Category Archives: TSR

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Since it seems to be the most reliably relaxing spot to spend an off day these days, I was back at the ballpark on the Fourth to see Mets/Phils.

The announced temperature was 86 degrees when the first pitch was thrown.  It rose into the low 90’s as the afternoon went on.  A blazing, unobstructed sun and a high level of humidity made it uncomfortable for many.  I actually felt pretty good because I activated my heat resistance plan before walking into Citi Field.  I chugged as much water as my body would hold during the 90 minutes prior to the game’s start and then nursed cold beers at about half the rate I’d consume them when the weather isn’t hot.

I sat up in the right field porch with Jackie from the Bronx and her family.  Tickets were $30 a pop.  Mets starter Chris Young was lights out until he hit the same seventh inning wall that plagued his outing ten days ago against the Yanks.

Young’s return from major shoulder surgery has been a pleasant surprise although his effectiveness seems to go away after six innings.  Met manager Terry Collins likely knows this but continues to keep Young out there a few batters too many.  On Wednesday,  Young took a 2-nil lead into the seventh.  He had thrown just 67 pitches through six.  I would have pulled Young as soon as Juan Pierre singled to start the seventh.  I told my seatmates that the first sign of trouble in the seventh was all I needed to make a change.  But Collins allowed Young to remain in the game and the lanky right-hander proceeded to give up back-to-back homers to Utley and Ruiz.

It turns out the Met bullpen got shellacked in the eighth and ninth, so who knows what would have happened if Young was yanked after the Pierre single.  At the time, the long balls off Young felt like daggers.  Cliff Lee got his first win of the season (spanning 14 starts) for the Phils and looked like the dominant Cliff Lee of yesteryear.  Philly is nine games under break even and will need a big second half to get back into it.  It’ll help to get Ryan Howard back in a few weeks along with Doc Halladay.  Don’t be shocked if the Phils get red hot in August and September and make a run.

Attendance for the holiday matinee was 28,687.  The crowd the night before was 42,516.  Why the difference?  Tuesday night had a fireworks display after the game.  It’s funny how that works.  The Tuesday night crowd was the largest in Citi Field history.  The televised pictures of the upper deck corners revealed a completely packed house just prior to the fireworks display.

-Times sportswriters Ken Belson and Jere Longman have been merciless in their mockery of US track and field’s handling of the third place dead heat between US sprinters Jeneba Tarmoh and Allyson Felix but I don’t get the fuss.  Lacking formal protocol to settle a tie when a spot on the Olympic team is at stake, USATF was forced to find a solution.  What they came up with was fair.  Unless one of the two parties objected, there would be a run-off.  This country’s governing body for track and field acted swiftly and decisively and produced a remedy to a problem it had never been faced with.  Both Belson and Longman had lots of fun taking shots at USATF but neither advanced a better idea.  In the end, Tarmoh conceded the final 100 meter roster spot to Felix.  There was sour grapes bubbling beneath the surface as Tarmoh accepted and then rejected the run-off.  She certainly must have felt emboldened in her bitterness by Belson and Longman’s rip-jobs on the USATF.  Personally, I find it difficult to understand how current technology allows for the conclusion that two moving objects cross a finish line at precisely the same time.  But once that declaration is made, it seems to me that ties of this type should be broken by additional competition.  Had Tarmoh been defeated in the run-off, she would have at least gone down fighting.  Her problem is not with the USATF.  It’s with her inability to accept the odd circumstances associated with technology’s determination that her torso crossed the line at exactly the moment Felix’s did in the final.

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The one and only Mets trip to Wrigley Field this season had been circled on my calendar since the schedule came out late last year.  I went out for the final two contests of the mid-week three game set and had a wonderful time.

The Cubbies are in the early stages of a substantial rebuilding effort.  My Dad and I sat just beyond the vines in right field for Anthony Mike Rizzo’s Cub debut Tuesday night.  The 22-year-old left-handed slugger (pictured above) wore uniform #44 and had a couple hits on his first night wearing the blue hat.  Rizzo is the start of what should be a significant injection of young talent acquired and deployed under first-year personnel whiz Theo Epstein.  The former Red Sox boss is charged with conducting a top-to-bottom overhaul of an organization that stunk in each of the last two seasons.  Epstein will be expected to reload the Cubs with youth before adding much in the way of new, expensive free agents.  He’ll likely be allowed two or three seasons to execute his plan before contention is expected.

Rizzo’s power is legitimate but plate discipline will be a focus as he goes along.  He seems to have trouble laying off pitches at his ankles.

Mets first baseman Ike Davis came up to the big leagues last year with attributes and expectations similar to Rizzo’s.  After a flurry of immediate success, Davis got hurt and missed the final five months of the 2011 season.  His first three months of 2012 have been bad.  On Tuesday night, Davis was tossed from the game when he argued a blown call on a pickoff attempt at first base.  It was the first MLB ejection for Ike and it prompted an unusually emotional on-field defense from his manager Terry Collins (pictured above with Davis and umpire Manny Gonzalez).  It’s way out of character for Collins to yell at an umpire.  Gonzalez likely felt compelled to give Davis the thumb after Ike’s glove brushed him during the initial debate of the call.  Ike’s removal from the game was costly since his spot in the order came up in the next and final inning of a 5-3 loss.

My Dad and I had a red hot at Wrigleyville Dogs on Clark before the game. Earlier in the day we roamed the city as tourists on familiar turf.  We hung out on the concrete blocks along Lake Michigan just north of Irving.  We had lunch at Tamales Garibay on Kedzie.  We grabbed an intensely flavorful cup of joe from the Intelligentsia coffee bar on Broadway.  We knocked around Logan Square and sat in the center of that neighborhood next to the Illinois Centennial Monument which has sadly been defaced with scribble.

The next day I went back to the ballpark and met up in the right field bleachers with my brother Chris and old pal Matt.  The wind was blowing straight out at a good clip so you knew baseballs would be flying.  It turns out it was only the Mets who benefited from the breeze.  Danny Murphy hit his first two home runs of the year.  Ike had one and so did Hairston.  17-1 Mets was the final.  The first Murphy long ball landed just a few rows in front of us.  Sitting in the bleachers gives one the perspective of an outfielder.  The ball is a tiny white speck against the blue sky backdrop and it’s an unusual feeling to interpret its movement as it gets closer to you.

The ballpark was less than full both of the games I attended.  There was plenty of room to stretch out in the bleachers.  I thought the crowd was less annoying than in recent visits.  It got a little boozy on Tuesday night but not in a bad way.  We had a bachelor party sitting behind us on Wednesday but even those guys turned out to be pretty tame.  My only beef about the ballpark experience is the incessant ad reading by the PA announcer 45 minutes before first pitch.  It’s a stream of commercials that runs a solid 15 minutes.

The old guy who sells umbrella-shaped sun hats outside the park was in fine form before both games I attended.  Wearing a leisure suit and speaking through a small mega-phone, the guy’s sales pitch was pitch perfect.  “Get your sun hats, people!  Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Howard Stern wear them.  They come in many different colors.”

Unlicensed vendors sold two dollar bottles of water on Waveland and a father-son combo entertained with aggressively-played percussion on upside-down plastic paint pails.

We went to The Piano Man on Clark and Grace for a round after Wednesday’s game.  It’s just far enough from the park that you avoid the loudmouths.  The sixteen-ounce cans of Old Style are ice cold.  Yum.

My brother Tim took me to the airport Thursday morning.  We squeezed in breakfast at Mac’s in Park Ridge before the drop-off.  Mac’s opens at 5:30 AM.  When we arrived at that time, the griddle was already hot and the coffee had already been brewed.  We were in and out in 20 minutes.  I‘ll repeat what I‘ve said here before: the corned beef hash at Mac’s is as good a way to start one’s day as there is.