You aren't driving today, are you?

Ursus - thanks, that's a shame about Dodgertown. It was a great facility for 'just' a training camp although I recall the local 'Vero Beach Dodgers' play there. I enjoyed watching baseball there, similar in atmosphere to pre-season friendlies. Some very friendly (and patient!) american folk also helped explain what was going on.

I think Mr Roberts' claim to baseball fame would have been very early in last century when he would have been of sport playing age. I think it was only 'rumoured' that he played but then again that's part of the appeal to me.

There's significant hope that another team (perhaps the Orioles) will take over the facility, so all is not lost.

There is an evocative slide show and related article from the New York Timeshere and an ESPN extravaganza here.

Spring training is one of the truly great things about baseball, though even it has become significantly more corporate in the last 20 years.

Urs - no, tomorrow. Tonight is Toronto Eagles U-11s. I'm hoping to get 8 solid hours tonight.

I've only skimmed National Pastime--I hoped it would be useful for my research, but it was only tangential. Thankfully I got it for free.

The Dodgers leaving Vero Beach is even more sad because a lot of the facilities--like the movie theater, golf course, and pool--were built so the black players could relax along with their white teammates, as Jim Crow was very much alive down there in the 1940s and 1950s. The Dodgers were pioneers, and their leaving that history of Dodgertown behind.

I thought that all the Yankee haters might get a chuckle out of this.....

---------------------------

This evolution of the game is to its detriment, says deadspin.com editor Will Leitch in his book God Save the Fan: How Preening Sportscasters, Athletes Who Speak in the Third Person, and the Occasional Convicted Quarterback Have Taken the Fun Out of Sports (And How We Can Get It Back) (Harper). The baseball-watching experience, on TV and at the ballpark, has been degraded, he writes, be it by beer advertisers who “not only think [men are] morons, but also that we’re monsters,” or by brainless fans in the stands. (“If you have a sign that spells out the name of the network showing the game, you are a douchebag.”)
Singled out for contempt: Yankee Stadium. “There’s not a stadium in sports that’s a less enjoyable place to watch a sporting event,” Leitch writes, likening it to a “wealthy uncle’s house, the one who never talks to you, [and] works for some evil law firm somewhere.” (The “ASS-HOLLLLE!” chants are charming, too.)

Soon, Stade Fasciste will be demolished. But rejoice not — it will only be replaced by a gargantuan, gleaming edifice that’s just like its old self, but more so. More boorish fans. More nauseating symbols of arrogance and entitlement. Louder loudspeakers for “Cotton-Eye Joe” and “God Bless America.” God help us all.

Inca - what research are you referring to? You got a book on the go or something?

Antonio Gramsci wrote:

QUOTE:
Inca - what research are you referring to? You got a book on the go or something?

My dissertation back when I was in grad school. A very ill-defined history of American attitudes towards soccer, hopefully bringing the West Coast more into soccer's early history in America. I did some research in Oneonta, and in the archives of SIU-Edwardsville. I never found many sources for soccer on the West Coast in the early 20th Century, and my grad school career came crashing down in a roughly two-week span last June. I was getting tired of it anyway, but I still hope to write something (if not that, then at least one somewhat related paper that I have an idea for, and I think would be good if I can find the sources).

Jeez, Vernons is really into it. Stade Fasciste?

I have been thankfully gone for the entire "God Bless America" era, but there is real cognitive dissonance between that kind of image and my memories of the Jerry Kenney/Horace Clarke Yankees.

Ursus - that wasn't me - that was part of an article in this week's Phoenix, that starts like this..

Hope springs eternal with each opening day. But even as the sun rises on the new Major League Baseball season, skies are cloudy for the game we love. Echoes of the Mitchell Report’s j’accuse still reverberate. One assumes more names are forthcoming — if not in official documents, then at least in Jose Canseco’s juicy new tell-all. But it’s worth remembering that, in one way or another, the sport has always had a split personality.

Baseball is a game of verdant fields, of balletic athleticism, of beery sunny Sunday afternoons. It’s also one of cheating and meanness and corruption and greed. “Some ballplayers were alcoholics, others gamblers,” writes Northeastern professor Roger I. Abrams in his new book, The Dark Side of the Diamond: Gambling, Violence, Drugs and Alcoholism in the National Pastime (Rounder). “Some were violent sociopaths. Although appealing as an escape from day-to-day life, baseball reflected what we are as a society, warts and all.”

It still does. Just look at Elijah Dukes, who this past year texted a photo of a gun to his estranged wife. (“You dead, dawg,” he intoned on the attendant voicemail.) Or Scott Spiezio, who was recently charged with drunk driving and assault and battery (and four other counts, including hit and run and aggravated assault). Or Jim Leyritz, who kicked off 2008 by pleading not guilty to DUI manslaughter. Guys like that make jerks like A-Rod (opting out, then in, for mega millions) or Nomar (snubbing kids on Dodgers autograph day) seem saintly.

This spring, the usual annual crop of baseball books is being tossed onto shelves. But not all offer heartwarming tales of father-son catches and scrappy bench-player heroics. Rather — perhaps feeling that ill wind blowing in from right field — many are zeroing in on the darker aspects of America’s game: baseball’s seven deadly sins.


You can find the whole article here.

http://thephoenix.com/Article.aspx?id=58303&page=1

Ah, that sounds more like you.

I was thrown by the large space between grafs. Apologies.

That is all.

Ursus - thanks for the Dodgertown links, esp. the ESPN one. I'm glad I went to Dodgertown now. One thing that struck me when I was there was how open and relaxed it was.

I just heard that the Dodgers are going to be playing an exhibition game at the Coliseum. Are you going, Inca?

I follow the Brewers, there was bugger all else to do in Milwaukee.

Soccer Scrimmage wrote:

QUOTE:
I just heard that the Dodgers are going to be playing an exhibition game at the Coliseum. Are you going, Inca?

Wasn't there--tickets sold out in minutes both times they released them. Plus, there was the UCLA game yesterday, and I knew that parking would be horrendous (the lots around the Coliseum usually fill up about 4 hours in advance of an in-demand game there; people that live nearby sell parking on their front lawns for about $50). The Dodgers opened up the parking at Dodger Stadium for free and ran shuttles; in great Dodger organizational fashion you had to call a number earlier in the week and make a reservation, and there were still thousands of people waiting to board the shuttles at the first pitch.

The Dodgers held the game as a fundraiser for their cancer charity. There were over 120,000 people paying a lot of money for the game, and they reportedly raised $1 million dollars. Not to sound like an ingrate for raising $1m for charity, but that seems like a low number to me.

Some pictures: