In early June I went down to Baltimore and Washington DC and took in two games at Camden Yards and Nationals Park respectively. Two weeks ago I was in Boston at Fenway watching the Sox come back in the 9th inning to beat the Tigers and in the process created an additional panoramic of Fenway to add to my growing collection. So here are all three for your viewing pleasure. I guess the goal now is to take panoramics from every MLB stadium. Three down, twenty seven to go.

Nationals Park – Home of the Washington Nationals

Camden Yards – Home of the Baltimore Orioles

Fenway Park – Home of the Boston Red Sox

This weekend, the Red Sox were down in the Bronx taking on the Yankees in a typical late August four game series. The teams split the series, with each team winning two games. But here is the interesting thing. The two winning pitchers for the Red Sox were Clay Buchholtz and John Lester, who combined earn about $4MM a year. The Red Sox losing pitchers were Josh Beckett and John Lackey, who combined make around $30MM a year. Now that’s NOT getting your money’s worth.

Spongebob going over the ground rules with the Umpires at a Somerset Patriots game. :-P

This past weekend, I was down in the Baltimore-Washington area with the family. The main reason we went there was to see the Red Sox play the Orioles on Sunday. On a whim, we also went to see the Washington Nationals game in their somewhat new stadium on Saturday evening (vs the Cincinnati Reds).

With these visits to these two MLB stadiums, I took a few pictures, including stitching together a series of photos of each of the stadiums to create panoramics of each one. So here they are. Click on the images to view larger versions.

Nationals Park – Home of the Washington Nationals

Camden Yards – Home of the Baltimore Orioles

The iconic baseball field and house that was the centerpiece of what is still the most iconic baseball films ever is up for sale. The baseball field and house in the cornfield in Dyersville, Iowa is up for sale for $5.4MM. Bringing the film’s iconic line, “If you build it, they will come”, to reality, the owners of the field have created a cottage industry around the film and the field, keeping it open for baseball pilgrims who want to play the game there. Personally, if I ever am out in Iowa, I know I’m going to make a pit stop there in Dyersville!

If you’ve ever played baseball, you know how using a brand new, slick baseball can be an adventure unless you “rub it down” and take the shine off. A time honored pre-game ritual in the majors is to rub new baseballs down with mud. Here’s a great article from CNN about where baseball’s ‘magic mud’ comes from and the story behind the tradition:

On August 16, 1920, Ray Chapman, a shortstop for the Cleveland Indians, was crowding the plate in the top of the fifth inning when he was struck in the head by an underhand curve ball from New York Yankees pitcher Carl Mays. Days later, Chapman became the first and only player killed by a pitch in Major League history.
“From that point forward the umpires were looking for a way to get a better grip for the pitcher on a new baseball,” Bintliff says. “They tried tobacco juice, shoe polish, dirt from the infield and all of those things scarred or damaged the leather.”
Lena Blackburne, a manager for the Philadelphia Athletics, had an idea. He cured and aged mud from a fishing hole near his home and took it back to the Athletics clubhouse.

Some new footage was of Babe Ruth was recently discovered in a home movie collection from a family in New Hampshire.

The latest Babe Ruth film, unseen publicly until now, is part of a 90-second clip shot from the first-base stands at Yankee Stadium. There is no sound. But there are sweeping views of the park. And there is Ruth, obvious by his shape and waddle.

Here’s hoping this discovery will place a curse on the Yankees this post seeason. :)

As I wake up from last weekend’s drubbing at the hands of the Yankees, and stare at the train wreck that the 2009 Red Sox season has become, I continue to be amazed at the comedy of errors that the Red Sox’ front office has made at the critical position of shortstop. Call it the “Curse of Orlando” or maybe the “Curse of Nomaaaah”. It is true that since that fateful trade deadline deal in 2004 that sent Nomar Garciaparra packing, the Red Sox have won two World Series (two more than I anticipated in my lifetime), and they have consistently been in the playoff hunt. You can’t argue with that success. However, when you “peel back the Onion” a bit, you see a concerning trend of decisions and moves, none more head scratching than the revolving door of underwhelming shortstops.

Most recently, they traded away their latest mistake, Julio Lugo, and have brought back 2006 re-tread Alex Gonzalez, a great fielder who can’t hit is way out of a paper bag. Since their magical run to the 2004 World Series, this is the list of shortstops they have run in and out of (and back in to) town:

2004 – Orlando Cabrera, Pokey Reese
2005 – Edgar Renteria, Alex Cora, Hanley Ramirez
2006 – Alex Gonzalez
2007 – Royce Clayton, Julio Lugo
2008 – Julio Lugo, Jed Lowrie
2009 – Julio Lugo, Nick Green, Jed Lowrie, Alex Gonzalez

What’s most baffling to me is that all of this could have been avoided if they just signed Cabrera after the 2004 World Series for, if I recall, $25-30Mil over 3 or 4 years. I could not believe they did not do it then, and I still curse the decision. This inept judgment was made exponentially worse when they turned around and signed Edgar Renteria for 4 years/$40Mil, and he turned out to be a bust of epic proportions. A few years later, they did essentially the same thing (!!) by signing Julio Lugo to a 4 year/$36Mil contract, and he too was an epic bust. Renteria and Lugo combined have cost the Sox more than double what Cabrera would have cost. Through all of this, “OC” had, and continues to have, solid performance on the field and at the plate for Anaheim and Oakland. Instead of traipsing out 10+ different shortstops during that 3-4 year period, they could have had the steady “OC” there. Now we all know that Hanley Ramirez could have been that stud shortstop for the Sox, but he was traded away while Theo was walking out of Fenway in a gorilla costume, a deal that has been beneficial for both organizations but still always prompts the “what if” questions.

So as we slog through the dog days of August, and the Sox try to claw back into the Wild Card race, lets hope that the three headed shortstop monster of Alex Gonzalez, Jed Lowrie, and Nick Green can pull something out of their collective hat and help turn this thing around. I’m not holding my breath.

I came across a great site today called Flip Flop Fly Ball. The site’s author Craig Robinson essentially takes run of the mill baseball statistics and information and turns them into graphic works of art. For example, the chart below displays the direction that the batters face within each of the MLB stadiums (click to see the full sized image).

There is a great visual of the price variance of MLB tickets (with the Yankees leading the way), the types of MLB stadiums, and my personal favorite, the monetary value of MLB’s stolen bases if they were actually stolen.

On this day, June 29, 1905, Moonlight Graham played in the only game of his major league career.   Archibald “Moonlight” Graham’s short career is significant because its a central storyline in W.P. Kinsella’s book Shoeless Joe, which was the basis for ( in my opinion) the greatest baseball movie ever made, Field of Dreams. Here is his MLB career line:

The story of Moonlight Graham was depicted semi-accurately in the movie:

On June 29, the Giants were the visiting team against the Brooklyn Superbas. For the bottom of the eighth inning, Graham was sent in to play right field, replacing George Browne. In the top of the ninth inning, Graham was on deck (scheduled to be the next batter) when his teammate Claude Elliott flied out resulting in the third and final out. Graham played the bottom of the ninth in right field but never came to bat, and that game turned out to be his only appearance in the major leagues.

After his short visit to the majors, Moonlight completed his medical degree and moved to Chisholm, MN where he served that town as “Doc” Graham for close to 50 years. In the movie Field of Dreams, Burt Lancaster brilliantly plays “Doc” Graham in one of the great sequences in movie history. One of my favorite lines from “Doc” Graham:

Well, you know I… I never got to bat in the major leagues. I would have liked to have had that chance. Just once. To stare down a big league pitcher. To stare him down, and just as he goes into his windup, wink. Make him think you know something he doesn’t. That’s what I wish for. Chance to squint at a sky so blue that it hurts your eyes just to look at it. To feel the tingling in your arm as you connect with the ball. To run the bases – stretch a double into a triple, and flop face-first into third, wrap your arms around the bag. That’s my wish, Ray Kinsella. That’s my wish. And is there enough magic out there in the moonlight to make this dream come true?

The way Lancaster delivers this line is amazing. You can see the twinkle in his eye and you get the feeling that he is just dying to jump into the batters box. So on this June 29th, pay an ode to “Moonlight” Graham, and to the idea that you can achieve what you want, even if it is for only half an inning in the field.

Alex Rodriguez completely comes clean and admints he took ‘roids from 2001-03 and that he’s not exactly sure what he was taking. At least he has the balls to stand up and admit he did it, even though he denied it on 60 Minutes about a year ago.

Great article about how the Tampa Bay Rays had to scramble to find hotel rooms because the World Series has been put on hold due to the terrible weather in the Philadelphia area

The puddles did it. As soon as Jeff Ziegler, the director of team travel for the Tampa Bay Rays, saw water covering the infield at Citizens Bank Park on Monday night, he realized Game 5 of the World Series might be suspended. Instantaneously, Ziegler also realized he needed to locate hotel rooms for 170 waterlogged people.

Ziegler called hotels near downtown Philadelphia, but he had as much success as someone selling $600 doorknobs. Not only did he discover that finding the 87 rooms the Rays needed was impossible, but hotel manager after hotel manager also said there was barely a spare cot. The puddles were growing bigger.

I originally wrote this post last Thursday at around the bottom of the 6th inning of Game 5 between the Sox and the Rays. As we all know, the Sox staged a comeback for the ages in that game but, alas, just prolonged the inevitable as they lost in Game 7 to the Rays. So the post below was delayed, but the story remains the same (to quote Led Zepplin):

In the end, the Red Sox missed Manny more than they thought. But it was more than that. The Rays “dropkicked murphyed” the Red Sox all over Fenway Park, then once they were done kicking, they shipped them off to the off-season.

In the three games at Fenway Park (stats below through 6th inning of Game 5 [editor's note]), the Rays outscored the Redsox 29-5 and outhit the Sox 34-20. Collectively, David Ortiz, Jason Varitek and Jacoby Ellsbury went a combined 3 for 43, or an .070 batting average for those of you keeping score at home. And I won’t even go near the pitching stats. That is not a formula for winning games. But more than anything, the Rays made the Red Sox look like a very slow, plodding and old team.

The stats above were through the 6th inning of Game 5. Since the series went 7 games, the numbers changed a bit by the end of the series, but the story is still the same. Papi, the Captain, and Jacoby did not show. The off season should be interesting. And with that, I will keep my Red Sox posts to a minimum until next summer.

Oh my lord. TBS is having major technical difficulties and they can’t broadcast Game 6 of the ALCS as of this post. They have been showing Dick Clark Bloopers and Practical Jokes and Cedric the Entertainer. Could this go down as the Cedric the Entertainer Game? Similar to the Heidi game from the 1970′s.

TBS’s tagline is “TBS: Very Funny” Dripping with irony.

Someone is getting fired tonight.

Red Sox – 8
Tampa Bay – 7

Wow, what a comeback win. Seven runs down in the 7th inning. No expectations here. We still have to win two games down in the Trop. Not going to be easy, even with Beckett and Lester.

Update: Great article by Bill Simmons on last night’s game and the emotional roller coaster that it was. The following exchange was exactly how I was feeling:

We [Simmons and his Dad] were having the funeral for the 2008 Red Sox. Heck, I even gave one of the eulogies. Called my dad during the seventh inning for the requisite, “Yup, we just didn’t have it this year,” conversation and everything. I remember uttering the words, “I wanted us to win tonight if only because it would have been another two days where I didn’t have to think about Matt Cassel.” I remember Dad admitting, “I turned it off 20 minutes ago; I’m watching ‘ER.’” I couldn’t even blame him. We hung up.And yet …I didn’t turn off Game 5. I did the old “half-watching it, going through e-mails and not getting totally invested even though I totally was” thing.

I had a blog post ready to go, extolling the season and the fact that the “Ghost of Manny Ramirez” was haunting them. But somehow, they lived to see another day. Yes, the upcoming sports weekend did get a hell of a lot better last night.