baseballtourist

Jays on a bit of a roll, but I'm behind. SkyDome is 20 !

I have been watching the games and keeping up on the collecting hobby news, even monitoring the losing status of my MLB Fantasy team (damn that Matthew!).

The Jays have turned it around since last Friday..starting with a big win over Greinke and the Royals.

June 5 - Alliteration Man picked a great time to pull it together - going 7 great innings, scattering 5 hits and 3 runs. The Jays offense did what no team has been able to do to the KC ace...knock him out and hit a home run off him (2, in fact). Overbay (more on him later) and Lind took Zack yard, putting him out of the game after 5 innings, and having given up 7 earned. Greinke's ERA 'shot' up to 1.55 after the game! Jays improve to 31-26.

 

Need to mention that this weekend (in fact, the June 5th game) marked the 20th year of the Rogers Centre...formally called the SkyDome. Having worked in the stadium for 10 years, off and on and lived next door for a season...and having gone to countless events there, I have a fondness for the concrete and steel monstrosity. I also have some great  memories from the Jay's former home, 'The Mistake on the Lake" - the old 'Ex" as it was known. Ask me the one about Matt falling up the stairs into his pizza "Come on Jess!!".

 

June 5th was another of the Jays'  'Flashback Fridays'....I love the retro Jays uni's; especially the powder blues! Above is my Tony Fernandez, 1988 gamer (with some other Jays items), that is signed by the Dominican gold glove shortstop. Tony is a classic Jay and a standout player from my early days as a fan of the team. He played 17 years in the bigs, including 4 separate stops in Toronto (1983-1990, 1993, 1998-99 and 2001). He picked up a World Series ring in 1993, 4 gold gloves, 5 all star selections and was honoured with his name and number being added to the "Jays Level of Excellence".

1988 was a great year for Tony - 186 hits including 41 doubles, .287 batting average, a .971 fielding percentage, on his way to his 3rd gold glove of 4 in a row. Tony finished his career with 2276 hits and a .278 BA.

I just finished reading a interesting book entitled - 'EL BEISBOL - Travels Through the Pan-American Pastime',  By John Krich. It is written in 1989 and covers a baseball-loving writer's journeys through Latin America. Tony is highlighted, as is the 'shortstop factory' - Tony's hometown - San Pedro de Macoris.

 

Back to the Jays..and a loss to KC on June 6th - Scott Richmond of BC, looked great at the outset...allowing only one single to George's fantasy team member (that I recommended, no less) Callaspo. Scott was otherwise perfect through 4 innings. Didn't last...as the Royals got 5 runs in the 5th and took the game 6-2. Jays falter to 31-27 overall.

June 7th - enter Roy Halladay. Complete game. Shutout. 6 Ks. Done. Major League leading 10th win of the year. Lyle Overbay continued to look good - slugging a long shot of the top of Windows Restaurant in dead centre. I managed in Windows for a few years and this is a feat. Only happens a few times, if at all all season. Hill snaps his 0-25 slump with a home run of his own, and amazingly, still held the MLB hit lead despite the slide, in which his average dippedc from the .340's to just over .300. Great game to watch! Jays win 4-0 and move up to 32-37 on the campaign.

June 8 - Jays, with Casey Janssen on the mound, travel to hitter-friendly Arlington to face the Rangers for 4. Overbay earns 'MLB Player of the Week' nod (not THAT kind of player) - hitting at a .533 clip, with 2 impressive dingers and 8 ribbies. Adam Lind knocks 2 out of the park (of course, I sat him in my fantasy league for the first time all year...to give some 'hot' hitters a chance to shine...see what facing Ashley does to a man's mindset). Casey pitched well enough to win and the Jays hung on for a 6-3 victory (33-27).

June 9 -The Stache of Brian was dominating! Actually, the hairy appendage itself looked a little diminished in this game - kind of blending in with his chin stubble...but it piched well! 7 innings (tying his longest outing ever) and gave up 2 hits. Lind hit another big fly (good form the Jays, bad for my points) and Hill also knocked one out (good for Kates and also proving that the 0-25 snide is forgotten).Jays inch up to 34-27 on the season.

Another big test for Romero tonight...no let down after beating Greinke last week, the Alliteration Man must face Texas' Kevin Millwood.

Baseball Older and more British than thought

"For generations, the sport of baseball has been considered an American creation. Sure, the British games of cricket and rounders might have provided a basic framework, but it was in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1846 that the first "official" game of modern baseball was played. Right?

Maybe not. A discovery of a diary entry that mentions "base ball" about fifty years before the next known reference to the game. The diary belonged to William Bray (pictured), an English lawyer who mentions playing a game of base ball on the day after Easter - a traditional holiday in the U.K. - in 1755.

"Went to Stoke Ch. This morning. After Dinner Went to Miss Jeale's to play at Base Ball with her, the 3 Miss Whiteheads, Miss Billinghurst, Miss Molly Flutter, Mr. Chandler, Mr. Ford & H. Parsons & Jelly. Drank Tea and stayed till 8."

The diary has caused quite a stir among historians."

And Juney (my mother) would be proud!

(photo and story - jaunted.com)

Wild and Outside

I just reread Stefan Fatsis' "Wild and Outside - How a Renegade Minor League Revived the Spirit of Baseball in America's Heartland".

I recommend it to baseball fans, especially those in towns with MLB teams, to see what pro baseball at the grass roots level is really like. Great value for your $ can be found in minor league team towns such as my hometown- Vancouver, BC (home of the Oakland A's, Single A, Short Season - Vancouver Canadians)....even if the team isn't exactly full of superstars.

Here's a video of mine from a game at the 'Nat", from last season that illustrates a bit about what you can expect.......btw-I had my money on Chef Wasabi :

About Wild and Outside (notes by author)

"I heard about a new minor league in the upper Midwest. Unlike almost all of the other minor-league teams in North America, the six franchises in the Northern League had no affiliation with big-league organizations."

"I flew to St. Paul, Minn., for Opening Night. It was first time a minor-league game had been played in the region in 20 years. A pig delivered balls to the umpire. A barber cut hair in the stands. A nun gave massages. Bill Murray threw out the first ball. And the club owners I met—led by Mike Veeck, son of the late baseball impresario and major-league thorn Bill Veeck—were smart, committed, colorful and, best of all, angry about the state of the game."

"I followed the Northern League throughout its second season in 1994, roaming around the six cities that formed the league—St. Paul, Duluth, Sioux Falls, Sioux City, Thunder Bay and Winnipeg. I fell in love with the outcasts and renegades on the field and in the front offices."

The big-league players went on strike that summer and the World Series was canceled that fall, confirming everything that was good and right about the Northern League. In its wake, independent minor leagues sprouted like dandelions. Dozens of players made good on second chances to reach the majors."

19th Century Baseball Equipment - from my collection

I don't have a lot from this era in my collection, but I have picked up some interesting 1880's-to-early turn of the century baseball equipment, and ephemera that I would like to share with you.

First Item (please see future posts for more!):

1882 Presentation or Trophy Baseball 

Great looking 1880's leather baseball with excellent period stitching (white, tight, double stitching), great patina, and clear ink inscription.

The ink writing indicates that this was a ball from a game played between Lewisburg and Mt. Joy - two towns in Pennsylvania, approximately 95 miles apart. 

The ball is dated Aug. 19th, 188? (it looks like a "2"....or possibly an "8". Aug 19th, 1882 fell on a Saturday...a likely day of the week for a big match; while Aug 19th, 1888 was a Sunday, and it’s unlikely that the game was played on the Sabbath. In fact, I learned from reading another great baseball book (and also another great Xmas gift from Katie!) -. "The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca, and the Shot Heard Round the World"  by Joshua Prager ; that Sunday baseball was outlawed in PA until the 1930’s and then only allowed until an hour after sunset right through 1951 at least.

(Things have changed!)

It also reads “Umpire W.W. Fisher” on one panel and, "Lwb 3 Mt. Joy 0" on another and also "3 inn." on another (short game!).

I have contacted the Historical Society in each town and asked for newspaper research support in the hope that this game may have been publicized, but have come up empty thus far.

Spalding's Baseball Tourists

  

(photo credit www.farm3.static.flickr.com)

Katie bought me a great Xmas present - Mark Lamster's "Spalding's World Tour: The Epic Adventure that Took Baseball Around the Globe - And Made It America's Game". I really enjoyed the book, as it took me step by step through the progress of the Tour at a time when world travel was still a novelty for the rich and baseball was as absurd to the countries visitited as the behaviour of the players.

Below is synopsis of the book, paraphasized,  as reviewed by Adam Mazmanian of The Washington Post.

During the winter that followed the 1888 season, Chicago White Stockings owner and sporting goods magnate Albert Goodwill Spalding led a tour of professional baseball players around the world. His White Stockings battled the All-Americans, a team of standouts recruited from rival clubs, as they barnstormed from Chicago to San Francisco, then sailed for New Zealand and Australia, and went on to introduce the game to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Egypt, Italy, France, Britain and Ireland.

At the time, the tour was big news. The teams were bid farewell by President Grover Cleveland and welcomed back by his successor, Benjamin Harrison. While they traveled, the New York Sun featured almost daily dispatches on its front page. Upon their return, Mark Twain delivered a rollicking speech at a celebratory banquet.

In Spalding's World Tour, Mark Lamster, a devoted baseball historian and an editor at Princeton Architectural Press, attempts a door-to-door account of the expedition. Each of the tour's 57 games , if not the full box scores, at least the results are included. He draws on a host of journalistic accounts, published memoirs and diaries to convey the players' impressions of foreign lands, the shipboard banter, their misadventures at ports of call, as well as the logistical roadblocks to planning and promoting a round-the-world tour in the days before the Pacific cable.

Spalding -raised without a father from the age of 8 in the rural outskirts of Chicago, he broke onto the baseball scene as a 17-year-old phenom who pitched his scrubby Rockford, Ill., club to a deeply improbable victory over a nationally known team of barnstormers based in Washington, D.C. Spalding is a towering figure in the development of baseball. He was the game's first true impresario and the architect of its founding myth, that baseball was invented by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1839.

The rest of Spalding's crew was hardly less memorable. At shortstop for the All-Americans was the great John Montgomery Ward, a Columbia-trained lawyer who, owing to an ongoing labor dispute over baseball's notorious reserve clause binding players to teams indefinitely, was plotting his upstart Players League even as he traveled the globe on Spalding's dime. The Chicago captain was Adrian Anson, the league's premiere player -- variously nicknamed "Cap," "The Baby" and "The Chicago Fakir" -- and one of the early practitioners of the "hit and run" play, and an incorrigible arguer with umpires. Anson was also, in Lamster's words, "the most visible proponent of the movement to keep blacks out of organized baseball"; his refusal to play against a team fielding black star Moses Walker directly led to baseball's official ban on black players in 1887.

(photo credit Zmotive.com)