TDA Bullpen - Our Writers' Blog

Tuesday, September 07, 2004

Hot Winds Blow Hard in September

Blustery Venting in Pennant Chase

The Yankees have asked the commissioner's office for a forfeit in yesterday's first game of a would-be double-header with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays after Tampa didn't show up on time for a 1 p.m. start (delayed to 3 p.m. before being cancelled.). The Yankees claim the D-Rays could've come up to New York on Friday, before Hurricane Frances hit Florida, and thus could've been right on time bright and early Monday morning.

The Devil Rays responded that they never had any intention of coming to New York early, since (a) they had a series with the Tigers scheduled, just in case the hurricane changed directions at the last minute (this happens), and the Tigers didn't leave until Tampa Bay until after Friday night's game had been cancelled. And more to the point, (b) the players have families, many of them live in the Tampa Bay area, so they had other priorities, like making sure everybody stayed safe, that superceded the demands of the Yankees.

This should've closed the issue, but Brian Cashman and Randy Levine of the Yankees were out there having a press conference claiming the Rays should've found a way out. I wonder if it had been the other way around -- let's say the Yankees were due to play in Tampa Bay the day the hurricane was supposed to arrive -- if the Yankees would've been so strident. Maybe Florida, instead of postponing the weekend Cubs series, should've sent nine players through the storm to Old Joe Robbie, had an umpire call "play ball", and claimed three forfeits from the Cubs.

So the protest is pointless. The Commissioner's office has said basically there's no way they're going to call a forfeit for a delay caused by a major weather event. The game will be made up if necessary at some other point (possibly Monday, October 4), although why they can't just play back to back double headers today and tomorrow hasn't been answered.

Do we sense some desperation coming out of the Bronx, that the Yankees want to claim a win without the necessity of playing a game? It's not enough that the Devil Rays stepped off a plane in mid-afternoon and had to rush to the Bronx to play a game, not a batter having had batting practice in five days. The Devil Rays, in a show of "sportsmanship" or something, didn't even reset their rotation. Predictably they lost to the Yankees, who complained that they'd had to come to Yankee Stadium early, and then because they were such great guys, they held batting practice for the benefit of the 500 or so fans who'd shown up for the supposed 1 p.m. start. This despite the fact the Yankees already knew the Rays weren't going to be able to get a flight out until early afternoon.

Did we hear a call from the Yankees front office yesterday to collect donations to send to the victims of Hurricane Frances? I didn't. Maybe the players could've had an impromptu home run derby to raise money for Floridians, with those Yankee fans in attendance pledging money for each batting practice homer.

I seem to recall citizens of 50 states donated over $3 billion of their own private money to help New York out after 9/11. I see that President Bush is using pictures of his throwing out the first ball at Yankee Stadium two weeks after those attacks in his campaign commercials, presumably to demonstrate through the association with the Yankees (which are owned by a man, George Steinbrenner, who has a felony conviction for illegal contributions to the Richard Nixon re-election campaign, ironically enough a Tampa Bay resident) how as a nation we always come together in times of disaster.

The Yankees didn't forfeit any games the week of 9/11 that I recall.

Calling for a forfeit because the other team chose to stay home during a hurricane? Bad sportsmanship, old bean.

Trapped in Oakland, Boston Wins

I've been to major league games in all but three of the current major league cities and maybe 100 more minor league parks. I think Oakland has the best fans of any of them. This is no knock on any other group of fans, especially not my hometown Boston Beaneaters. Oakland fans are more engaged with the game, generally more knowledgeable, and interested in the game of baseball in a way which neither takes the whole enterprise too seriously nor dismisses its many finer points. I have yet to sit down next to a season ticket-holder at the Coliseum and fail to come away from a conversation with them having learned something. It's a mixed-income, mixed-race crowd, something hard to find at many other luxury-priced ballparks these days. You can still get into an A's game for less than the price of a movie. The ballpark isn't great in the sense that it has little pure-baseball charm like a Camden Yards. With the erection of the centerfield monster bleachers for football, you can't even see out of the place. The angles are weird, the stands removed from the action, raised up or pushed back, compared to other ballparks. But the fans show up. They blow trumpets. They carry hand-lettered signs. There are rooting sections for practically every A's player. A legion waves A's flags from centerfield. You couldn't even bring in a flag on a pole in most ballparks these days, under the guise of 'security'. A's fans know their baseball, they follow the game well, they root hard. They complain from time to time, like any set of fans, but it's not the kind of ranting screed I hear every know and then on the radio waves from my fair home town.

So I was a little surprised yesterday when, after a blown call by an umpire, some A's fans protested by showering the field with debris. Manny Ramirez trapped a ball, and the third base umpire missed it and called the batter out to lead off the bottom of the seventh in a tight ballgame. The play was re-shown on the jumbotron, which probably paradoxically backed the umpires into standing by the call since they didn't want to apepar to have their decisions dictated by instant replay. Mark Kotsay, the victim of the play, went ballistic and tried to charge across the diamond; the A's coaching staff restrained him. Oh, the bitter irony -- next inning, Kotsay trapped a ball, one which was correctly called a hit by the same umpire. Kotsay let the kid have an earful. The fans had been treated to video of Manny laughing and Pedro joining in with some kind of joke, which perhaps was taken as mocking of the fans themselves or glee in having got away with something. Neither call ended up really affecting the game, in that the Red Sox blasted their way to the lead in the eighth and it's hard to see how either call would've made a difference. But the debris rained down after the second call, and play was stopped for a few minutes before order was restored.

One suspects A's fans have a frustration as yet unexpressed with the Red Sox after they lost last year's five-game LDS in dramatic fashion. Barry Zito, last night's starter, was at the center of that loss as well. One thing about sports, it's a way of displacing a lot of emotions from the real world, and even within the game itself, emotions get projected onto completely unrelated field activities. Just look at most beanball wars. When the fans get into the action, though, booing somebody, throwing stuff on the field, it's usually over an injustice they feel has put them under the bootheel unfairly just one time too many. It's also got to be hard when the Red Sox are in town, when half the stadium is filled with Boston fans.

Still, I was surprised that the great A's fans could so easily be prodded into an act of projection against the Red Sox and the umpires when the fault was bad play on the field. I tuned into the post-game call-in show on the radio afterwards to try to see what was up.

Ah, those great and reasonable A's fans. They were still ticked on the radio about the umpires and a little bit at Manny and Pedro's antics, to be sure. But they not only blamed Zito, fan after fan dissected the nuances of the match-up. The Red Sox were waiting out Zito's curve ball, knowing that the overhand drop was going over and around the strike zone and that all they had to do was wait for the hanger. Whereas in Boston they'd've been calling for the umpires heads until the wee hours of the morning, the hardcore A's fans were back on baseball quicker than a Ken Macha hook.

That's good sportsmanship.

posted by The Crank 8:13 AM