On-deck at the bay
The Cards are in San Francisco tonight. Bonds chasing Ruth as Pujols chases Bonds. There's a guy dressed as Babe Ruth in a life raft out in the bay The Redbird television announcers keep dwelling on the fact that the game isn't sold out. Maybe the fans are just waiting to come tomorrow night when Matt Morris pitches against his former team...---
White Sox catcher A.J. Pierzynski sure knows how to make friends, doesn't he?
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The Cardinals unveiled a nice addition to Busch Stadium during the last homestand-- pictures of their retired-numbered players on the leftfield wall. The added good news is that the campaign to retire Willie McGee's uniform #51 is gaining traction. An on-line p.r. campaign by his most cultish fans has elevated to the mainstream with the publishing of this Post-Dispatch column last week.
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Speaking of those retired numbers, I began rereading a 14-year-old book this week called "Diz-- The Story of Dizzy Dean and Baseball During the Great Depression" by Robert Gregory. What a character ole' Diz was. It's a shame that baseball allows ESPN to dictate so much of its marketing strategy these days. The 1930s were such a colorful era of the game, and Dizzy was the Satchel Paige of the Caucasian Leagues. Of course, the Worldwide Leader in Sports only gives a shit about the great Yankees, Red Sox, and Jackie Robinson, and the rest of baseball's greats are left to shrivel up in the musty basement. Even when the network's broadcast teams cover games in St. Louis and they utter thoughtless platitudes about the great baseball city, they only reference back as far as Bob Gibson and the 1960s. And the local sportscasters only suck up to old timers that can still grant them interviews.
Dean, the brash son of an Arkansan sharecropper, developed folk hero status throughout the south and the west before the War, and I don't think Dean has ever been properly credited for expanding the ballclub's popularity during those early days of radio. Maybe the media will dig up the ghosts of the Gas House Gang when the next Depression arrives.
posted by CM @ 5:46 PM
2 Comments:
Here is another reason not to like Tony La Russa.
I can't side against the Wizard. Your favorite player when you're 10 years old is your favorite player for life.
I would be tempted to let bygones be bygones at this point, but it still irks me when I think back to Ozzie's farewell campaign, the 56-55 baseball we played with Royce Clayton at short (compared to Ozzie's 31-19), the backhanded play Clayton couldn't make off the bat of Rafael Belliard in Game 6 of the NLCS, allowing the go-ahead run to score, and then finding out in the years following what kind of player Clayton was never capable of becoming.
And if it makes ME mad, then you know it makes Ozzie mad. He always carried such a big chip on those tiny shoulders, and it was that exact attitude that landed him in the Hall of Fame. You can blame him for being too prideful over this-- if not downright petulant, but if you believe Tony LaRussa hadn't already picked his shortstop when he arrived in St. Petersburg that spring, than you're crazier than his barber.
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