Daily Archives: October 13, 2008

The Red Sox figure to win behind Jon Lester this evening. That puts the focus back on the Dodgers and Phillies in the late game. With Cole Hamels lurking as the Phillies’ starter for Game 5, the Dodgers need to win tonight just as much as they needed to win last night. Joe Torre is taking his chances with Derek Lowe on three-day’s rest rather than turn to the very young Clayton Kershaw or the very old Greg Maddux. Is it the right move? My previews are up on SI.com

By Jonah Keri

My first trip to Yankee Stadium was supposed to be my second trip. A last-minute bailout the first time delayed the inaugural expedition for 12 years.

The day was August 12, 1995, the summer after second year of college. Brian, Elan, Eric and I set out on a four-day baseball road trip down the East Coast, with the first stop in the Bronx.

It took a while. The drive from Montreal takes six hours. There was also a stop at Crabtree & Evelyn to buy this girl we were staying with a gift for her hospitality. (Sales clerk at the store, inquiring about our gift choice: “Is she…earthy?). When we finally arrived at the ballpark (one of the scam-job parking lots around the park, to be precise), we were zonked. Stepping out of the car, we felt the blast out of a muggy New York evening, complete with all the smells you come to expect from a quality borough on a hot summer night.

We were expecting a shrine, a living monument commemorating Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle, Meacham, all the Yankees greats. Instead, we got a zoo. Swarms of people everywhere, flitting around the periphery of this monstrous structure. We were told to pick up our tickets at Gate…something, we couldn’t remember. After 30 minutes of darting through the throng, shoving people aside and getting piss-off responses from fans and stadium workers alike, we finally found our ticket window. Made it to our seats in the bleachers just in time for first pitch.

Once again, it smelled. Awful. We were told that trash sometimes piled up under the bleachers, but we figured that was just an exaggeration. Um…no, it was not. Combined with the sweltering heat (89 degrees at game time), we were doing everything in our power to focus on the game, or beers…anything other than the sticky, stinky, squashed-in mess that was left field that night.

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Two weekends ago, the Hall of Fame held its annual fantasy camp, an event that will forever remind me of Joe Niekro. Two years ago, Niekro made his final public appearance at the Cooperstown camp. Three weeks later, he was gone, the victim of a brain aneurysm that claimed his life at the age of 61.

Whenever we hear of someone’s passing, someone that we just saw days or weeks before, it always hits us a bit harder. On that Saturday in October, Joe Niekro seemed to be in very good health. Working as a fantasy camp coach under his Hall of Fame brother Phil, Joe threw back-to-back seven-inning games at Doubleday Field in the afternoon and then took part in a discussion panel at the Hall of Fame that night. He was one of the best people on that panel—outgoing, funny, and full of pride in his son, Lance, who had managed to make his major league debut with the Giants three years earlier. (Lance, by the way, has fittingly taken Joe’s place at the last two Hall of Fame fantasy camps, working side by side with uncle Phil.) But the overriding theme of Joe Niekro’s comments involved sincere admiration for his Hall of Fame brother. Like most people in the audience that night, I learned that he and Phil were remarkably close, closer it appeared than most sets of athletic brothers. There was not even a trace of jealousy on the part of Joe toward his more famous brother; there was simply respect and love for a big brother who happened to be a Hall of Fame pitcher.

Although Joe’s career did not achieve the same heights as Phil, he was an awfully good pitcher, too. Remarkably, Joe achieved most of his pitching glory after turning 30. He struggled in his early years, bouncing from the Cubs to the Padres to the Tigers to the Braves, just trying to establish himself as something more than a journeyman right-hander. His career began to change in 1973 and ’74, when he joined Atlanta. Having toiled primarily as a fastball-slider pitcher in the late sixties and early seventies, Joe began learning about a third pitch—the knuckleball—that he would add to his pitching repertoire. It was the same pitch that had already made his brother the ace of the Braves’ pitching staff. As teammates in 1973 and ’74, Joe learned all he could about the knuckleball from Phil, ranging from the basics of throwing it to the sophistication of making it flutter within the strike zone. Borrowing a page from big brother’s notebook, Joe began using the knuckleball more and more when he joined his next team, the Astros, in 1975. He didn’t master the knuckleball right away—no one does—but he refined it over the next few seasons, until it became the primary weapon in a highly effective pitching arsenal.

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Two, Three, Break.

Claudia La Rocco had a great profile in The Sunday Times on a dance troupe called the Subway Entertainment Crew.  They can usually be found on either the 4 of 5 trains:

All are strong improvisers — you have to be when your stage is a narrow, moving, crowded metal box, likely to jolt at any moment and packed with obstacles like poles, strollers and passengers disinclined to cede their ground. Mistakes regularly morph into new moves. ”All we need is three feet of space,” the men announce before each show. They aren’t lying.

Backed by a boombox, they maintain a commentary, flirting (“Ladies, if your man can’t do that, leave him. Leave him now!”), cracking wise (“Ladies, you can smile; it won’t mess up your hair”) and egging one another on during solos — anything to keep the energy up. They winningly encourage contributions. (“The best nation is donation. The best city is generosity.”) It isn’t a hard sell; riders, initially jaded or wary of being within striking distance, grow wide eyed with delight. Pocket change, 5’s, 10’s and even 20’s fly into the performers’ baseball caps and duffel bags. “Christmastime is the paid-est time ever,” Mr. Steele said. Tourists give generously; a Japanese man once handed Dante Steele a $100 bill.

The entire piece, which is accompanied by a slide show, is well worth checking out.

You’ve got to hand it to the Worldwide Leader.  They sure know how to stockpile talent–writers like William Nack, Chris Jones, Howard Bryant, and Wright Thompson, to name just a few.  How about J.R. Moehringer, the award-winning journalist and author of the terrific memoir The Tender Bar?  Moehringer wrote a fairwell to Shea Stadium recently–I missed it completely until I was browsing around ESPN’s site over the weekend–and it is first-rate, like most everything he writes:

We loved the Mets because we felt like born losers. Though we were in just the first inning of our lives, we were already down four runs, with a weak bullpen and no bench. Sons of single mothers, living on food stamps, attending so-so schools, wearing ill-fitting clothes, we faced a future that seemed sure to include a heavy dose of failure, ignorance and want. The Mets, therefore, were more than our home team. The Mets were proof that losers could be lovable. Better yet, they were proof that losers could shock the world and win.

And Shea Stadium, 12 miles from where McGraw and I played Wiffle ball every day, was sacred ground. It was our home away from home, especially when we had no homes of our own. Our mothers struggled to make rent, and when they couldn’t make it, which was often, we’d move in with our grandparents, in a house so overcrowded with cousins and aunts and uncles that McGraw and I sometimes slept in the same bed. From such chaos, inner and outer, Shea provided needed, frequent escape.

It says something about our childhoods that Shea — surrounded by vacant lots, chop shops and strip bars — was one of the few places where we felt safe. Four feet tall, dangerously naive, we’d take the train to the stadium, alone, at night. The memory makes me shudder. We carried little more than 10 bucks and standing orders from an old-timer in our hometown, a guy who supplied all the paper products to Shea: Go into the bathrooms, pull out the towels and toilet paper, and throw it all on the floor — so the stadium will have to order more from me next week.

These were our people.

If you haven’t seen the latest editon of The Best American Sports Writing (edited by Nack), the volume is worth picking up for Moehringer’s non-profile profile of USC coach Pete Carroll alone.

The Dodgers got back into the NLCS in more ways than one last night, first by refusing to be bullied by Philly’s aggresive pitching tactics, and more importantly by coming away with a win. L.A. looks to tied the series tonight.

I caught Game Two last Friday night with Jay Jaffe.  His best call of the evening?  Blake DeWitt is a dead-ringer for our own Cliff Corcoran.  It really is a pretty good call, man.