Adieu, Mon Season, Adieu!

Well, despite the rain, despite the mud, despite a two-day delay, Philadelphia won the 2008 World Series. The puppy dog pile was intense with outfielders, right on cue, jumping on top of infielders who had jumped on top of the hugging pitcher and catcher. The Tampa Bay Rays looked on, dejected and sad and dreading the long plane ride home. And The Boyfriend and I, having already said good bye to our favorite teams in the regular season (me) and the post season (him), had one last good-bye to the Crossroads Lounge in Anchorage, (where friends meet) where to the bar’s credit they had the World Series on every tv monitor in the joint. But now the season turns to basketball, and football, and hockey and Sunday morning football games with a steak and egg special between 9 and 2 p.m. (We are of course 4 hours behind Eastern Standard Time so Alaskans are used to watching football in their jammies and with mugs of coffee in hand.) We’ll be back in April.

In so many ways, I’m ready for the season to be over. I’ll take a break, and focus on Christmas, and then on to the Mardi Gras season (check out http://www.killerrubboard.com/! ) and enjoy the beauty that an Alaskan winter has to offer. There’s an old wise-cracking saying from a button I used to wear during my sassier days that proclaims, “How can I miss you if you don’t go away?” So we have to have time to detach and forget and build up hope and excitement and build up our fighting weight again so we are fierce competitors and not the sentimental marshmallow I always turn into this time of year.

A couple last thoughts from The Girlfriend at the end of this baseball season, random thoughts, like a ball breaking loose into a ground ball and darting into the part of the outfield that no fielder covers.

First of all, baseball caps with ear flaps. Who knew? This is the first year that I’ve seen ear flaps on baseball hats, and they featured prominently in the Tampa Bay lineup during the blowing rain and 39 degree temperature of Monday’s game. You know, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Alaska hunters have been wearing hunting caps with ear flaps for years , but the baseball cap version is truly styling. I predict they are here to stay. You know those commercials featuring Joe Torre in Los Angeles and touting some kind of financial planning (the red dot people)? He is featured surfing and doing yoga and driving in a convertible. I can feel his blood thinning out even as he speaks. If he ever returns to a team in the North, he’ll be looking like Joe Maddon did last night. I think the Alaska Glacier Pilots team have already put in an order with Tampa’s team for next season. Can we get them in camouflage?

Secondly, groundskeepers rock! I’ve always been impressed by the guys with the lawnmowers who made intricate designs such as checkerboards, and stripes, and the funky Boston Red Sox logo in the infield. They carefully cultivate those patterns through a rich fertilizing program and mowers with specialty blades that bend the grass this way and that. The new ballparks are modern day temples in many ways, and the groundkeepers are the unsung heroes of grass and lushness. But in this World Series, it became obvious that different fields demand different care. The Tampa Bay Rays play in Tropicana Field, a domed stadium, and their grass looked meager and adequate, but no Field of Dreams. Philadelphia, with that beautiful new ball park, has a gorgeous field and you could tell that the temple keepers were a fine skilled bunch. But Game Five on Monday night was a groundskeeper’s nightmare. With rain pounding down for most of the game, the baserunning paths turned to a creek of soupy mud. Despite the groundskeeper’s diligent dumping of sawdust, the special “Groundskeeper Secret Sauce for Rainy Days,” and the judicial unrolling of a tarp bigger than the Matanuska Susitna Borough which holds the distinguished city of Wasilla, The baserunning and stealing game looked like those advertisements for “Slip and Slides.” They couldn’t stop the rain, but they kept the game going until the sixth inning. Last, night, the field looked beautiful. Gardeners’ rule!

And lastly, I think about why I started writing this blog in the first place. My goal was to help Girlfriends of the world understand and appreciate this game called baseball. I remember back to when I didn’t know what I didn’t know and when I didn’t understand baseball enough to even recognize my mistakes and faux pas. Those of us who weren’t baseball fans as children all took our first step somewhere. Somewhere along the line, we have an experience that changes it for us. We end up spending lots of time sitting next to someone on a couch whose passion is baseball. Or we become friends with his baseball buddy who knows more about baseball than most people on the planet. Or we meet a friend of a friend who pitches for a softball team and rabidly defends her team even through heartbreak and gossip about Madonna. Or your sister moves to a new town and is suddenly wearing red tee shirts and spouting off the latest batting stats for David Ortiz. Something invites you into this club of people who love baseball. If you are willing to learn, you are amazed how complex, and involved, and statistical, and fanatic, and heartbreaking, and quirky, and truly wonderful this game is.

I had to remember all this last night in the bar when a young woman came up to us in the bar last night to say hi to The Boyfriend who she knew through the music scene. She stopped, introduced herself, and started chatting, making small talk and being very friendly. What she didn’t know is that above her head was a tv set showing that it was the top of the 9th with Tampa up to bat, down 4 to 3 with two outs and two strikes. And the Phillies posed to win the World Series with the next out. She didn’t have a clue what was happening at that moment. I (and The Boyfriend) were smiling and nodding, but with our ears and our peripheral vision were watching the end of the Series happening before our very eyes. She left before the final out (whew!) with a friendly goodbye.

I realize she was a girlfriend waiting to happen. If I see her again, I need to take her aside and introduce her gently to the art of baseball. I’ll loan her my DVD copy of Bull Durham and invite her to join us at the Crossroads Lounge next April, when the baseball season will begin again and the Seattle Mariners will commence on their march to their first appearance ever in the World Series. Now that, girlfriend, is what I’m talking about. There is always next year.

See you at the game!

--The Girlfriend

Bat Boys and Ball Girls

During a Major League Baseball Game, the television coverage zeroes in on the players, the dugout, and the actual play of the game. But at every game, others help the game run and are an integral part of the game. You, too, can be a member of the team even if you can’t be in the World Series lineup.

I’m talking bat boys and ball girls.

Bat boys are the more traditional of the two. The bat boy is the kid (and sometimes an adult) who is the fetch-em-and-go-fer member of the team. They don’t get to just hang out in a uniform with a big BB on their backs. They work hard. Bat boys look after the equipment for the team. They get the uniforms lined out in the lockers and collect the laundry at the end of the day. They line out the bats and clean the shoes. And of course, during the game, they retrieved tossed bats and stray balls. If you are watching on tv, you often see them darting out between at bats scooping up balls, bats, and various detritus.

All bat boys in Major League Baseball have to be at least 14 years of age. This requirement came after a “hold your breath” episode when Dusty Baker’s, manager of the San Francisco Giants, 3-year-old-son (cute as the dickens in a mini-Giants uniform) almost got clobbered in Game 5 of the 2002 World Series when he went out to home plate to recover a bat. Unfortunately for the little guy, the play wasn’t over yet and a player was running toward home. Darren was scooped out of harm’s way before any collision occurred, but after that, the MLB instituted an age minimum.

Often the bat boy is a teenager or young adult, though a man named Stan Bronson served as "bat boy" for the University of Memphis for over 50 years. They are part of the team, so they also wear a uniform with the initials BB on the back. They work hard and get to the game way before everyone else, but what a cool job for someone who loves baseball! When the players show up for batting practice, sometimes it’s the ball boys who get to shag the flies in the outfield. They carry the balls out to the players and the pitchers. There aren’t a lot of bat girls in Major League Baseball because the position has to move easily in and out of the guys' locker room, and well, let’s just say that’s a little different than an adult female reporter doing interviews in the locker room. Often the bat boys are the ones who stand on the wrong side of the foul line to field foul balls, but more and more teams are using ball girls for that job.

And ball girls rock.

The primary responsibilities of the ball girls during the game are to chase down foul balls and throw them into the stand. Look for them sitting on their chairs tucked next to the walls. Ball girls retrieve fouls so that players don’t have to go chasing balls and they get the fun job of determining who gets to go home with a souvenir baseball. (Trust me, if you are a little kid holding out your baseball glove, you have a much better chance going home with that ball than if you are a drunk college guy waving your beer and shouting, “Hey, baby, I got your balls right here.”)

Seattle has been using ball girls at least since the Nineties. The Texas Rangers are in their second season of using ball girls. And to show the popularity of the program, in this past season, 600 girlfriends showed up in Philadelphia to audition for seventeen positions for the Phillies (Look for them in World Series play when play goes to Citizens Bank Park, ) All the women are long time softball and baseball players and athletes. To be a ball girl for a Major League Team, let’s face it, you usually have to be pretty and young. But just as importantly, you have to be able to think quickly, discern quickly whether the ball is fair or foul, you have to think quickly to get your chair out of the way of a fair ball, you have to be able to field balls hit by Major League Hitters and you have to be able to throw. And trust me, looking at the resumes of the Phillies ball girls, they aren’t slouches (for example, the team this year includes past Captain of Cherry Hill East softball team, a health and physical education teacher, a Division I track scholarship winner, a Penn Varsity Softball player, and a pitching instructor.) Trust me, if someone ever tells you, “You throw like a girl,” look ‘em straight in the eye and thank them for the compliment.

There was a video going around the internet about a ball girl in the minor leagues that is superb. It turned out to be a teaser video of a commercial for Powerade and is staged, but it is still fun to watch and shout, “You go, girl!”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SqJz0NgnnE

Of course, sometimes in her eagerness, a ball girl misjudges and makes a mistake. A Seattle Mariners’ ball girl named Rosie Santizo gained national attention during a 1998 game against Toronto when she came off her stool and dived after a ball hit into the corner by the Blue Jays' Craig Grebeck. But the ball was fair and Grebeck was awarded a double. However, the Seattle crowd went crazy, cheering the ever enthusiastic Rosie who had worked with the Mariners since she was 16. She was the only ball girl to show up for work wearing wrist bands and baseball cleats. According to Larry Stone in an article about Rosie in the Seattle Times, after leaving the Mariners, she stayed with professional baseball and worked as a cultural trainer for Latin America baseball recruits, teaching English and cultural literacy to players for the Boston Red Sox and Baltimore Orioles organizations. She finished her degree at the University of Washington in international business and Islamic studies. and worked for the Seattle Mariners to teach English to such players as Cuban born Yuniesky Betancourt.

Rosie had a big dream for a ball girl—she wanted to be a general manager of a Major League Baseball team. She was working toward this goal by working in Israel with the emerging Israeli Baseball League. Who even knew there was an emerging Israeli Baseball League? Unfortunately, that dream was cut short when she was killed in a car accident in Jordan in September of this year at the age of 29. The Seattle Mariners held a moment of silence before a game in September in her honor. Rosie was a girlfriend to be proud of.

You go, ball girl.

To The Victor Goes...

If you have been watching the playoffs, specifically the game last night that sends Tampa Bay to the World Series for the very first time, you have experienced the phenomena that I call the "puppy dog pile.” That is the exciting moment at the end of the game when the shortstop throws the ball to get the runner out at second and ends the game in the bottom of the ninth inning. Mayhem ensues and the pitcher throws his arms up in victory. The catcher throws off his bulky helmet and runs at the pitcher, jumping up and wrapping his legs around him in a huge bear hug and suddenly all the other players on the field jump on top of them until there is a teeming mass of legs and heads and hands pounding on each other. Here come the outfielders. It takes them longer to get to the action so they are the last ones there. They jumped on top of the pile until it is a churning lump of humanity, reminiscent of the “monkey piles” we formed in fourth grade.

Unbridled joy and celebration. This, girlfriend, is the prerogative of the victorious. The losers need not apply.

Tampa Bay beat the Red Sox 3 to 1 last night and won the series 4-3. It was a fun series one with some exciting twists, but this young team looked good and solid after a good and solid season and I wish them well in the Series. You’ll find, girlfriend, that when you know a little bit more about any game, you can appreciate it more when the team you and your couch buddy are rooting for loser in a well fought, well played game.

I know. I once told you that baseball will break your heart. And it does, almost every season. It’s no fun to lose. I’ve had the advantage of rooting for several teams this season—the Mariners (St. Rita, patron saint of lost causes, pray for us), the Milwaukee Brewers in the playoffs, and now in this past week, the Red Sox against Tampa Bay. So I found a way to extend the excitement of the baseball season. But last night I had to experience the same thing that my friends who are Yankee fans and are Cubs fans have already experienced. It’s time to close down your season of fan-dom. I know we still have the Series and great baseball ahead. But I’ll be watching it differently. More detached, more open to both teams, less enmeshed.

It’s a sad fact of being a fan that sometimes, it is just better when your team doesn’t make the playoffs or gets eliminated. Then you can return to being a normal human being again. You can sleep better. Maybe you can fold laundry or pay bills or do some other “multi-tasking” thing as you watch. Maybe you can skip a game or two and not be so obsessive about checking the internet. You aren’t sneaking peaks at the computer generated game update on mlb.com and emailing The Boyfriend about the progress of your team. It almost is a relief to finally say, “enough.”

And then you look at the faces of the fans in St. Petersburg and Tampa Bay. You see this incredible joy and victory of the folks wearing Bartlett and Longoria jerseys and jumping up and down and pointing “We’re Number 1!” fingers in the air. You watch the puppy dog pile and note that the players in Tampa are all really young, so they jump higher and with more abandon than a David Ortiz or a Jason Varitek might. You watch the dozens and dozens of champagne bottles get shook and sprayed in the air and over the heads of players and misting the lens of the cameras in the locker room. Then you watch the camera pan to the Red Sox dugout where the disappointment is quiet and deep and palpable. You know that somewhere, someone is destroying all those boxes of pre-printed tee-shirts and caps that proclaimed the Red Sox as the American League champions. And you wish that it was you who were celebrating.

We still have the Series ahead, so baseball isn’t dead yet. But I’ll also be starting to look forward to next year’s season. And that, dear girlfriend, is as American as baseball, apple pie and Mom.

It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over

Girlfriend, I hope that some day you have the experience of waking up in the morning and immediately thinking, “Where’s the sports page?”

That’s what happened to me on this morning. Last night, the Boston Red Sox were obviously on their way to being eliminated by a young, vigorous and well playing Tampa Rays team. It was 7 to 0 in the seventh inning, for heaven’s sake, and even The Boyfriend turned off the television in disgust. (It is sometimes better for your health if your team doesn’t make it into the playoffs. You can just relax and enjoy the games in a detached, appreciative manner instead of being bi-polar for an additional three weeks.)

Anyway, he left the game and I was out with a friend and came home about the time he checked the internet for “the final score”. There was a shout and a yell, “It’s 7-6, we gotta watch the game.” We stampeded to the couch.

And the Red Sox did it. They came from 7 runs behind and in the last three innings, scored 8 runs and earned another chance, another sweaty-heart-pounding-bipolar-episode for the fans. Coco Crisp tied it up with a 10-pitch at bat resulting in one run RBI and JD Drew hit an RBI walk off single to win the game in the bottom of the ninth. Then it was just a bunch of joyous-silly-jumping-up-and-down-puppy-like boys on the field, thrilled that they pulled off the impossible. They haven’t won the series and they are still behind two games, but one of the best parts of baseball is when the team you are rooting for pulls it off even though they should have lost.

Sports fans of all kinds know this feeling. This is not particular to baseball. But what does seem to be unique is the rapidity of how things can change. In soccer, players score one goal at a time. But in baseball, a player’s at bat can jump the score anywhere between one run to four runs in a single bat, So even when the game plods for several innings, things can change quickly. It ain’t easy. There wasn’t a Red Sox fan in Fenway at the beginning of the seventh inning that thought his or her team was going to win last night. A bunch of them headed home because it was late and they wanted to beat traffic. But suddenly there was a wave of good hitting and missed fielding that resulted in the crowd being back in the game again. And despite a gloomy first six innings, heck, here came the Red Sox coming from behind for the largest playoff comeback since 1929 (where the Phillies over came an 8-0 deficit against the Cubs.). This is what you pray for when you watch your team but never believe it will happen. Last night, it happened.

That’s what is so great about baseball. It really ain’t over ‘til it’s over. And it still ain’t over. Boston and Tampa meet again on Saturday and Tampa leads the series 3-2. But it still reminds me that baseball is a great game, filled with uneventful innings and soaring moments. And you reach for the sports page in the morning to relieve the impossibility and to understand what you really saw.

Who's On First?

You may have never seen this famous baseball skit or you may have memorized the entire thing, but it still is one of the best comedy sketches about baseball that ever was written. If you want to know baseball, you have to be familar with the "Who's on First?" sketch by Abbott and Costello. I've included the video here for you viewing pleasure and a link to the script just for fun. It has definitely has withstood the test of time!

Here's a link to The Video: "Who's On First?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sShMA85pv8M

Here's a link to The Script: "Who's On First?"
http://www.baseball-almanac.com/humor4.shtml

Songs of the Season

For me, one of the delights of the post season games (especially in the World Series) is hearing the Star Spangled Banner played at the beginning of the game. It’s not a secret that one of my biggest desires and most impossible dreams is to sing the Star Spangled Banner before a baseball game. That probably won’t happen in my lifetime, but I always enjoy hearing other folks take it on as part of the baseball season. There’s been a trend in the last twenty years to spice it up a bit and put a pop feel to it. Some people hate that trend. They feel it is disrepectful. (For example, look up "disrepectful" in the baseball dictionary and you’ll find a picture of Roseanne Barr singing the Star Spangled Banner back in 1990. God awful!) But I like the trend. It inspires me.

I’ve been thinking about the songs of baseball games. Some teams, like the Red Sox, have their own song tradition (Neil Diamond's Sweet Caroline before the bottom of the eighth inning) but almost all teams share the tradition of three songs played during the game.

Take Me Out to the Ball Game

Take Me Out to the Ball Game was written in 1908 and is the unofficial anthem of baseball. The words were written in 1908 by Jack Norworth (who also wrote Shine On Harvest Moon) who while riding a subway train, was inspired by a sign that said "Baseball Today — Polo Grounds". The song is traditionally sung during the seventh-inning stretch of a baseball game and tradition has it that fans sing along. What’s fun about this song is that it was originally written for a woman to sing as part of a duet. Baseball in the early century was seen more as a male pasttime, and this song is from the perspective of a woman who wants her date to take her to a baseball game instead of a theater show. See, even early on, girlfriends dug baseball!

Chicago’s Wrigley Field has taken this song a step further and currently invite a guest conductor to lead the crowd. This happens elsewhere, too. I saw Marian Ross (Mrs Cunningham from the Happy Days series) leading the crowd in Kansas City when they played against the Mariners in September. It is said “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” is the third most-often-played song in the United States, after "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "Happy Birthday to You".

There are verses to it as well but nobody ever sings them at a baseball game. However, in Ken Burns documentary series on baseball, Carly Simon sings the verses and pops it up a bit. (Nothing says "old-time" baseball like a tenor banjo!) Here’s a link to that version and a version with versus by the Andrew Sisters and Dan Dailey:

http://skyking162.com/2006/05/take-me-out-to-the-ball-game-mp3/

The fame of the song needs to be laid at the feet of Bill Veeck and Harry Caray of Chicago Fame. Hall of Fame sportscaster Harry Caray, was well known for leading the crowd in a singing of Take Me Out to the Ball Game by leaning out the window of his broadcasting booth and leading the crowd in the song. He started the tradition with the Chicago White Sox, but when he moved over to Wrigley Field, it really becames a Cubs tradition.

When Caray missed a number of games due to a stroke later in his career , "guest conductors" (including once a very drunk Bill Murray) did the honors and continued to be a tradition after Caray's death. If a game goes to the 14th inning at Wrigley Field, they will sing the song again.

Coincidentally, the year the song was written (1908) is the last year the Cubs won the World Series. A good omen?

To read even more about his song, go to this article from the Baseball Hall of Fame.

http://web.baseballhalloffame.org/news/article.jsp?ymd=20080505&content_id=7228&vkey=hof_news

God Bless America

God Bless America was written by Irving Berlin in 1918 and revised in 1938 to be sung and made famous by Kate Smith. When you think of Kate Smith, you think of God Bless America (On the other hand, how often do yo think of Kate Smith?) Woody Guthrie wrote his song This Land Is Your Land in response.

It started out being played before the home games of the Philadelphia Flyers Hockey Team but started becoming part of baseball after the 9/11 Attacks against New York and the World Trade Towers. It replaced Take Me out to the Ball Game during the 7th inning Stretch in many ball parks for a while. Yankee Stadium is the only Major League ballpark to continue to play "God Bless America" in every game during the seventh-inning stretch. Tenor Ronan Tynan is a favorite at Yankee Stadium and usually tapped to sing it during all the including all playoff games. Well, not this year.

http://www.geocities.com/god_bless_america_lyrics/

The Star Spangled Banner

The Star-Spangled Banner is, of course, our national anthem. The lyrics come from a poem written in 1814 by Francis Scott Key who wrote "Defence of Fort McHenry" after seeing the bombardment of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812. The poem was set to the tune of a popular British drinking song and eventually became our National Anthem in 1931 during prohibition under Herbert Hoover. (A bit of irony, isn’t it?) With a range of one-and-a-half octaves, it is a bear for most people to sing and everyone muffs up the words (which I think is a perfect kind of national anthem the noisy, messy democracy we are.) We usually only sing one verse because that’s hard enough to remember itself.

According to Wikipedia, the playing of the song during the seventh-inning stretch of the 1918 World Series is often noted as the first instance that the anthem was played at a baseball game, but evidence shows that the "Star-Spangled Banner" was performed as early as 1897 at opening day ceremonies in Philadelphia and then more regularly at the Polo Grounds in New York City beginning in 1898. However, the tradition of performing the national anthem before every baseball game began in World War II.


The Star Spangled Banner used to be a pretty dry affair, usually with a high school chorus or an operatic singer or more likely a recording during which everyone took off their baseball caps and mumbled along. But things started charging up in 1968 when guitarist Jose Feliciano played it slow and bluesy before a crowd before Game Five of the 1968 World Series between Detroit and St. Louis. It was controversial at the time to sing an “interpretation” , but now, all bets are off. There are now countless different versions, interpretations and styles of the song. In fact, it has become a challenge to make your own unique interpretation. I believe that Aretha Franklin is the queen in this area (you go, girlfriend!) but most fans have their favorites. I’d love to hear a Zydeco version someday with a sassy accordion and banging rubboard. Maybe when I get to sing it, I’ll get Rosie Ledet and the Zydeco Playboys to back me up.

I know it’s impossible to sing for most people. I know some of the renditions of the song out there are truly horrible. I know that even professionals mess up the words. But there is something about those opening notes that’s just scream “play ball.”

I wish I had a recording to share you from the Queen of Soul from a baseball game. But I did find this great version from the 1996 Democratic Convention. Enjoy! And, Play Ball!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jhyxr6gP3eo&feature=related