a few days later, I saw the same thing:
Celebrate their pain.
Twelve years later, when the Trumpists took power, I heard the same thing:
Celebrate their pain.
To this day, I remain a Yankees fan, and I hate cruelty and bullies with a heat that would light wet sand on fire.
And I do not see any contradiction between those two attitudes.
David_C
Don’t have the time to watch these days, but I’ve long been hooked on baseball – mostly from college on (including rooting for the BoSox in 1975). Started reading about old-time baseball and met a young lady who was as big a fan as I was – first real date was camping near the Baseball HoF with a coworker’s 10 year-old son. Long story.
Our son (we ended up getting married) was a fan and player who peaked in Babe Ruth league, primarily as a catcher. Rifle arm and quick release – threw out a lot of runners trying to steal on him. In one fall league he stole more bases than he allowed. We would go to the minor league games, sit behind the catcher, and score the games. Got some autographs from players to eventually went to The Show.
After that, church league softball. The ultimate singles hitter, I got by on my speed, which was not too bad for an old guy and surprised a lot of the opposing teams. Baseball movies? “The Sandlot” stands out. “Field of Dreams” is marred by Shoeless Joe Jackson speaking like a yankee (the region, not the team). “The Natural” deviated from the book, but good movie. Filmed in my home town of Buffalo, in the stadium in which I watched a bunch of minor league games. Also the stadium (All-High) in which I ran track.
indianbadger
Baseball and Cricket are the 2 sports I follow where the ball is in the hands of the defense to initiate the play. Plus most other sports you just follow the ball to follow the play; whereas in Cricket and Baseball you need to pay attention to the whole field when a scoring play occurs. That’s why I like to sit in the upper deck behind homeplate/pitch when I go to a game.
Kayla Rudbek
@moonbat: yeah, baseball is supposed to be a leisurely game played in a park, as opposed to football which is a militaristic sport played in a stadium. I went to a Nationals game this year and I couldn’t get over how fast paced it was as compared to being at my grandparents and listening to the Twins on the radio. And I still remember St. Olaf Catholic Church in downtown Minneapolis putting up the Vincente Gemini sign when the Twins were in the Series.
artem1s
@stinger: The book, as usual, was better than the movie and had way more compelling characters and back stories. It can be hard to find but it’s worth it.
Shoeless Joe is a 1982 magic realist novel by Canadian author W. P. Kinsella that was later adapted into the 1989 film Field of Dreams, which was nominated for three Academy Awards.