Snowman On Fire

In t-shirt form, at least. After sitting shiva (electronically) for Jewish Fashion Conspiracy, the company that originated the “Jews For Jeter” t-shirt I was faced with a quandry about my favorite Yankees t-shirt: wear it and risk Premio sausage stains rendering it unfit for a trip outside, or retire it like an out-of-print Beanie Baby? Fortunately, the shirt has been picked up by Pop Judaica’s store. So the shirt is outdoor-safe, but I have to lay off the Carvel: it only comes in sizes up to XXL.

If you’re wondering what the fakokta letters are on the front, it’s not a funky pair of silent hebrew letters - it’s the two loudest letters on the East Coast - a stylized NY. I guess interlocking them would have been confusing to the reader.

Citibank has a plate full of worry right now: limited bonuses, no corporate jet deal, and a $20M/year naming rights agreement with the Mets. No matter what, I think this one ends badly for the fans, and that’s where MLB should draw the line and start enforcing some sanity around player contracts, the stadiums that house the players with those contracts, and the cost to go to a ballgame in the current economy.

Normally I’d just scoff at large contracts and consider it fodder for some summer time, post-hockey season blogging. But my Devils ticket partner of the past six seasons decided not to invest in playoff tickets this year: of the eight of us in the group, nobody wants to shell out the money up front for the seats (it’s a sizeable commitment the Devils are asking for, in February, no less). The economy is going to take a bite out of everything, including the $12 sausage and pepper sandwich you’d normally wolf down when the Mets went to their bullpen in the 4th inning.

If the Mets lose $20M in stadium funding, you can bet that comes out of someone else’s pocket - if they draw 3 million fans this year, that means each fan will have to contribute $7 per game to make up the difference. So parking goes up $2, beer goes up another buck, the Premios cost another deuce, CrackerJack will cost the same as an equivalent volume of silver jewelry, and you extract another few dollars from the fan. There are only three problems with this scenario:

1. Fewer fans are likely to come to games, especially if the average cost per game goes up. New stadium or not, a large percentage of the “regulars” who live in Manhattan are looking for work, not foul balls.

2. It assumes infinite elasticity of demand for stadium concessions. More and more people are going to forgo that extra beer if each one costs as much as a six pack of something imported from the Czech Republic.

3. It sends the wrong message to fans: the players are important, the field is important, so if you want a team, suck it up and pay for it.

Here’s how I’d solve the problem - and realize that I’m not a labor lawyer, I’m not a contracts person, and I’m not running a ball club. But I do know what it’s like to spend $300 to see supposed superstars fall apart at clutch times, knowing that your exhorbitant ticket, food and parking charges are paying for them. All I ask is that the players with the largest stacks of chips contribute to the naming rights contracts.

I said it. If you’re making over, say, $3 million a year, then you get hit with a 5% tax that goes into a league-wide fund to pay off these insane stadium naming contracts. Otherwise, the taxpayers end up indirectly footing the bill, either through TARP funds that go to the bank that pay for “marketing expenses” (like naming rights) or through paying through the nose, wallet and teeth at the gate. So do a double good deed, relieve the taxpayers of an additional burden, and rename the stadiums for people and things — local color, local celebration, local heros. I miss Veterans Stadium, Three Rivers Stadium, the Boston Garden and yes, even the Brendan Byrne Arena. Isn’t it obscene that there isn’t a Jackie Robinson Stadium in New York? How about a Freedom Field, in honor of the victims of 9/11?

Unless you think that Mark Teixeira needs every dollar of the $17.5 million he’s going to make this year ($12.5M in contract, $5M in signing bonus). If we’re going to get upset about outrageous bonuses and cost structures that are out of control, then we should do it across the board: executives and athletes. More kids will idolize sports figures than the people who are trying to fix the economy. Why not get the athletes to demonstrate a little leadership in the only kind of “fixing” that belongs in sports — fixing the hearts and minds of the fans.

I am appealing to the Interwebs for help in solving what has become a family mystery. Unlike most Jewish family stories, this doesn’t involve food, potential injury or Florida; this is about a bobblehead doll. The very first bobblehead doll, in particular.

During 1960 and 1961, a series of 15 bobble heads were made representing 12 Major League Teams and 3 Pacific Coast League teams. They are made of a (now) brittle plaster or soft clay/ceramic mixture, much denser and more poorly weighted than today’s acrylic bobbles. Some time during the last 1960s, an aunt (I think) gave this Minnesota Twins bobble to me as a gift, and I’ve had it since. It sat on a shelf for the better part of 15 years, then in a drawer, and has remarkably few dings or chips.

I have no idea how it ended up with my family. I have four theories: (1) someone visited the Twin Cities in 1961 and got this as a stadium give-away, which seems unlikely for a variety of reasons; (2) a visitor from Minnesota brought this as a gift for one of my cousins, and my aunt gave it to me after it sat on his (or her) shelf for half a decade, which is somewhat less unlikely but still requires more Jewish geography than Google Maps would support or (3) they were sold in other Major League Ballparks, and a cousin bought it on a summer outing, with it ending up in my hands much in the manner of my previous idea or (4) the distributor or manufacturer tried to leverage local Topps distribution and left a sample in my grandfather’s general store (the source of my pasteboard empire in the day), and my uncle (who worked in, and later owned the store) brought it home, where my aunt passed it along to me.

Option (4) makes the most sense, as my sole recollection of the bobble is getting it at that particular aunt’s house, and nobody (that I know of) had family west of the Delaware River, let alone the Big Muddy. If we were getting in the car to visit, it was a trip to the deli and perhaps the beach, but not a baseball game in Minneapolis.

If you, gentle reader, know any of the backstory of the 1960-1961 colored base bobble heads, leave a comment. I’m looking for data on how they were distributed or sold, how a Twin ended up on the right coast, and clues to a reasonable chain of possession that ended above my desk, where all of my sports memories have lived for decades.

Billy Martin, the late manager of various 1970s Yankees teams, whose career arc had more loops, detours, and sideways movement than the emotional rollercoaster it described, once said: “When you’re running horseshit, you’re horseshit.” Those are true Billy clubs of words, captured with the eloquence I’d expect out of baseball’s disco era. Like a good Zen koan, there’s both meaning in what it says and what it doesn’t say - when things are bad (economy or the Islanders’ goaltending, for example), no amount of well-wishing can make them better; similarly when things are running well nothing (2-goal deficits, 2-goal leads blown, empty net situations) can make them turn toward the southern end of the horse. The Devils are Billy Martin inverted right now, and that is a good thing.

Just to put this back into my favorite 10-game chunking: since their 11-7-2 mark at game 20 the team has gone 21-8-1 without Brodeur in net. That’s 43 out of 60 possible points, or about 1.3 points a game. The games give us something to cheer about, and are full of moments to cheer, even if they come late in the game (great for those of us who have missed the first periods of the last three games anyway).

I find myself in a strange position this first week of October: There’s baseball on TV, and I am only counting the days until hockey coverage begins. In every fall since I’ve been able to carve out sports-watching time (read: after the great sleeplessness of having two toddlers), I’ve been able to cheer for some combination of New York hardball teams. This season was one to forget across the entire Tri-State area: this may be the first year I didn’t blog once about Major League Baseball until after the regular season reached its regular and final conclusion.

There were highlights: I completed my annual Willie Stargell pilgrimmage, enjoying Chicken on the Hill, sporting my Cooperstown Classic t-shirt with a large snowman on the back, watching the Pirates get demolished by Joe Torre’s Dodgers. I watched with interest as Will Venable started in a game for the Padres, joining fellow Princetonian Chris Young in the lower left hand corner of the nation. After those small flashes, though, there weren’t many other bright spots. Kind of a sad season for baseball around here.

But here’s a parting thought: anyone who blamed Joe Torre for the sad state of the New York Yankees should carefully check this week’s NLDS box scores. The Dodgers are doing more damage to the Cubs than a decade’s worth of Bartman incidents. Torre has a hodgepodge of slightly muted stars, cast off from other teams - Manny Ramirez, Juan Pierre, Nomar Garciaparra - and he’s made them into his team. So perhaps I am watching baseball, slyly, out of the corner of my eye, hoping that Joe Torre is vindicated for the wonderful years he poured his heart and soul into the Bronx.

A family trip to Cincinnati was punctuated with a trip to see Reds game.  Their relatively new stadium is a wonderful place to see a baseball game on a spring afternoon. On the plus side: parking was easy an hour before the first pitch. Entrance was eased by plenty of security and ticket scanners. Large-bore kielbasa at the food concession with outboard, individually wrapped packages of kraut. To top it off, we never missed more than a single at-bat of play for food, drink or bathroom excursions. Everything flowed together (Ohio stories require river references) to make it an outstanding game day experience.

One of my less-secret goals in life is to visit every Major League Baseball stadium, to sample their food and comment on the sight lines and respect their new or old histories by refusing to use corporate names when referring to a field of play. Our Reds seats (acquired through Stubhub a week before the game) left us in the second row of the left field bleacher balcony, with a view fit for the day. “Great” and “American” are perfect compound adjectives for baseball, but I’ll refrain from adding them to the stadium moniker to invoke an insurance company by name. Deep down, it’s still an echo of Riverfront Stadium, home to the Red Machine of the 1970s to me, which is what set the stage for the afternoon’s game. Like visitingPNC Park last year, there was a childhood memory waiting for me inside the gates.

I can trace my childhood love of baseball to October 11, 1972; a month to the day from attaining double digits in age and three years precisely before my Bar Mitzvah. As I sat on the floor with my twin friends Scott and Glenn, watching our favorite Pittsburgh Pirates play the Big Red Machine in the National League Championship Series, Game 5, bottom of the ninth, tie score, George Foster on 3rd base with Bucs reliever Bob Moose on the mound. Moose threw a wild pitch, Foster scored to win the game for Cincinnati and I saw my friends’ mother cry. It is one of the most amazingly trivial pieces of knowledge I carry around, yet for 80% of my life it’s been one I can recall as the moment at which I correlated sports with something I felt, not just something I watched or a champion for whom I cheered. It was easy to get caught up in the Miracle Mets of 1969 or Joe Namath and his Jets; it was hard to watch WIllie Stargell, my childhood hero and number-sake, lose one that literally slipped away.

Stepping into the Reds’ ballpark, I wondered if visiting an echo of an event 36 years prior might somehow bring closure. It would be the equivalent of forgiving the girl in your 5th grade class that tortured you over a ridiculously colorful pair of pants, without admitting that you’re secretly happy her life turned into the equivalent of the Reds in the last decade and a half. Like an old Masters’ canvas, though, the answer comes not from recoloring the past but from applying fresh paint over the old to create something of recent memory.

Enter Ken Griffey Jr. On the east coast we have little incentive to follow him, although his pursuit of 600 career home runs has made the occasional breakfast time SportsCenter appearance. Center field in the Reds’ park has a home run counter, tantalizingly set at 598 dings when we arrived. In Griffey’s first at-bat, he deposited a 3-1 pitch into the right field bleachers, igniting fire works in the stands and above the running total. Each inning, each play, became a game of front-running to determine a sequence of hits and base running to bring Junior to the plate, giving us a chance to be first-hand witnesses to history. For a game in which my main interest was sampling the hot sausages, the baseball mattered more.

For anyone who doubts there is redemption through baseball; that family memories can be intertwined with a sport in which the names of players, teams and stadiums change literally with the seasons, I offer this: leaving Cincinnati this morning, my son found his game ticket in his pocket and said “Have to keep that one, #599″. No matter where the paper stub ends up, he’ll keep that one.

Whenever we teach “teamwork” to our kids or employees, we always imply that it’s intra-team work. And when we teach players to establish goals, far too often we imply winning or awards, rather than simple objectives that demonstrate improvement in any aspect of the game. This video segment from ESPN shows what happens when team work means looking beyond your uniform crest, and a goal is something that hasn’t yet been achieved, but is a swing, a stroke, a shot, an attempt away, separated only by practice and attitude.Scrap every bit of youth sportsmanship training there is, and just have the young sports in your home, as well as any sports parents you know, watch this clip. Even better that the batter literally carried by other team mates wears #8: Somewhere in heaven, Willie Stargell is proud of everyone involved.

One of my co-workers refers to anything that involves confusion, lack of leadership, conflicting goals, and mild amounts of directionless meandering as a “goat rodeo.” That’s the best metaphor for the New York Yankees right now. A-Rod and Posada are hurt (hey, A-Rod, for $275 million dollars, try staying in shape in the off-season); the Yankees can’t buy a hit with runners in scoring position, and Bobby Abreau looks like he phones it in from right field about one in every four plays. In tonight’s Subway Series game Abreau’s throw on a sacrifice fly had a better shot of reaching Joe Girardi (in the dugout) than Molina (fillling in for the one-armed Posada).

The Yankees are in last place. And not just one of those artifacts of scheduling, short-term respite at the bottom of the statistical ladder; they’ve earned this one. With a new manager, key injuries and a pitching rotation that hasn’t improved one iota over last year, I’m inclined to see what happens, making it all the more amusing to see the front office goat herder himself (that would be Hank Steinbrenner) stage mini-outrages in public. If Steinbrenner really wants to improve the Yankees, he can stop with the histrionics and start by finding someone who can pitch, followed by someone who can hit when there’s another pinstriped uniform in view on second or third base. And maybe provide some much-needed leadership on the team in the process.

My friend Claire always wonders what makes us love sports so much. By “us”, of course, she means guys who have severe Claire-attention deficit problems when a game of even minor interest is broadcast over television, radio, internet, or via grunts and hand signals nearby. I’ve thought about her question for close to four years, much more so this past hockey season as each time the Devils lost, I sunk into a foul mood that even Ben & Jerry’s could not redress.

I think the answer hit me after the Devils decided not to show up in Philadelphia last Friday night. We love sports and sporting events because, for a short time, we do not distinguish between the players and ourselves. When they win, we win; when they lose, we lose and feel anguish; when they flirt with disaster our heart rate skyrockets and when disaster is averted by a goal post, poke check or shot that sails wide, we breathe easier on our way to the bathroom or beer cooler. What man hasn’t personally felt (or at least imagined) the cold ground striking the back of Charlie Brown’s head as Lucy snaps the football away from him? Even in cartoons, we time share with our favorite players.

I think this self-identification is part of the charisma that drives March Madness to ever increasing levels of public visibility. You can be a fan, an alum, or just a long-shot bettor on a school that doesn’t get so much as an ESPN Bottom Line score during an entire academic year, but once you make the Dance, everybody wants to be you if only for a little while. It’s also why all men tear up, ever so slightly, as CBS rolls “One Shining Moment.” We get to trade mental places one more time, and when the clock strikes midnight all of the Cinderellas, young and old, begin to dream of next year’s ball.

I came to this deep, Ganesh-given insight thanks to Bubba, who noticed my funk on Saturday morning. “Even if the Devils don’t do well in the playoffs,” he argued, “another season starts in the fall, all over again.” That was it. We love sports on a tribal level, wearing the colors, designs and marks of our alter egos, but we also love them on a temporal level. The seasons change - football, hockey, baseball, vacation, as the joke goes - and yet things don’t age as long as we have a fresh scoresheet, an empty stats page and an entire schedule of games to fuel our double lives.

Now that college basketball has been safely tucked away for the summer, it’s time to truly focus on the rites of spring: Passover, NHL Playoffs, and the disaster known as the Yankees bullpen.

It’s been a few days since Joe Torre’s implicit dismissal as the Yankee skipper, coming full circle with Joe Girardi’s filling the managerial jersey today. I’m still flabbergasted by this move: Torre was micro-managed from above (like he couldn’t figure out how to pitch Joba Chamberlain himself?), was given horrible resources to manage (his pitchers either sucked or were ancient or both, with the exception of Chamerblain), and had to deal with the media circus known as Alex Rodriguez. And he made the playoffs, again, as he did every single year he was in the Bronx. Normally I’m not a big LA fan, but go get’em Joe, and return some of that Dodger blue pride to the La-la-valley.

Then there’s A-Rod. The picture says it all — I snapped this one coming out of the Hynes/Convention Center “T” stop on the Green Line in Boston, halfway between the hub of the universe and Fenway Park, the true heliocentric point for the sun shining on Red Sox Nation. Why would the Sox want A-Rod? They actually won two World Series titles without him, and seeing how much Rodriguez failed to contribute in terms of baseball performance or on-field leadership, he’d only reverse the winning curve again. What on earth are A-Rod and Scott Boras thinking? That fans stop caring after the last regular season game? That someone who shelled out thousands of dollars on season tickets, and then doubled down for the playoffs, is going to think it’s fair that their signature player checks out for the postseason? The Yankees offered him more than he’s worth, which isn’t atypical, but somehow Boras thinks A-Rod can get more money for more years somewhere else. Loyalty, anyone? What difference will $3-5 million a year make for Rodriguez? Please don’t tell me it’s about the money, or providing for his future after baseball. It’s not about loyalty. Maybe it’s about where A-Rod thinks he can chase Barry Bonds’ record, and he’s shopping for a ballpark, not a team. That I could understand because it fits his public persona so well.

In the warped universe where I’m a baseball GM, here’s how I’d sign Rodriguez: give him a nice base above where the Yankees pitched, but with a negative performance option: Miss the playoffs, and he’ll forfeit the amount that would have been paid by season ticket holders for the divisional and league championship series home games. Get knocked out in the division series, and forgo the LCS home season ticket holder revenue. If you average out to 3.5 home games, $100 a ticket, and 15,000 season ticket holders, that’s $5.25 million a round. And that money would go directly back to the season ticket holders (if the team signed him it clearly had the cash to spare, all I’d be doing is redistributing it to the people who really lose when someone isn’t a team player.