Re: Profondo Baseball

[joesox]

up!

postate postate postate

[joesox]

JUNIOR a 600...sto preparando due righe.

[lephio]

By mid-afternoon, Rincon's locker inside the visiting clubhouse at Progressive Field had been cleared out and the pitcher had left the ballpark before the media was allowed inside.

Questo pezzettino mi ha fatto pensare a quell'articolo che aveva postato webba qualche tempo fa. E soprattutto alla bruttissima sensazione che deve sentire un giocatore quando se ne torna in spogliatoio e non c'è più la sua roba. soprattutto magari quando quello è il tuo locker dopo TANTI anni.. 

[joesox]

up

[Pixi89]

non so quanto sia profondo.. ma è fantastico..

I tifosi dei Mariners felicissimi con la Bavasi alla bocca - è vero se lo sono mangiato!

SEATTLE, Jun. 16 - A group of Mariners' fans has attacked with machetes, killed, cooked and eaten the former M's GM Bill Bavasi.
"We had to but a bigger barbecue grill, but it was worth" said John Spoonman.
Another one, Mike Pixi added "Most of the meat was quite tender, but the brain was already fried!". Not much was left at the end as a crowd of over 5,000, mostly homeless, queued for hours to take even only just a small bite. "It was a great day out, while waiting for the game against the Marlins" said another one, just known as Seattlefan.

Bavasi - Riposa In Pancia - vedrai che adesso Seattle inizia la rimonta.

[webba2000]

Pezzo per gli amanti della tribù, ma non solo. Sono sicuro che Joe apprezzerà.

http://joeposnanski.com/JoeBlog/2008/06/09/super-joe/


Comunque tutti i pezzi di Posnanski sono dei piccoli capolavori, per chi a tempo:ù

http://joeposnanski.com/JoeBlog/2008/06 ... the-sreak/

e

http://joeposnanski.com/JoeBlog/2008/06 ... edge-gaps/

se poi si va nell'archivio c'è da sbizzarrirsi.

[Gio]

Piu profondo di cosi........

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/columns/story?columnist=kurkjian_tim&id=3433810

Gio

[webba2000]

George Carlin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Carlin
12 05 1937 - 22 06 2008

Baseball and Football

By George Carlin

Baseball is different from any other sport, very different.
For instance, in most sports you score points or goals; in baseball you score runs. In most sports the ball, or object, is put in play by the offensive team; in baseball the defensive team puts the ball in play, and only the defense is allowed to touch the ball. In fact, in baseball if an offensive player touches the ball intentionally, he's out; sometimes unintentionally, he's out.
Also: in football,basketball, soccer, volleyball, and all sports played with a ball, you score with the ball and in baseball the ball prevents you from scoring.
In most sports the team is run by a coach; in baseball the team is run by a manager. And only in baseball does the manager or coach wear the same clothing the players do. If you'd ever seen John Madden in his Oakland Raiders uniform, you'd know the reason for this custom.
Now, I've mentioned football. Baseball & football are the two most popular spectator sports in this country. And as such, it seems they ought to be able to tell us something about ourselves and our values.
I enjoy comparing baseball and football:
Baseball is a nineteenth-century pastoral game. Football is a twentieth-century technological struggle.
Baseball is played on a diamond, in a park. The baseball park!
Football is played on a gridiron, in a stadium, sometimes called Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium.
Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life.
Football begins in the fall, when everything's dying.
In football you wear a helmet.
In baseball you wear a cap.
Football is concerned with downs - what down is it?
Baseball is concerned with ups - who's up?
In football you receive a penalty.
In baseball you make an error.
In football the specialist comes in to kick.
In baseball the specialist comes in to relieve somebody.
Football has hitting, clipping, spearing, piling on, personal fouls, late hitting and unnecessary roughness.
Baseball has the sacrifice.
Football is played in any kind of weather: rain, snow, sleet, hail, fog...In baseball, if it rains, we don't go out to play.
Baseball has the seventh inning stretch.
Football has the two minute warning.
Baseball has no time limit: we don't know when it's gonna end - might have extra innings.
Football is rigidly timed, and it will end even if we've got to go to sudden death.
In baseball, during the game, in the stands, there's kind of a picnic feeling; emotions may run high or low, but there's not too much unpleasantness.
In football, during the game in the stands, you can be sure that at least twenty-seven times you're capable of taking the life of a fellow human being.
And finally, the objectives of the two games are completely different:
In football the object is for the quarterback, also known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use the shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy's defensive line.
In baseball the object is to go home! And to be safe!
- I hope I'll be safe at home!



edit: Per chi vuole vederlo e/o sentirlo:

425,350

[rene144]

[guerrero_27]

rest in peace

[lephio]

che bello. sono commosso.

[joesox]

The sound buzzes in the background of cookouts and on back porches on shirt-sticking nights, a murmur as constant in the summer as chirping crickets.
It fills the silence in taxis and tollbooths and deep woods cottages that have no cable television. It can be followed from campfire to campfire in far northern Maine, and from blanket to blanket on a glimmering day on Nantasket Beach in Hull.
For 82 summers Red Sox baseball has been broadcast on the radio, a faithful companion of warm weather. The tick-tock of balls and strikes offers a lifeline to elderly shut-ins, sets a rhythm for cooks and dishwashers in steamy restaurant kitchens, and passes time in bodegas, back porches, and sailboats bobbing close to shore.
"I cannot imagine summertime without it," said Karen Kevra, a Grammy-nominated flutist in Montpelier, Vt., who carries a pocket radio in the orchestra pit to check scores at intermission. "It is the background music."
For me, baseball compliments summer because it is a game without a clock, a sport with a dawdling pace that matches the lazy days of July and August. Nine innings can take three hours and only involve eight minutes of action. A game watched on television leaves a person anchored to a couch, staring at practice swings.
Radio makes baseball portable for half a million listeners in New England during any particular game. A D-battery powered clunker with a broken antenna gives my 90-year-old father-in-law, Ernest Peter, a seat behind home plate while he is down on bended knees weeding his garden in tiny Gilsum, N.H. The monotony of balls and strikes seems lost among the daisies, but then the Sox score a run and Pop erupts in hoots from a patch of impatiens.
Radio has transported me to games at Fenway Park while reading a book in the Camden Hills, or while trying to stay warm in a towel as the sun set at Good Harbor Beach in Gloucester.
It brings the game to Ron Dinsmore, the night ranger who listens on a lunchbox-sized radio in a wooden booth at the entrance to Maine's Aroostook State Park. And it is a reliable companion for Roberta Stackpole, an 85-year-old left blind by diabetes who tunes in from her nursing home in East Providence, R.I.
Dave Neville has white hair now, but he remembers being a teenager during Boston's 1967 Impossible Dream season, listening as he worked pedaling the Swan Boats in the Public Garden. The drivers each carried transistor radios and flashed thumbs up on the Lagoon after a run scored.
Today a brown extension cord is strung through the rafters of the Swan Boat dock, so the new teenage drivers can hear the games on a portable Panasonic. Tourists asked so often about the score that Neville, now the Swan Boats manager, began tallying runs and hits on a whiteboard, noting homers and other big plays.
"There is something about baseball on the radio," said Neville, who will also listen on a wicker rocker overlooking his wife's garden in Salem. "It's like a couple of guys telling a story about the game."
One of those guys is Joe Castiglione, a silver-haired man who has been the avuncular voice of the Red Sox for 26 years. He presides over the roar of Fenway Park from a booth some 50 feet above home plate, that voice bouncing via radio to barbeques, ice cream stands, and cars speeding to the beach.
"To me the nicest compliment is, 'You remind me of summer,' " Castiglione said.
He shares his perch most nights with Dave O'Brien, bellied up to a waist-high counter like two old friends sitting at a bar. Moths flutter in the massive open windows that overlook Fenway, and the humidity rolls in off the field. A week into July, a calendar remains open to June.
The pair juggles scorebooks, hand-scribbled memos, index cards, folded pieces of paper, and messages passed on Post-it notes. An intern with a laptop Googles an occasional obscure fact. Told he looked like an accountant as he erased with a pencil, Castiglione said: "But I have a much better view."
They know their voices blend into the background of people's summers, that listeners tune in and out, and carry on dinner conversations when the game slows. But there's that jarring moment that catches the ear, when the announcer's voice quickens.
Smack.
"The crack of the bat, the crowd rising," O'Brien said, "that's the magic coming through on the radio."
From the taxi drivers to boaters bobbing off Martha's Vineyard, I imagine people stopping to listen.
Swing and a high fly ball, left center field
A flutist in a Vermont orchestra pit squeezes her palm-sized radio. Campfire conversation quiets in Maine.
Back . . . to the wall . . . Looking up
Books on beaches are put down. A toll-collector on the MassPike pauses.
It's gone! Tie game. Manny goes deep on the first pitch.
Arms pump the air in lobster shacks on Cape Ann.
And in Gilsum, N.H., hoots erupt in a patch of impatiens.

Andrew Ryan

[joesox]

The fence is badly in need of new paint. A dozen New England winters and springs will do that.
But I can't bring myself to restore it, or paint over it. It represents a family moment, frozen in time. So the weathered wall is probably going to remain untouched by scraper or paintbrush.
Our wood fence was installed sometime in the early 1990s, a typical suburban structure designed to keep kids, cats, and dogs out of the driveway. A tasteful battleship gray with white trim, the fence provides a speck of privacy in a neighborhood peppered with big houses on small lots. We played a lot of Wiffle ball back there.
It was a short poke for righthanded pull hitters. Our three kids were young, but they were versed in the nuances of Fenway Park, and it didn't take long for someone to suggest that we paint the left-field wall green.
Not the whole thing, mind you. Just the two inside sections in the corner.
We were lucky. I knew a guy who had real Fenway paint.
When Boston's beloved baseball theater opened in 1912, its color was described as "Dartmouth Green," but in the early 1990s, the official hue was a lighter shade called "field green." In the latter part of the 20th century, the Smith family of Wilmington painted Fenway's Wall, using a custom blend made for the Red Sox by the California Paint Co.
Joe Mooney was the Sox' groundskeeping guru in those days. When I asked Mooney where I could find a close replica of official Fenway paint, he gave me a half-bucket of the green gold. The Sox always had a few cans handy for small jobs and touch-up work.
Our backyard project didn't take long. The kids helped with the green part. Armed with rollers, 4-inch brushes, and a dented can we relabeled "Monster Green," they were latter-day, baseball-crazed Tom Sawyers.
I took care of the detail work - the white trim that would replicate Fenway's left-field scoreboard.
Decisions had to be made. Declaring an opponent was easy. We were going to stencil a single game on our Wall for eternity, so the Sox had to be playing the Yankees.
Today, the fixed numbers on the old wall serve as an archaeological dig of sorts. The starting pitchers are No. 21 for the Red Sox and No. 46 for the Yankees: Roger Clemens vs. Andy Pettitte. The identities of the starters certify the Wall was painted in 1995 or '96. Clemens's last year with the Sox was 1996 and Pettitte did not pitch in New York until '95. All those years ago, how could we have known the infamous manner in which the two would be linked in the Mitchell Report of winter 2007-08?
It was agreed we would feature Mo Vaughn (No. 42) batting for Boston. Mo was MVP of the American League in 1995, and every kid in New England loved him.
We had a little fun with the linescore. In Little Rascals script, our board has the Sox leading, 7-0, in the bottom of the eighth and Clemens is working on a two-hitter. The Yankees have 20 errors. Forever. Got to like that.
I was reminded of our old scoreboard when I read a June 29 Globe Magazine feature about a New Bedford artist (M-C Lamarre) who specializes in Fenway-inspired murals. Her work adorns bedroom walls, dens, and even the broad side of a barn in Waterbury, Conn.
She's good and she's thorough. Lamarre's Wall usually includes the expanded out-of-town scoreboard and the logos over the numbers. She even replicates the ads. Like everything else at Fenway, the Wall was simpler back in the days when I did my artistry. I mean, who among us had ever heard of W.B. Mason back in 1995?
We walk past our Wall every day, numb to the attention it gets from first-time callers at Chez Shaughnessy. In that way, it's a little like the real Fenway Park. When you work at Fenway every day, you can forget how great it is until you see the wide eyes of folks making their first visit from Nebraska.
My son has a favorite Wiffle memory from the early days. A lefthanded hitter, he learned to take advantage of the Wall with an inside-out swing. One day he sliced a foul ball into the street just as a landscaping truck was passing through. We never found that ball. It must have nestled into the back of the truck. We like to think it's still traveling. Longest homer he ever hit.
Time passes. Our old Wall is flagging and sagging. Mo's number is partially obscured by hosta plants, and the apple tree - a mere sapling in the mid-1990s - is a virtual Sequoia rooted in front of the shabby Monster. The little people with the paintbrushes and rollers graduated from high school and a couple of them are done with college. They played a lot of softball and baseball in the years after outgrowing Wiffle Fenway.
Every family home has something similar. It could be a squeaky swing set, a splintered tree house, or a rusted basketball hoop over the garage. It's a place where things happened, where there was always noise, nonsense, and laughter.
Paint fades and peels. Memories are forever lush and green.

Dan Shaughnessy

p.s. non certo il mio favorito articolista, anzi, ma quando è profondo baseball...

[Rocky]

Baseball is not about corporate boxes and extracting licensing pennies from poor kids or taxpayer dollars donated to construct ballparks to help billionaires make millions. It is about Babe Ruth changing the sports culture, Jackie Robinson changing America and Cal Ripken changing lives. Baseball has always been able to turn the page because of someone and something always grew up out of the rubble, and Josh Hamilton began the process of turning the page on Monday night.

It is unbelievable what he has done, and now the nation knows it. Hamilton matters and when we saw his friends like Milton Bradley, Ian Kinsler and Michael Young embrace the moment and the future, we saw the awe and the appreciation in their eyes.

These are not the best of times in America, but we look at baseball and see Ankiel. We see what Jose Reyes and Hanley Ramirez have overcome to reach stardom. We see an Athletics pitcher named Brad Ziegler come back from two fractured skulls and take a run at the record for most shutout innings to begin a career. And then we watch 55,000 New Yorkers standing and chanting Josh Hamilton's name. We are reminded that baseball can help us remember what we stand for, not against, what we believe, not what we fear, and that while we learn from the past, what we all want is to open the door to the future.

Peter Gammons

[joesox]

OLD ORCHARD BEACH, Maine — Graffiti marks the walls of the roof boxes. Weeds, some waist high, choke the concourse where Maine Guides fans walked to their seats. Sunlight and rain have stained the wood siding. Small trees or overgrown bushes block doors to the clubhouse. The outfield is a meadow. Birds chirp and squirrels chitter. The Ballpark, described as America's prettiest when it opened for its first International League season in 1984, is today a shocking eyesore. Tucked away in the pine grove that shields it from sight, it is a monument to abandoned dreams. The last minor league game played here was in 1988. Attempts to bring The Ballpark back to life have died. Last month, Old Orchard Beach voters rejected a proposal to sell some of The Ballpark's land to a developer.
A group of volunteers believe baseball will be played here again. "We all thought it was something special," said John Regan, the Old Orchard Beach High School basketball coach who worked as an usher nearly 25 years ago. "It was a fantastic time for a community as small as ours. To have a Triple-A team with ballplayers who were one step away from the major leagues made us feel like we belonged."
Small-market cities like Syracuse and Rochester, N.Y., and Columbus, Ohio, had Triple-A teams. They had larger populations. More people meant more baseball fans and more dollars spent on tickets and souvenirs. More local businesses to tap for sponsorships or advertising.
Old Orchard Beach was more accustomed to hosting vacationers drawn to the Atlantic Ocean and the boardwalk rather than baseball fans enjoying the national pastime. Jordan Kobritz, the determined attorney and baseball fan from Bangor, convinced the town it could do what Portland and other Maine population centers could not: get and keep a minor league team.
A PROMISING START
The Ballpark was full for its opener. Never mind it was a typically cold April day in Maine. For the first time in decades, the state had a professional baseball team. Regan probably would have worked for free.
Young fans, unable to buy a ticket, perched in the tall pine trees beyond the right-field fence. Regan didn't know it at the time, but Francois Bouchard, who would become one of his star players, was in a tree.
Marc Collette watched from the sideline. He was the 23-year-old manager of stadium operations. He and his staff of five had poured countless hours into getting the field ready.
"All I could think was, this was great for Maine, great for Old Orchard Beach. I was just out of college and I thought this was the best job."
Lorenzo Gray, the team's third baseman, lived in the same apartment complex as Collette. He became friends with Dave Gallagher, the center fielder who quickly became a fan favorite. He remembers talking to Butch Hobson, the former Red Sox third baseman, who had come to town with Columbus.
Even more, he remembers the ballplayers telling him The Ballpark had one of the best fields in the league.
Sandy Lord, a teacher at nearby Old Orchard Beach High School, worked in the souvenir stand where caps and T-shirts seem to fly off the shelves. She remembers Kobritz organizing a trip to Fenway Park to see Gallagher play after he was called up to the Indians.
The Ballpark had become her second home and the workers her extended family.
Businessman Lucien Huot bought four season tickets for that first summer and the next four. "I used to put my feet up on the visiting dugout. I got to see young ballplayers playing their hearts out."
That was the joy shared by everyone who went to The Ballpark. Watching games, making eye contact with players, getting their autographs. Kobritz and the partners in his ownership group invested their money in the team. Ballpark employees and fans invested their emotions.
The Maine Guides made it to the IL championship finals in 1984 before losing. Attendance was good that first year as the novelty of pro baseball and a winning record brought more than 183,000 fans into the park. The Guides won again in 1985, but 50,000 fewer fans came. It was already the beginning of the end.
'BEYOND ANYONE'S CONTROL'
The jokes about giant mosquitoes stopped being funny. Lord kept a can of bug spray handy, and she was indoors. She probably could have sold cases of the stuff. Not that ownership would OK that bit of marketing. No one got swallowed up by the fog that rolled off the ocean by the fifth inning of night games. Although there were times when you couldn't see if Gallagher, or Otis Nixon, when he played with the Guides, were still in the outfield.
The Indians didn't have one of baseball's stronger minor league systems in the mid-1980s. Future stars, such as Toronto's Fred McGriff, were mostly in the visiting dugout. The biggest name to come out of Old Orchard Beach wasn't a player. Gary Thorne, an attorney and a partner, became the Guides' radio voice.
On the road, Thorne did play-by-play and color. He laughed at his mistakes, particularly those made near the end of long trips, endearing him to his audience. He thought he would return to practicing law. He's still calling games, now with the Baltimore Orioles and also ESPN. But two years after The Ballpark opened, Kobritz and his partners faced money troubles. Acts such as Aerosmith and the Moody Blues were added to the schedule. The cash helped, but the music didn't. Why buy a ticket, groused neighbors. You could hear the concert from your couch. Kobritz and Indians management had a strained relationship at best. Cleveland had hired Jim Napier to manage the 1986 Guides. Kobritz said he wasn't consulted and put out his own help-wanted sign. Napier did lead the team. It went 58-82 and finished eighth.
Attendance continued to fall in the face of uninspired teams and legal wranglings over the sale of the Guides. Kobritz had a deal with a group from Pennsylvania for cash and the rights to buy the Indians' Double-A franchise in Waterbury, Conn. The Eastern League would come to The Ballpark.
Instead, the Maine Phillies moved in. It was understood from the start that they would leave once a new park was built in the Scranton area. Lord was at the souvenir stand for the last game. She was interviewed by Bob Elliott, from WMTW. She remembers trying to hold back her tears. Huot, now 78, was the last fan to leave, he says. "I couldn't believe it. I couldn't understand how this could fail."
Collette left after the 1985 season. He had married, which meant he couldn't stay married to The Ballpark. He went to work for Unum. He returned to The Ballpark two years ago. Someone wanted to bring a team of college-age players to Old Orchard Beach. Collette was asked if the field could be restored.
"I can't bring it back to the way it was," he said, mindful of the money involved. "They let it go, it's too far gone." Friday, you could still hear the regret in his voice. "In the end, there was such a feeling of disappointment," said Regan. "For us, it was beyond anyone's control."