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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Greg Prince on 3 January 2011 8:52 pm The Mets have signed two low-risk, low-budget, low-profile pitchers on whom only the truly prescient were concentrating highly prior to the announcement of their unforeseen acquisitions. One is former Rockie Taylor Buchholz, who not long ago underwent Tommy John surgery. The other is former Brewer Chris Capuano, who also not long ago underwent Tommy John surgery.
If either of them pitches like Tommy John, that would be great.
At the moment, I’m most interested in Chris Capuano, not because he was an All-Star in 2006 and hasn’t done a ton since (ahem), but because he comes to us in the same offseason as Boof Bonser. When the Mets picked up Boof Bonser, Stephanie asked me if the Mets were now placing an extraordinary emphasis on alliteration.
I suspect they are. Boof Bonser…Chris Capuano…can Bill Bonham be far behind?
Let us zealously zip to UMDB and quickly compose the All-Alliteration Amazins:
C – Chris Cannizzaro
1B – Tony Tarasco
2B – Tim Teufel
SS – Luis Lopez
3B – Bob Bailor
LF – Melvin Mora
CF – Bruce Boisclair
RF – Shane Spencer
P – Rick Reed
Billy Baldwin is primed to pinch-hit, though Chris Carter is more likely to get the call. Wally Whitehurst warms up alongside Brian Bohanon. One is throwing to Duffy Dyer, the other to Greg Goossen. Scott Strickland stands ready to get the save, but pitching coach Red Ruffing is telling him to hold his horses. There are a couple of Mike Marshalls rarin’ to go as well. (Blaine Beatty’s buried in AAA ball; Bobby Bonilla, benched, sits, stews and seethes.)
Amid all this avid activity, Ryota Igarashi was designated for assignment. Igarashi was non-alliterative, but mostly he was non-effective.
Cap tip to Fred Solomon, Ed Leyro and John Sharples for helping to expand the roster.
by Greg Prince on 2 January 2011 8:10 am The Florida Marlins remain no help whatsoever. By not having announced a start time for their Opening Day hosting of the New York Mets at Name Subject To Change Stadium, they did not allow us to calculate precisely when the Baseball Equinox would be upon us. That’s something we look forward to figuring out every winter, yet the Marlins’ perpetual languor robbed us of that small pleasure, much as their latent, late-September competitiveness robbed us of larger pleasures in advance of previous winters. However, because we do know the first game of 2011 will be April 1 — and because the final game of 2010 definitely took place on October 3 — we can say with authority that even though we don’t know when it occurred exactly, we have indeed drifted past the Baseball Equinox, that space on the calendar when we are closer to next season than last season. The blessed event happened sometime yesterday afternoon.
Tangibly speaking, then, Happy New Year.
Of course we’ve been alternately hurtling and schlepping toward the 2011 campaign’s gravitational pull since the morning of October 4, at whichever instant word seeped that the unfortunately linked tenures of Omar Minaya and Jerry Manuel belonged completely in the past tense. From there, everything became about looking ahead. Who’ll be the next general manager? Who will he choose as manager? Those overarching questions have long been answered — and, I might add, with more definitiveness than the Marlins have offered regarding the moment Josh Johnson next peers in toward the general direction of Jose Reyes’s strike zone.
Far less certain is what we can expect from the first team Sandy Alderson organizes and Terry Collins helms. Seems we’re skipping the part that includes enticing new acquisitions, which is where the hurtling slows into schlepping and I have to rub two sticks together to maintain a spark of anything more than perfunctory excitement over the emergence of the upcoming season. Yes, Alderson’s the man with a plan; and the plan, in its broadest, faintest strokes, is implicitly contingent on decrappifying the 40-man roster of its most onerous commitments; and perhaps as soon as the recording of the final out of September 28 — Closing Day 2011 — we will be hurtling in earnest toward quantifiably brighter years than the last couple we’ve lived through.
This year (like all years before they begin) is an unknown quantity, though relying on the same basic 79-83 bunch to exceed .500 seems a surefire prescription for disappointment. On January 2, disappointing baseball beats none at all, but once the euphoria attached to Opening Day on April 1 and the Home Opener on April 8 dissipates, all we can do is watch and see. We’ll watch and see if a full year of a healed Carlos Beltran compensates for the several months we’ll likely be missing Johan Santana; if Jason Bay’s clear head makes up for a bullpen quietly cleared of dependable lefthanders; if a developing Josh Thole generates more impact than a lingering Luis Castillo depletes energy; if there’s anything at all to be found within a returning Daniel Murphy or an arriving Chin-lung Hu.
St. Lucie beckons soon enough. Not that Spring Training will tell us anything provable, but at least it will distract us for a few weeks. After that, there’s the actual season, when we stand an excellent chance of being pleasantly surprised. Or dourly dismayed. Or something in between.
Which sounds not altogether unlike 2010, but we don’t know that yet. We don’t know anything at all about that which won’t do us the courtesy of transpiring before it’s damn well ready to get rolling. Perhaps the new GM really does know more about our Met future than we can possibly grasp, and if that doesn’t make 2011 a certifiably happier year in the standings, I suppose it could signal 2012 as truly worthy of our salivation. Still, I don’t want to write off the year that just got here just so we can move on to the next. Thirty-two hours into 2011 and eighty-nine days from its first pitch, it’s immensely unsatisfying to think in those terms.
I used to get psyched about the approach of a new season. Lately I just brace for it. Maybe that will change between now and April 1. Maybe the Marlins will tell us what time we need to tune in before then. Once we are so informed, I’m going to watch and see.
That much I do know.
by Greg Prince on 31 December 2010 11:34 am The phrase “48th birthday” carries a Metsian resonance that resounds beyond the usual suspects. Randy Tate, Randy Myers, Aaron Heilman (I suppose)…all valid identifiers for we who are tenured fans/MBTN bookmarkers, yet when I found myself earlier this week noticing the nearness of my 48th birthday, one name unattached to uniform No. 48 planted itself in my mind:
Gil Hodges.
I could do math very well as a kid, so when I received my 1972 yearbook in the mail and opened to the first inside page, it was an easy calculation. Printed under the suitable-for-framing photo of our late manager were his birthdate — April 4, 1924 — and his astoundingly untimely death date — April 2, 1972. That was 48 years minus two days, and that would become the last line of every biographical summation of the man’s life. Hodges was felled by a heart attack two days shy of his 48th birthday.
 The only manager I could imagine. So close to 48. Not that there was anything magical about 48 except that it would have been a blessing to all concerned had Hodges reached it. The Mets would have been a better place if Gil had made it to 48, then 49, then 50 and so on. The world at large probably would have benefited, too. In Gil Hodges’s not quite 48 years, he fought for his country at Okinawa, caught the last out of the World Series for Brooklyn and worked miracles in Queens. Gil Hodges accomplished a great deal in a short time. One can only speculate what a longer life might have yielded.
Everything I’ve ever read about Gil Hodges, from his Indiana coal country upbringing to the way his days ended with a literal thud on a Florida golf course, dwells on how strong he was. Physically strong. Constitutionally strong. Strong as a Marine in World War II. Strong as the powerful corner infielder who anchored Ebbets Field’s epoch of glory. Strong as the manager who raised expectations for each individual New York Met until they were strong enough to lift themselves, as a unit, to the pinnacle of their sport.
Strength Gil Hodges did not lack. Yet he didn’t make it to a 48th birthday. An inveterate smoker, he was strong enough to survive one heart attack, at age 44, but not a second. This is Gil Hodges we’re talking about, the Mets’ one-man Mount Rushmore, the first manager I ever rooted under, the only manager I could, in my early years of fandom, ever imagine commanding my team. I’m sure I didn’t know Gil Hodges’s age until it was announced in the past tense. I’ve been amazed ever since I bothered to do the arithmetic that he was a mere 45 when he steered the 1969 Mets to their destiny. When I was a kid, I had no concept of 45. It sounded old. So did 70. So did 28.
 Watch out fellas, there's 120 losses under your feet! From left to right, it's Original Mets Thomas, Hodges, Zimmer and Craig. As of today, I am 48 years old and, quite frankly, I can’t believe I’ve outlived Gil Hodges. I’ve never seen a photo or a film clip of him, certainly not from the time he was a Dodger fixture onward, in which he didn’t seem older than me right now…to say nothing of more substantial. Even in that incongruous image of Gil Hodges leaping loonily into the abyss that was about to become the 1962 Mets — the shot in the Polo Grounds where he’s wearing a road uniform and a mitt while brandishing a bat alongside several hammy teammates — he instinctively maintains his dignity. Gil Hodges was 38 when that season began. His designation as the starting first baseman for those inaugural Mets is often invoked as a symptom of the deleterious franchise-building philosophy that hamstrung our collective baby steps. Sure, he was beloved locally. Sure, he was winding down a stellar playing career. But Gil Hodges was 38. He was ancient.
I don’t remember feeling ancient when I was 38. I don’t feel ancient at my newly minted age of 48, certain undeniable physical trends notwithstanding. Maturity was held to a different standard in 1962, the year I was born. It was hanging tough in 1972, the year Gil Hodges died, two days before he could make it to 48.
I may be older than Gil Hodges ever was, but I doubt my maturity will ever be in the same league.
by Greg Prince on 28 December 2010 9:23 pm John Olerud’s name appears on the 2011 Baseball Hall of Fame ballot. It should be the other way around. The Baseball Hall of Fame should appear on the 2011 John Olerud ballot.
THE 2011 JOHN OLERUD BALLOT
Rules: Please vote for the honors, offices and/or institutions to which John Olerud should consider lending his considerable personage. Mr. Olerud will decide at a later date if he will grace with his presence any of those named on at least 75% of all ballots.
__ NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME
Located in Cooperstown, New York … may not be convenient for John Olerud unless it is relocated to Pacific Northwest … purports to offer “immortality” to outstanding baseball players … to discerning Mets fans, immortality is the second-highest level a baseball player can achieve; John Olerud is the highest … could use infusion of grace considering it is weighed down with surfeit of poor character (e.g. Walter O’Malley, Bowie Kuhn) … John Olerud may not wish to associate himself with this supposedly august body unless peers in legendary first base play (Gil Hodges, Keith Hernandez) are inducted alongside him … membership currently limited to individuals … ultimate team man John Olerud would no doubt prefer 1999 Mets — a.k.a. The Ultimate Team — be inducted as a unit.
__ AMERICAN IDOL
One of the highest rated television shows of the past decade … John Olerud too often underrated when, in fact, he can’t be rated highly enough … airs on Fox … John Olerud’s sensibilities better suited to low-key networks like C-Span3 … an all-time high 624 million votes cast during show’s eighth season … in his second season as a Met, John Olerud set a new club mark by batting .354 … average Americans call in to select the new American Idol … John Olerud already an idol to the average Mets fan.
__ MISS UNIVERSE
Worldwide beauty pageant for young ladies … no creature on earth as beautiful as John Olerud … a truly international event … John Olerud’s stardom shone in both Canada and the United States … produced by the Trump Organization … John Olerud wore a helmet in the field for protection after experiencing a brain aneurysm; what’s the excuse for that thing Donald Trump keeps on his head?
__ MAYOR OF NEW YORK CITY
Responsible for delivery of services to more than 8 million New Yorkers … John Olerud always delivered for New Yorkers … must make certain snow is removed after severe winter storms … John Olerud cleared the bases with regularity — primary, secondary and tertiary roadways would be a breeze … has to deal with an array of high-powered rivals … John Olerud has dealt effectively with Curt Schilling and Greg Maddux … needs to unite diverse constituencies that aren’t always willing to understand one another’s differences … even brief, unfortunate tenure as a Yankee could not diminish the luster of John Olerud in the eyes of Mets fans.
__ ROCK ‘N’ ROLL HALL OF FAME
Recognizes transcendent contributions to contemporary popular music … hard to think of anybody who had bigger and better hits than John Olerud … previously inducted musicians include those who were considered extraordinary on bass … John Olerud was extraordinary at getting on base … as induction ceremonies wind down, the stars jam together in a one-night supergroup … John Olerud played with Robin Ventura, Rey Ordoñez and Edgardo Alfonzo in the Best Infield Ever for just one year … mostly considers artists from the 1950s onward … John Olerud would have been most at home with the music of the 1940s, as he was all about that sweet swing.
__ POPE
Spiritual leader of Catholics everywhere … John Olerud’s goodness is too far-ranging to be confined to a single faith … infallibility a key aspect of papacy … did John Olerud ever look like he didn’t know what he was doing? … selected by College of Cardinals … John Olerud jumped to the majors directly from college — and registered an OPS of 1.042 versus the Cardinals in his first season as a Met … election signaled by white smoke … John Olerud wouldn’t knowingly subject a crowd to second-hand smoke.
by Greg Prince on 28 December 2010 9:00 pm In 2009, Flashback Friday commemorated the milestone anniversaries of previous Mets seasons ending in 9: 1969, 1979, 1989 and 1999 with a series subtitled I Saw The Decade End. Here, for handy reference (a year after the fact, because I sort of forgot to give it its “Best of FAFIF” cataloguing treatment last December), is a guide to the epic Mets days of ’69 and ’99…as well as the lesser Mets days of ’79 and ’89. Remember: you don’t need to make the playoffs to generate a good story. Click on any for whichever trip back in time might intrigue you.
1999
Our Days Got Numbered: Cosmetic changes are all around
Team Building Exercise ’99: The unlikeliest Met, from the vantage point of 1988
Wallworthy: Why some things are bigger than titles
Never Gonna Win Another Game: An eight-game losing streak that feels much longer
Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough: The Mets who stayed crunchy, even in milk
The Fab Four: The Best Infield Ever coalesces
Freaks and Geeks: Setting September’s stage
Baseball’s Most Magical Date: October 3 comes to its logical conclusion
Prelude, Playoffs & Postscript: Whacking the Diamondbacks
A Beautiful Ride: Coming up short against the Braves
The Days After: Picking up the pieces
Amazin’ Medley: A musical homage
1989
Showing Some Fight: Darryl takes on Keith, while I take on beverages
Last Summer in Long Beach: Getting around to coming of age
Dykstra & McDowell for Samuel: Potentially advantageous trade goes horribly awry
Intermittently Sweet Music: Frank Viola, not quite the answer
As Mookies Go & Eras End: Exiting the Eighties
1979
When Shea Would Go ‘Boom!’: Fireworks Night explodes in Flushing
Generation Pre-K: Going cheap, going young
The Willie Mays Bridge: Spanning New York’s National League generations
Livin’ It Up (Friday Night): When Mets vs. Yankees was as much conjecture as rock vs. disco
Dock Ellis to Doc Gooden: Counting our lucky All-Stars
Dave Kingman Appreciation Day: Surrendering three homers, gaining one win
¿’79 or ’93: Cuál es Mas Mal?: Which wretched season is more bad?
1969
Before & After: If it occurred before I met the Mets, it hardly counts
Living in the Moments: How does a miracle lose its currency?
Donn of a New Era: Clendenon makes an impact
Duffy Deserves His Ring: The ultimate backup catcher
Born Again: Before there was Jimmy Qualls, there was Don Young
It’s A Family Affair: Uniquely Met immortals
Rites of Passage: Bar Mitzvah in the morning, Old Timers at night
You Never Forget Your First: Why 1969 still resonates
Across The Decades
Don’t Pitch to Kevin Young: A fan born in 1969 revels in 1999
Rickey and Jesse Would Always Know How to Survive: A Met rookie from 1979 crosses paths with a Met star from 1999
Euphoria and the Infinite Sadness: The long and winding road from 1969 to 1979
by Greg Prince on 25 December 2010 1:37 pm What? You didn’t get a ballpark for Christmas? Fear not, for I have regifted one of the presents baseball has given me — a quick trip to the 34 ballparks I’ve visited, passed on to you one paragraph at a time, from least to most beloved. Should you care to linger longer at a given venue, please click on the ballpark’s name and take the full tour. No ticket (or sleigh) required.
34. Olympic Stadium
Its main drawback was it was less like a ballpark than a basement, and not the National League East kind (the Expos were doing pretty well in 1987). Or maybe it was more like a warehouse, but I don’t mean in the fun Camden Yards sense. More like those refrigerated warehouses I’d visit when I was covering beverages full-time. It was cold, there were forklifts and there was plenty of beer. Beer’s not a drawback at the ballgame, but, as you probably saw if you watched Mets @ Expos games on TV, it never looked finished.
33. Jack Murphy Stadium
Pleasant beats unpleasant every time. But pleasant’s not the same thing as big league, and there was something about seeing a Padres game in their original home that felt less than major. It wasn’t bad — pleasant can’t be bad — but it didn’t fill me with anything approaching awe.
32. Royals Stadium
This was a multipurpose stadium in soul if not practicality. The artificial turf (replaced by grass in 1995) didn’t help. The schlep up to the top rows of the upper deck — I’d bought the seats in June, but the Royals were very popular — was frustrating, too. The Royals monarchical scoreboard was unique, but the fountain’s charms wore off quickly. Middle of the second: fountains spew water. Top of the third: fountains spew water. By the fourth, we got it.
31. Veterans Stadum
Veterans Stadium was as unpretentious as a ballpark could get, which was appropriate because what could it possibly have pretenses toward? It was hard. It was plastic. It was numbingly round. You didn’t rush to embrace it and you wouldn’t dare hug it. If you tried, I suspect you’d come home with bruises on the inside of both arms, and maybe a jab between your shoulder blades. But it got the job done, no matter how unpretty the job. Your job, as the fan, was to watch the game. You watched the game at the Vet. There was nothing else to look at.
30. RFK Stadium
For something that was so somnambulant for so long, RFK served its temporary purpose remarkably well. Don’t get me wrong. The place was a dump. I don’t mean in that Shea “it’s a dump, but it’s our dump” lovable way, either. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was used for a tire fire when it wasn’t being used for baseball. It was dark, it was cramped, it was MacArthur Park come to life: someone left this cake out in the rain, the sweet green icing was long melted and it showed. But it came to life in 2005 when the Expos became the Nationals, and you’d be surprised how beautiful a “dump” can be when it’s got baseball and baseball fans.
29. Renovated Yankee Stadium
I would have liked to have seen the real Yankee Stadium, the one that existed in full for a half-century. I only saw that one on Channel 11, and then only if the Mets weren’t playing (and even then in short doses and with distaste — distaste for Jerry Kenney, Rich McKinney and Celerino Sanchez…I was capable of hating Yankee third basemen well before Alex Rodriguez was born). That place was legitimately historic. The place I got to visit I never bought as the same one. I’d looked at too many pictures of the original to think the renovated version was anything but a knockoff. Granted, the ’76 iteration hosted its own history over 33 seasons, but I never had the sense I was in the house that anyone but John Lindsay built. The Yankees may not have moved to the Meadowlands, but their refashioned building, escalator banks and all, reminded me more of Giants Stadium (also class of ’76) than a pure idyllic ballpark. For anyone who wasn’t buying in to the myth in advance, it wasn’t an alluring proposition. It combined 1920s efficiency with 1970s charm.
28. Minute Maid Park
It’s in a part of Houston that, at least back then, contained nothing else with a pulse. Maybe a bar or two, but it felt plopped in as if to develop or redevelop downtown. I liked the idea of a converted train station, but it didn’t give off a ballpark feel from the outside. Nobody who worked there seemed particularly friendly (come to think of it, there were a lot of unfriendly people who worked for Mr. McLane). It was kitschy without being fun. Maybe it was an improvement on the Astrodome, which I never visited, but it was the first retro park I saw that I really didn’t much enjoy.
27. New Comiskey Park
It was too high. That’s what we’d heard going in, and we weren’t disavowed of the notion once we left. Capacity was in the low 40,000s, but the upper deck negated any notion of intimacy. Original Comiskey, by dint of posts, kept the upper deck within striking distance of the field of play. Cantilevering (one of those words I learned when I was having my ballpark-consciousness raised in the early ’90s) removed such obstructions, but there was now the chance your view of the game would be blocked by a bird. The last row of the last tier the old park, I’d read, was closer to home plate than the first row of the last tier of the new park. I believe it. No kidding, it was high and steep up there. I was a veteran of the Shea upper deck, but that was a dash up the steps next to New Comiskey. Bring water. Bring a guide. Bring oxygen. Maybe don’t bring your wife on a 90-degree day, particularly when she is averse to glaring sun and has left her Mets cap in New York. (One adjustable White Sox cap never to be worn again: $15.)
26. Network Associates Coliseum
I’ve never encountered less grandeur en route to a major league stadium. That hoary quote from Gertrude Stein was obviously written with the home of the Oakland A’s in mind. There is no there there. It didn’t feel like there would be when Stephanie and I stepped off a BART train from San Francisco nine years ago and looked for something approximating a ballpark. Normally I’d just follow the crowd, but for a Thursday afternoon game in Oakland, there was no crowd. There was barely any “there”. There was, however, a bridge. There were some panhandlers. There was then a loading dock. Then there was an enormous pile of concrete. That’s the Coliseum. Welcome to A’s baseball. It’s going on in there somewhere. Perhaps it was because the outside was so uninspiring that once we were inside “the Net” (or as our local friends called it, “the Ass”), it actually surpassed our expectations. We expected a quarry, I suppose. We got a pretty decent setting for baseball, all things considered.
25. Old Busch Stadium
The tour ended on the turf. It was my first time on a major league field. Even though it was carpet, it was thrilling. We stood in foul territory on the first base side and were told to not step over the line lest we incur the wrath of the grounds crew. It was just turf, but who wanted to make trouble? As the guide wound down his remarks, my eye wandered to right field. On October 3, 1985, Gary Carter hit a fly ball over there with one man on and two men out in the ninth inning, the Mets down a run. When he connected, I was convinced it was going out, that the Mets were going to pull ahead of the Cardinals in the game and tie them in the standings and that everything would be great. Instead, the ball was routine and the outcome — 9-unassisted, caught by Andy Van Slyke — was predictable. Still, for a moment, I reveled in standing feet away from bittersweet Met history. We won those first two games in St. Louis that first week of October. They could call us pond scum, they could spill their beer on Lenny, but we went to the ninth inning of the third game with a genuine chance. Keith had singled for his fifth hit of the night, and Gary, on fire for a month, was up against Jeff Lahti. That was 1985. This was 1995. Baseball had been gone since the previous August. Now it was so close, I could taste its lingering heartache. Three seasons after having had quite enough of it, I would exit Busch Stadium the second time not particularly wanting to leave.
24. SkyDome
Our $50 pair of seats was in SkyDome’s upper deck, or “SkyDeck,” which sounds so much cooler than upper deck. Very futuristic, very tomorrow. Thing is while we climbed to said Deck, I wasn’t being whisked along by a PeopleMover or a GlideWalk or something else that smushed TwoWords together in a futuristic construction. There were just stairs. Outside the doors to the seating bowl, there was just a hallway. It was no more modern out there than Madison Square Garden. With a threat of rain, the retractable roof was closed. We were inside an arena, basically. A vast, carpeted baseball arena adorned by the largest JumboTron in North America. Where’s the future in that?
23. Anaheim Stadium
The comfort of the Big A came easy. And there was one overriding reason for it: I could have sworn I had been there before. Why? Because it was Shea! Anaheim Stadium was a thinly veiled, West Coast version of Shea Stadium. It couldn’t have been more like Shea had it had an apple and an airport over the outfield fence. This was Anaheim Stadium before gentrification. You see it on TV today and you see a Disneyfied ballpark-style attraction now known as Angel Stadium. But back then, it was Shea West. It was enormous and it could be used for a multitude of purposes. Sound like any stadium you once knew? That alone may not be specific enough to evoke Flushing in Anaheim, but it definitely had the feel. Anaheim had grass, like Shea. Anaheim was from the ’60s, like Shea. Anaheim had that sense of being somewhere not altogether where you imagined it might be. Shea was New York, but it was, in terms of access to anything that wasn’t inside the stadium itself, in the middle of nowhere. Anaheim wasn’t L.A. — and L.A. definitely isn’t “of Anaheim” — but you shrugged if you were from back east and figured you were close enough. Anaheim Stadium was the closest thing to Shea Stadium I ever experienced without a 7 train. I’m not surprised that I liked it as much as I did, and perhaps it’s telling that when stripped of all personal and Met association, I didn’t find much else distinctive about pre-renovation Anaheim Stadium.
22. Bank One Ballpark
There was a tension between the modernism necessary to execute a retractable-roofed stadium in the middle of a burgeoning downtown and the desire to at least partially ride the retro wave that had been in ballpark vogue since Camden Yards opened six years prior (thus, that pretentious dirt path). It was sort of like the desire to have a unique Arizona feel to the scene — accented by those garish teal and purple uniforms on which Showalter signed off — while accepting megabucks to plaster the rootless Bank One logo all over the place. It continued indoors, which featured, among many other attractions/distractions, a Hall of Fame exhibit, on loan from Cooperstown. The Diamondbacks had existed for little more than a year to this point, but they were trying to steep themselves in baseball history, just as the sculptures outside tried to give fans a cue as to what awaited them inside. That type of touch could have been taken as truly tradition-friendly or it could have been interpreted as a overly marketing-driven. It was probably somewhere in between.
21. Great American Ball Park
Great American wasn’t a great park, but it was a good time. There was even something to the corporate name on the door. There was a touch of Twain to that view of the mighty Ohio and the country that lay beyond it. If you can evoke Tom Sawyer and Tom Seaver in the same evening, that’s gotta be pretty Great.
20. Nationals Park
The Nats skipped the bricks and the overwrought homages to a mythic baseball past. The clean, well-lighted, modern approach was refreshing even if red brick can serve as an effective Pavlovian cue to get fields-of-dreamy about one’s surroundings. You don’t always, however, need to be enveloped by a manufactured past. That said, there was something about Nationals Park that made it feel — and this isn’t intended to come out as derisive as it will — like a very nice and very large Grapefruit League park. It wasn’t sterile as much as not yet defined, not yet lived in.
19. New Yankee Stadium
Once the game started, the consensus was this place was OK for ballgame watching, but it didn’t set any new standard for excellence. If you peered hard enough, beyond facades and pictures of championship teams in the concourses (and they’ve had a few) and the massive video board above the left field bleachers, there was something Natsy about Yankee Stadium — it wasn’t a whole lot different from Nationals Park. I had that sense at Citi Field in April and now I got it here. You could sell a lot of stuff and you could put up a lot of pictures, but when you got right down to it, there was a throbbing adequacy to Yankee Stadium. It was new, it was clean, it had ATMs…after a fashion, no matter how much pride and pinstripes one franchise can claim, all these new places — Nationals Park in 2008, the two New York parks in 2009 — seem to have their core come out of a kit.
18. Miller Park
It was a super fun evening in a really well-conceived facility. The only thing that holds it back from greatness is it’s an indoor facility. We did a 360 walkaround before the game and it drained some of the enthusiasm I’d gathered outside. The curse of the auditorium. Watching the game while it was still light out felt all right, but once it was a nighttime sky, I felt claustrophobic again. I’d wanted a ballpark trip to get away from feeling enclosed. Miller Park needed to breathe. It needed to step outside and make everything feel a little less cold and industrial. It should have been a fantastic showplace for baseball. It almost was. Stupid retractable roof.
17. The Ballpark in Arlington
It’s the original Ye Olde Ballpark attraction planted in a parking lot off a highway. Even if the highway is the Nolan Ryan Expressway, it feels cut off from the kind of baseball tradition it aches to evoke. You can’t approach TBIA and not be conscious how far you really are from anything having to do with it. The good news is once you get close and then inside it, your ballpark snobbery fades because even if it is a bit of a baseball theme park, it happens to be a very good baseball theme park. And though those of us who value integrated neighborhood aesthetics and all that might be put off by a ballpark whose immediate community is a vast parking lot, it’s Arlington, Texas. Where else are they gonna put the darn thing?
16. Citi Field
Citi Field should have gotten everything right. It didn’t come close. But it didn’t screw up completely. If you’re a Mets fan, you understand that not screwing up completely is sometimes as good as it gets.
15. New Busch Stadium
Busch was beautiful from the outside. I rank it a hair ahead of Citi Field and that’s probably because it did unquestionably better with the aesthetics in my purely subjective opinion. The interior reds and greens are perfect. Busch’s exterior, meanwhile, looks like it belongs where it’s situated. The bricks hum in harmony with nearby buildings. The arches pay homage to that one really big one a few blocks east. There are reminders that we are near a bridge, the Eads, laced into the steelwork. And when you’re inside the park, particularly if you take the tour — as we did, mid-morning — and get the home plate vantage point, the St. Louis skyline makes for a glorious backdrop. All those years watching the Mets play in an enclosed Busch (and Three Rivers and Riverfront) revealed nothing of the environs they were visiting. It was nice to know that baseball teams actually played someplace. The attractiveness quotient was, like the temperature, high enough, but once we actually went to our game (praise be, the mercury plunged to 89 degrees at sunset and there was the slightest of breezes), it was less thrilling than I hoped it would be.
14. Citizens Bank Park
While I didn’t think CBP broke much new ground in 2004, it wears very well in 2010. It has a nice, easy slope to it. Its architecture doesn’t try too hard. It feels not like a drawing board project gone awry in the transition to real life but an actual ballpark, comfortable for its purpose, civilized in its approach. It’s intimate without the claustrophobia. It emits a lighthearted sense of self. The statues and other heritage-minded tributes (Ashburn Alley, Harry the K’s) burst with the kind of pride a fan — even an “enemy” fan — feeds off. I’ve sat in four different areas on my four trips, and they all have something to recommend them. It all looks good, it all sounds good — the PA is crystal clear and the music selection’s superb (though the announcer is overbearing) — it all tastes good and it all feels right.
13. County Stadium
My mother, had she ever made it to County Stadium, would have known what to call it. She would have broken out the Yiddish as she tended to do (American birth and upbringing notwithstanding) and declared it haimish. She usually invoked that word when she wanted to express how down-to-earth something was. Not prust, as in “common,” which was something we were told not to act (spitting, for example, was admonished as prust) but haimish…homey — unpretentious. County Stadium, Milwaukee. It was so comfortable, even the Yiddish language feels retroactively at home there.
12. Dodger Stadium
Damn that O’Malley, getting exactly what he wanted in Los Angeles and making it work to near perfection for decades, even long after he was gone.
11. Jacobs Field
It was the magnet in the middle of our minds from the moment we checked in until we got through our game. After dropping our luggage, we walked over and peeked in. There was no game in progress, but it was right there on the street waiting to be gazed upon. You could see the field and all the touches that made it special, like the toothbrush lights and the massive scoreboard (which seemed bigger in those days before everybody got one). You could enjoy the sandstone exterior, an unwitting antidote to the epidemic of Camden-style bricks almost everybody else building a ballpark was copying from Baltimore. Cleveland had itself an original. The game was Friday night, but I couldn’t wait 24 hours for more Jake. It was just too damn alluring and we were just staying way too close to pretend it wasn’t calling to us.
10. Coors Field
Saberhagen never much impressed me as a Met but seeing him as a Rockie, just eight rows away…wow! That was probably the beer talking. But sobered up and settled in after a fashion, my wowness never dissipated as the night wore on. Coors Field felt as fresh as what SandLot was brewing. It was crisp and open and electric, like no place I’d been for baseball. The house was packed and engaged by its baseball team. Intelligently engaged. Three years in the bigs and these were major league fans. Not only did they cheer their Rockies as three-quarters of their Bombers lay waste to Cubs pitching, but they were savvy enough to scoreboard-watch. The Dodgers had edged ahead of the Rockies in the N.L. West, but they were losing in Cincinnati. When that game went final, a roar went forth that was as majestic as the Rocky Mountains.
9. Turner Field
I developed a theory about Turner Field after spending nine sublime innings in its company. It had to do with the name on the door. Something about Turner Field looked and felt uncommonly perfect for baseball. It transcended what we were already calling “retro”. Turner Field didn’t feel retro. It felt traditional, like if you had to conjure a “ballpark” in your mind, you might come up with how this one looked while you were sitting in it. Ted Turner, I thought. Ted Turner’s in the entertainment business. Ted, I decided, put his best showbiz people on Turner Field. He called in his set designers after the 1996 Olympics were over, before the stadium would be converted for the Braves’ use, and said give me something that allows our patrons to get lost in baseball as they watch our games: not gimmicky, nothing distracting, just appropriate. If that’s the way it happened, then thanks Ted; it worked. And if it didn’t go down that way at all, it’s enough that I believe it.
8. Pac Bell Park
This place was Retro Version 2.0, an upgrade from the generation of trendsetting ballparks that preceded it. Pac Bell was evidence that nothing was static in this fast-moving era, that progress was only a mouse click or a Barry Bonds swing away. Camden Yards had been state-of-the-art just eight years earlier. Now baseball seemed poised to trade in their Camdens for Pac Bells. That’s how it felt up in the last row. As hackneyed an expression as “state-of-the-art” had become by 2001, it fit Pac Bell. Actually, maybe you could make do just by calling it “art”. Wow, what a venue for baseball.
7. Fenway Park
After touring the exterior, we made our way inside Fenway and to our seats in short right. We all had the same reaction: This place is small. “It’s smaller than the field at Shell Creek,” Rich said. Shell Creek Park, his and Joel’s place of employ, was a Town of Hempstead park, home to softball games. My ill-fated attempt to organize a team out of our high school newspaper staff took place at Shell Creek Park. There was nothing big league about Shell Creek Park. But Rich was right. It was smaller than Shell Creek. Felt smaller, at any rate. Definitely no match for Shea Stadium, the only frame of reference any of us had. Size, however, wasn’t everything. Fenway Park didn’t need a parking lot or logical access or an extra 20,000 seats. We were young, but we were wise enough to get why this place was a big deal. Everything we’d seen on television was here in bright green: the Monster; the hand-operated scoreboard; all the bizarre angles. There were the Red Sox and the White Sox, in living color, so much closer than we were used to the teams being at Shea (closer, in proximity, to Shell Creek Park). And there was, in our midst for the first time since 1983, Tom Seaver.
6. Shea Stadium
It meant home. Actually, in its way, it was better than home. You need a literal home, but you also need a place you just want to be…y’know? Home carries certain responsibilities, not all of them desirable, depending on what else is going on in your life. The place where you just want to be is there for you, free and clear of baggage. That was my Shea. I sought it out and it accepted me. Every time I needed to be, I could be there. When it was great, which was usually, I didn’t have to think about it. It was Shea being Shea. When it wasn’t, which was occasionally (and logistically), I could just write it off as, well, there goes Shea being Shea. I didn’t have to make excuses for it. Spend 400-some games with a ballpark, it will eventually explain itself.
5. Wrigley Field
It was a sweep! A Mets doubleheader sweep of the Cubs at Wrigley Field on a Friday afternoon that I took in from the kinds of seats reserved for the Eddie Vedders of the world. The Mets were the real rock stars, however. They were now 1½ in back of the Cubs for the Wild Card. There were still two months to go in the season, but this would be, thanks to expansion, realignment and general Seligism, the last series between the two old rivals. We had to get to the Cubs while the getting was good. The getting was very good this Friday. Wrigley was very great. I didn’t want to leave. Savoring victory, I took out my Chinon 35mm camera (huge by 2010 standards) and took some more pictures. The memories, however, would suffice. I can still see Wrigley filling up; Wrigley jammed; Wrigley filing out; the green, green grass of Wrigley, so close to me…I didn’t want to pull back from it. Who would?
4. PNC Park
PNC Park was the moment a decade of throwback ballpark construction was leading up to. There were breakthroughs before, there was innovation en route, but the culmination of the phenomenon that began in the early 1990s reached its peak with the opening and blossoming of PNC. It must have. I can’t imagine any newer place ever being better.
3. Tiger Stadium
I am not nor have I ever been a Detroit Tigers fan. But count me as a spiritual member of any organization dedicated to Tiger Stadium. I would have hugged her had it occurred to me as feasible. For what it’s worth, I kissed her goodbye on my way out. Literally. Tiger Stadium. Sweet, embraceable you. I guess all we had was a one-night stand, but you still bring a smile to my face and a pang to my heart. It was all I could do to see you once, before it was decided you had to go. I’m sure glad I got there just in time.
2. Camden Yards
Did I mention they got Oriole Park at Camden Yards right? That even with the slightly overdone name — does anybody who isn’t paid to actually call it Oriole Park? — and the implied (or not so subtly explicit) sense of class separation, that it was just the right place to be on that Tuesday afternoon? That the Baltimore skyline, accented by the Bromo Seltzer tower, complemented the Baltimore ballpark as if somebody took everything into account? That there was milling and teeming on the street between the park and the warehouse that was somehow part of the ballpark but was also a city street? Eutaw Street…they incorporated it into the footprint. Co-oped it during game hours, but it was open the rest of the time to pedestrians, just like the team store in the warehouse. There was a team store in the warehouse! Of course there was, why wouldn’t there be, but again, this seemed revolutionary for my pre-Camden mentality. All the interesting food stands and beer stands and Boog’s Barbecue — why had not this been thought of before? Or if it had been thought of, why was it not executed anywhere else? And how about that field? The angles of the outfield wall! And the ads for Coca-Cola and Budweiser that could have been from the first part of the century! And people….people, everywhere. People happy to have snuck away from wherever they were supposed to be on the sunniest Tuesday afternoon in the history of sunny Tuesday afternoons. My seat, in short right, was not bad. Not bad at all, especially in light of demand. Camden Yards was where everybody wanted to be, yet I could be in not the worst seat in the house. Did this house have a worst seat? I looked all over the place: the sea of green seats; the thousand and one perfect touches (the end of each row, for example, incorporated the 1890s Baltimore Orioles logo into its grillwork); and the green grass (not a detail to be taken for granted while the Vet, et al, still stood); and the way you could see the bullpens (they weren’t hidden like I was used to); and this marriage of urban setting and National Pastime… Christ, it’s like they thought of everything.
1. Old Comiskey Park
It reeked of baseball. That’s what Comiskey Park did. Reek does not carry pleasant connotations — “to be pervaded by something unpleasant” is the dictionary definition — but that was the word that came to me 21½ years ago. I meant no offense by it. To the contrary, it was the highest compliment I could pay it. What better to reek of than baseball? What better to sense oozing out of the pores of a building than 80 seasons of national pastime? I knew very little about Comiskey Park when I bought that ticket, but I could feel everything about it once I stepped inside. This place reeked unapologetically of baseball, baseball and more baseball. Baseball had infested this ballpark like termites. The baseball was peeling from its walls. The baseball formed puddles at your feet. You needed a bucket to catch all the baseball dripping from its ceilings. There was no mopping it up, no patching it, no stepping around it. You walked through Comiskey Park, you were immersed in a flood of baseball. Best. Reek. Ever.
by Greg Prince on 24 December 2010 12:57 pm Welcome to the final edition of Flashback Friday: Take Me Out to 34 Ballparks, a celebration, critique and countdown of every major league ballpark one baseball fan has been fortunate enough to visit in a lifetime of going to ballgames.
BALLPARK: Comiskey Park
HOME TEAM: Chicago White Sox
VISITS: 1
VISITED: June 27, 1989
CHRONOLOGY: 6th of 34
RANKING: 1st of 34
A new, state-of-the-art Comiskey Park will soon be taking shape directly across 35th Street from the current Comiskey, the oldest existing major league ballpark. […] The new ballpark will offer all the amenities to fans who come to White Sox games while at the same time retaining some of the look and charm of the old stadium. “Nostalgia” will be a key ingredient as the new 43,000 seat stadium rises immediately to the south of the current facility.
—Chicago White Sox 1989 game program
Now you can tear a building down
But you can’t erase a memory
—Living Colour, “Open Letter To A Landlord”
He called me kid. He called everybody kid. “Kid,” he said, “the NutraSweet party’s tonight. I won’t be able to make it, but you’ll be there, right?”
I nodded. In doing so, I lied. I lied to my publisher. I wasn’t going to any NutraSweet party.
***
The Institute of Food Technologists has a big annual convention every summer. Sounds like guys in lab coats waiting for a girl in a swimsuit to jump out of a chemically enhanced cake, but that’s not quite the scene. They set up shop in a massive convention hall and, as is the case with any trade show, it couldn’t be more numbing. Acre after acre of booths are set up so you can stop by, be told how incredible some new development/product is, take some literature and maybe have a sample.
Samples are everywhere at a trade show, especially one with food and/or beverage implications. The hot item at IFT twenty-one years ago was cheese, or some artificial simulation of cheese. “Would you like to try one?” some pretty booth hostess with a tray would ask. Sure, I’d say. I said it too often. I couldn’t look at artificial cheese by the time my first day at IFT ’89 at Chicago’s enormous McCormick Place was done. Not that looking at artificial cheese was ever a goal of mine in particular.
I wasn’t at this show for cheese. Not my beat. I was there for the beverages, or, more specifically, for the beverage ingredient makers. They were an intrinsic part of what we covered at the beverage magazine I had joined a little more than three months earlier. My job was to cover those booths — grab brochures, talk to executives or PR people and, when you got right down to it, let the magazine’s advertisers know editorial cared about them.
That’s why the NutraSweet party was on my publisher’s mind. NutraSweet was a huge advertiser. They were, at the time, the only company with a patent to produce the aspartame sweetener in the United States. Aspartame was the key ingredient in diet colas. It had revolutionized the category in the 1980s, making for a better-tasting and (according to repeated reputable testing) safe product for calorie-conscious consumers. By 1989, there was no doubt that every soft drink marketer and bottler in America knew how important NutraSweet was to their business. Why they had to advertise in trade magazines, it occurs to me now, isn’t clear, but convincing them it was vital was the genius of men like my publisher, the ultimate trade magazine ad salesman.
His fallibility, however, was believing me when I nodded that I’d be at the NutraSweet party once he told me he wouldn’t be there. Having already attended to NutraSweet’s IFT booth and having scooped up literature and quotes and whatever else I needed in terms of information and face time — and having determined that the NutraSweet party was the kind of gala cocktail soiree from which a single trade magazine reporter’s absence would go wholly unnoticed — I made an executive decision. I would pass on the NutraSweet party. I had some sampling of my own volition to do.
***
My publisher had sent word through my editor the week before: “Tell the kid to get his suit pressed.” (Apparently I struck him as a bit rumpled the first time he saw me in action away from the office.) My father, who grew up upstairs from Prince Valet in Jackson Heights, told me you don’t just get your suit pressed — you get it dry cleaned. My mother was still peddling the same advice she’d been giving me and my sister since we were kids.
“Put five dollars in your shoe.”
What was I — an idiot? Granted, I had never been to Chicago before, but I knew how to clean myself up, knew how to dress myself and knew enough not to get — as my mother confided to my sister she was afraid would happen to me in the strange city because I was too nice — “rolled”.
I was 26. If I hadn’t been “around,” I’d also venture to say I wasn’t an utter naïf. I was pretty confident I could handle getting on an overly early flight to O’Hare on a Monday morning (magazine too cheap to pay for a civilized extra night’s stay), getting to McCormick, getting a convention badge and getting on with IFT. At the first available break, I managed, all by myself, to uncheck my luggage at the convention center and check into the adjoining hotel when my room was ready. I even knew enough to tell housekeeping, when they came around to inspect, that no, I had not enjoyed a Heineken and M&M’s from the minibar, I had only just entered this room five minutes ago, that must have been the last guy.
Not rolled by hotel management. That was encouraging.
God, I was tired. The flight was too early for my nocturnal system, and United Airlines mysteriously offered only caffeine-free diet cola. No caffeine? What was the point of that at seven in the morning? Settling briefly into my room, I flipped on the radio to hear what Top 40 sounded like in Chicago (pretty much the same as it sounded everywhere else) and, just as the minibar lady with her clipboard left, the new Great White hit, “Once Bitten Twice Shy,” caught my ear.
You’re lookin’ tried
You’re lookin’ kinda beat
The rhythm of the street
Sure knocks you off your feet
Per Great White’s expert reading of my mental state, I would’ve loved a nap right about then, but I had miles of trade show booths to go before I could sleep.
Back to McCormick. Back to the floor.
***
I’d always wanted to go to Wrigley Field, but so did everybody else. The Cubs were hot stuff in June 1989. They held first in the National League East (damn it), so that made their already limited inventory of tickets even scarcer. Throw in the advent of night baseball on the North Side — lights were switched on for the first time the previous summer — and games that took place after traditional working hours were in near impossible demand.
At the end of my first day at IFT, I returned to my room, turned on WGN, Channel 9, and saw the joint was jumping. Another sellout, they exclaimed — it was all happening at Wrigley.
Before I nodded off for the evening (it didn’t take much), I opened the Tribune sports section and examined the upcoming schedule. The Cubs were home again tomorrow night, but that figured to be sold out, too. They had a day game the day after that, but I was flying home that night and how would that work? What was I supposed to do with my stuff? How does one approach a Wrigley Field scalper? Does one risk getting rolled? And what about my flight out of O’Hare — how close exactly was the airport to the ballpark?
I wasn’t a naïf, but I also didn’t know very much.
Yet I did know this, or at least I allowed it to occur to me: Chicago had another ballpark, home base to another team, one whose games were immaterial to divisional races and — based on my scanning of box scores — did not loom as major attractions. Best of all, that ballpark would, in the spirit of IFT, be open for business this week; the next night, in fact. It had never really crossed my mind to see it, but I was in Chicago, it was there on the South Side, relatively close to where I was from my best reading of Second City geography…
What the hell? If Wrigley was prohibitive, I’d sample the other place.
***
He called me sir. He called everybody sir, I suspected, out of professional courtesy.
“Good evening, sir.”
“Good evening. Comiskey Park, please.”
“Yes sir.”
The NutraSweet party was in my cabdriver’s rearview mirror. Somewhere ahead of us, baseball. Baseball in Chicago. Not the baseball in Chicago I’d always yearned to be a part of, but it would do for now.
It’s not like I’d never heard of Comiskey Park before. It, like the White Sox, penetrated my consciousness every few years. Bill Melton led the American League in home runs with an absurdly low total when I was a kid, the season before Richie Allen became Dick Allen. Richie Zisk became a free agent bargain when I was in junior high. Disco Demolition became a catastrophe the summer between my being a high school sophomore and junior. In 1983, while I was in college, they hosted an All-Star Game and then morphed into the embodiment of Winning Ugly. It was supposed to refer to their style of play, but it could have been an allusion to their ever more hideous uniforms.
You thought of the White Sox in the 1970s and 1980s, you thought of oversized sluggers in lumpy throwback blouses (with or without shorts), or horizontal stripes that could never quite take the measure of a Ron Kittle. The last time, by 1989, that I had thought more than a minute about the White Sox was probably 1986, when Chicago traded misplaced Met icon Tom Seaver to Boston, which I appreciated, because there had been talk he might wind up on the Yankees.
Tom Seaver looked good in every uniform, but that’s not one I ever wanted to see him try on.
***
“Sir?”
“Yes?”
“If you don’t mind me asking, are you a sportswriter?”
The cabdriver’s question tickled me. I had once been mistaken, sort of, for a Mets ballplayer, but I chalked that up to my youth (barely 19), my Mets jacket (a Starter), my surroundings (the Tampa airport, across the bay from the Mets’ Spring Training home in St. Pete) and the person who made the mistake (lady in the airport gift shop who definitely needed her eyes and/or judgment checked). This case of mistaken identity? I guess it was plausible. Though I had left my suit jacket and tie back in the hotel, I was still wearing a buttondown shirt and my suit pants — ever less pressed, but still presentable. Am I what a sportswriter looks like? They’re not all rumpled like Oscar Madison…or me, normally? I can pass for a sportswriter?
“No,” I said. “Just going to the game.”
I didn’t ask, but I figured my driver didn’t get many fares to Comiskey Park. In 1989, the White Sox were dead last in American League attendance, drawing a smidge over a million by season’s end. In 1989, someone would probably have to have a reason to want to go there on a Tuesday night, like it was his job. They would literally have to pay you to go see the White Sox.
Not me. They paid me to go to IFT. And the NutraSweet party, I suppose.
He mistook me for a sportswriter. I liked that.
***
The NBA draft was in progress, and attached to the cab’s meter was a news ticker of sorts. Interrupting the steady stream of traffic updates was this flash: The Chicago Bulls, with the sixth pick, selected Stacey King, from the University of Oklahoma. There was much hooting and hollering to be heard over the cab radio. The dispatcher was happy. The other drivers were happy. My driver was happy.
“Sir, do you follow basketball?”
“A little.”
“Everybody’s very excited about this draft pick.”
“Uh-huh.”
The Bulls were worth talking about in Chicago. The White Sox weren’t.
***
Six-something dollars (plus tip) from the convention center hotel, we were there: Comiskey Park. It didn’t look like much — the major construction site next door perhaps lessened its impact — and it didn’t appear to be in the middle of anything you’d want to be if you didn’t know your away around. To minimize the possibility of being rolled, I asked my courtly driver if there were cabs around after games. No, he said, there weren’t, so he gave me a business card with the phone number of the cab company circled. Just call, he said, and one will come to get you.
Sounded reasonable in theory. I thanked him for the ride and the information, if not the sportswriter remark.
***
As predicted, no problem getting a ticket to a White Sox-Rangers game in late June. Walked right up to the window (no wait) and went for an $8.50 box seat down the first base line. You couldn’t get a box seat at Shea in those days without major finagling. Three weeks earlier, I took my friend Chuck, visiting from out of town, to his first Mets game in ages. We had to buy our tickets from a guy who was selling them out of his trunk.
Not the case on the South Side of Chicago. Getting in was a breeze. Getting home might be another matter, but that was for later.
***
It reeked of baseball. That’s what Comiskey Park did. Reek does not carry pleasant connotations — “to be pervaded by something unpleasant” is the dictionary definition — but that was the word that came to me 21½ years ago. I meant no offense by it. To the contrary, it was the highest compliment I could pay it. What better to reek of than baseball? What better to sense oozing out of the pores of a building than 80 seasons of national pastime? I knew very little about Comiskey Park when I bought that ticket, but I could feel everything about it once I stepped inside.
This place reeked unapologetically of baseball, baseball and more baseball. Baseball had infested this ballpark like termites. The baseball was peeling from its walls. The baseball formed puddles at your feet. You needed a bucket to catch all the baseball dripping from its ceilings.
There was no mopping it up, no patching it, no stepping around it. You walked through Comiskey Park, you were immersed in a flood of baseball.
Best. Reek. Ever.
***
The first thing I loved about Comiskey Park was grasping that it had been there forever. It went up in 1910, before Fenway, before Wrigley. If I didn’t know the exact date on the night I was there, I could have guessed it was the oldest ballpark in the majors. It, unlike me, had been around. And unlike its more celebrated contemporaries, it didn’t emit preciousness. Fenway and Wrigley had been lauded my entire life for being what a ballpark was supposed to be, yet Comiskey didn’t need accolades. Its sturdiness spoke volumes. This was a ballpark that kept to itself and didn’t demand attention.
Yet it had mine, instantly. No, the whitewashed brick outside augured nothing overly sensational, and the utilitarian concourses told you mostly that these walls had been well lived in between (as did the concession stands, which were still selling 1983 A.L. West Champion buttons six years after the fact). But when you ambled down the first base side and came out the tunnel to your right field box seat and your $8.50 became the investment of a lifetime.
You were in baseball paradise. Nothing else existed except baseball. You just knew you were in the right place. The double-decked grandstand; the way it turned at sharp angles as if to put its arms around the field; the roof above the top deck warding off glare and rain for generations; the posts holding the roof aloft and keeping everybody on top of the game; the arches behind the bottom deck that let in shafts of natural light and a suggestion of the neighborhood beyond; the leafy trees behind the arches; the festive scoreboard ready to ignite at a homer’s notice; the picnic area where I once read Claudell Washington would help himself to ribs; the yellow accents; the green seats; the green fences; the green grass; the incredibly green grass…more than any ballpark I’d ever seen or would ever see, this place said in plaintive fashion to me, “Baseball.” That was it. That was all it had to say.
Once bitten by Comiskey Park, you were never shy about loving it.
***
A game between the 1989 Chicago White Sox (managed by Jeff Torborg) and the 1989 Texas Rangers (managed by Bobby Valentine) served mostly as an excuse to allow Comiskey wash over me, much as the shower Bill Veeck had long ago installed in the center field bleachers once refreshed and invigorated his customers. I cheered with temporary conviction for the home team, moaned theatrically at the success of the road team — featuring five players (starting pitcher Kevin Brown; left fielder Sammy Sosa; first baseman Rafael Palmeiro; right fielder Ruben Sierra; and second baseman Julio Franco) whose careers would extend to at least the mid-portion of the first decade of the next century; and came mighty close to picking off a foul ball (a father and son, actual White Sox fans, nabbed it in the row ahead of me). Otherwise, I just soaked up the evening. There was Nancy Faust’s organ and Old Style beer and the low, contented buzz of a night game in late June when there are few in the stands (9,631 announced as attendance) and not much on the line (the Sox were 17 out) and no reason whatsoever to want to be anywhere else in the world. The Mets were in Montreal, the NutraSweet party was a million miles away, I was where I always wanted to be but just hadn’t known it until I found it.
They should have had to have dragged me out of there kicking and screaming. It should have taken a Chicago police presence on the scale of what the first Mayor Daley unleashed on the 1968 Democratic Convention to move me. I should have claimed eminent domain and declared my box seat a sovereign nation. Instead, I bolted early, after six innings.
I was worried about getting a cab back to the hotel. Not knowing from the El, I didn’t want to be stranded on the South Side of Chicago; Jim Croce advised me years earlier that if you go down there, you better just beware of a man named Leroy Brown. And even if it wasn’t as bad (bad) as all that, I still felt a little uncomfortable with the notion of a sparse crowd filing out and me standing around a mostly deserted ballpark waiting on a ride. So while there were still people on the premises, I figured the smart thing to do was leave paradise behind with three innings to go, find a pay phone, use that business card and make a smooth exit.
I’m not convinced that my cab ever came. The seventh became the eighth and patrons began to trickle out in my wake. My anxiety quotient was rising at the thought of being the last out-of-town fan standing around in the dark. Thus, when a taxi bearing a name different from that on the card wandered by in my general vicinity, I hailed it down, jumped in the back seat and, before the driver had a chance to confirm I wasn’t the fare he’d been sent to pick up, I directed him to my hotel.
I may not have known the South Side, but I’m from New York. I know how to steal a cab.
***
Leaving three innings of the ballpark with which/whom I fell in love on the table made sense after the sun went down on June 27, 1989, and it doesn’t really bother me now. Comiskey had proven its point to me. She was The One. I knew it. I wasn’t a ballpark aficionado when I showed up. I had no more than a very vague desire to see as many of them as I could, maybe one day see them all, but I didn’t walk in with an agenda. My life list was only five before Comiskey. Nothing that preceded it in my travels, however, could approach it for beauty and feeling and baseball. Not Fenway, not Shea even.
Five years later, blown away by what had been constructed in Baltimore, I admit I had to think about it, but no, Comiskey could not be topped. Her cousin in Detroit touched me deep inside upon our one dalliance in 1997, but Tiger Stadium somehow fell short, too. PNC Park, this century’s gift to the future…only in a discussion that includes Comiskey could the jewel of Pittsburgh be considered an also-ran.
There would be no place like Comiskey Park for the rest of my life. Soon enough, there wouldn’t be a Comiskey Park. That dusty construction site next door would see to that.
***
Comiskey Park was shuttered forever in September 1990. I’ve been alternately sad and pissed off about it ever since. I suppose I want to be sad and pissed off about it. Comiskey Park deserved to survive and celebrate a centennial this very year. Getting all out of sorts over its enforced absence from the current baseball landscape is my way of keeping it alive. When I need my dismay stoked, I pull out what amounts to my bible in this matter, Baseball Palace of the World: The Last Year of Comiskey Park by lifelong White Sox fan Douglas Bukowski.
Bukowski took part in a doomed preservation effort — Save Our Sox — right up to the end. It didn’t go anywhere, but the diary he left behind in the form of his book is every bit as affecting to me as Comiskey itself. Bukowski refused to be taken in by club owner Jerry Reinsdorf’s clarion call for progress and amenities, the twin siren songs of all ownership-driven pushes for new/more profitable facilities. Comiskey Park was four years older than Wrigley Field. Nobody was tearing down Wrigley, Bukowski argued. They were maintaining it. Comiskey needed devotion, not demolition. Reacting to then-commissioner Fay Vincent’s likening Wrigley to a cathedral (and Comiskey to “an old car”), Bukowski wrote:
St. Peter’s stands as a landmark to the baroque. People visit to get a sense of seventeenth-century Rome; they do not complain about the lack of central heating or air-conditioning. For the cathedral metaphor to hold, Fenway and Wrigley have to appeal through their sense of the past. Fans venerate both — and Comiskey — because they are so unchanged: the field and stands are virtually the same as they were in the days of Ted Williams or Hack Wilson or Luke Appling.
All that has been done to Wrigley Field is good housekeeping and regular maintenance. The commissioner is confused when he talks about [modifications to Wrigley] moving forward “with the interest of the fans.” Skyboxes and night baseball are to the benefit of the few and well-heeled, not the average Chicago Cubs fan. At least Vincent had it right about Comiskey Park not changing. That is precisely what makes it a cathedral of baseball.
Douglas Bukowski came off as a bit of a curmudgeon as he chronicled his 1990 Comiskey farewell (and retained that chip on his shoulder in the best of White Sox times), but he had every reason to do so. His righteous love of his ballpark, well-earned and well-honed, is palpable. I can muster only a scintilla of his depth of appreciation of Comiskey Park, but I totally feel it still.
***
Comiskey’s 1991 replacement, also named Comiskey Park until a sponsor came along in 2003, was not what it was cracked up to be. Everything was farther away from the field. The upper deck stood absurdly high. A major renovation effort would be needed in its second decade to make it palatable to White Sox fans once the novelty of its modernity wore off. And in the great sweep of ballpark history, new Comiskey represented an aesthetic setback. It opened one year ahead of the great success of the age, Camden Yards. New Comiskey feinted toward nostalgia for inspiration and delivered no sense of timelessness. Camden, of course, became legendary as the first brick in the revival of baseball’s architectural integrity.
Peter Richmond, author of Ballpark: Camden Yards And The Building Of An American Dream, and presumably a disinterested party, framed the differences between what the White Sox gave up on…
Comiskey offered an antidote to the daily jungle. It was one of the first parks to install lights. In fact, Comiskey was a better park for watching baseball than Wrigley. It was small, and built on a human scale, for a human-scaled game. Its upper-deck front rows were forty-five feet closer to home plate than Wrigley’s. Down in the street-level concourse, the scents were shellacked onto the walls, adhering to the brick like the very soul of the game made manifest; cigar smoke, Old Style beer, sausage, cooking oil.
…and what they were rushing toward:
[T]he upper-deck cant — 35 degrees, among the steepest in the majors — was enough to induce vertigo. Its seats furnished a view of the Dan Ryan Expressway and its caravans of trucks, and the aural accompaniment was the incessant hum of rubber tire on highway. We also heard a train, but we couldn’t see it.
The steep upper deck was required to furnish sight lines; without columns below, the upper deck in a stadium has to be set farther back. With the extra height forced on it by three decks of luxury boxes — they are wincingly prominent, like the prow of a ship, the staterooms looking down on steerage — the upper deck up top has to be cantilevered even more.
Old Comiskey was home cooking, a one-of-a-kind family recipe. New Comiskey may as well have been concocted in some food technologist’s lab. You don’t need that refined a palate to tell the difference.
***
When your favorite ballpark ever is one you can’t go to any longer, you take what you can get. You read your books, you search out blogs and pictures, you keep an eye open for video. You sit through an hour of the morose John Candy comedy Only The Lonely only because one scene takes place in Comiskey Park; Candy takes Ally Sheedy for a nighttime picnic in the infield (he’s a cop and he knows the security guard). Candy laments it’s a shame they’re gonna tear this place down.
I’m not a White Sox fan, beyond reflexively wishing them well because they’re not the Cubs. I never begrudged them their plucking Tom Seaver off our unprotected pile in that abortion of a compensation pool draft in 1984 — it just showed they had good taste. But other than the 2005 postseason, when their fans deserved a break, and whenever they play the Yankees, I’ve never particularly cared what they do. I have no attachment to the White Sox. But oh, how I adored Comiskey Park and how I’d love to be able to go there again, but that’s never happening again, obviously. All that sits where it used to stand (besides a parking lot) is a marker signifying the site of home plate, with its year of birth and its year of death.
Seeing it on one of my visits to Comiskey’s half-baked replacement only pissed me off and saddened me more.
But that’s not what ballparks, even the ballparks whose unnecessary passings you endlessly rue, are for. Ballparks are for the best moments in our lives. Ballparks are where I’ve had most of mine. Whether it’s six innings one unplanned evening far from home; or thirty-six seasons in what you considered your home; or the throwback field exponentially enhanced by an ingeniously resuscitated warehouse; or the desultory circle on foreign soil and fake turf that made you think you were inside a warehouse; or that plastic place planted off some highway which everyone else thinks is splendid but you still believe to have been soulless; or that place that took the place of your home — the place you’ve given 63 chances to win you over and hasn’t quite after two seasons, but you’re going to give it as many chances as it takes…well, I must have a very limited imagination, because from Olympic Stadium and Royals Stadium, through Citi Field and Shea Stadium, all the way to Camden Yards and Comiskey Park, there’s nowhere else I’d rather have gone and that I’d rather go than the ballpark. Any one of ’em.
Thanks for taking these journeys with me to my 34 ballparks. No doubt I’ll let you know when I get to a 35th.
by Greg Prince on 21 December 2010 11:05 pm Perhaps it’s this miserable cold I’ve contracted and can’t divest myself of, or it’s the impending winter solstice (you mean it’s still fall?) but something overwhelming has occurred to me this evening:
I don’t care what the Mets are doing at the moment.
I will care. Of course I’ll care, but for now, I’ve run out of care. I don’t care who they’re looking at to fill out the rotation or to play second. I don’t care about trade rumors or how much budget they have to tinker with. I don’t care how poorly they frame themselves or present themselves or what kind of ticket deals they’re offering.
I’ve OD’d on year-round Mets coverage, my own included. It used to be if you came across a baseball brief in the fourth week of December, no matter how brief, no matter what it was about (but especially if it was about your team), you felt blessed. “They’ve extended their affiliate agreement with Visalia? WOW!” Now we grow antsy if there’s “no news” about the Mets on a given day.
Of course there’s no news. It’s the fourth week of December. If it was news, it would have happened by now. Or if it’s going to be news, it will happen eventually. Either way, the season will begin when it’s supposed to begin, not a tick sooner. Maybe if a boffo free agent were still prowling the open market, I could buy into the chronic curiosity, but there’s nobody out there worth losing a minute’s thought over on December 21 or December 22. You’re going to hit refresh for the latest word or lack thereof on Chris Young? Or Jeff Francis? Or Freddy Garcia?
Don’t. Winter is nature’s way of telling you not to give a fig sometimes.
by Jason Fry on 19 December 2010 5:33 pm It’s not yet the Baseball Equinox — though I’m eagerly awaiting word from Greg that we’re finally closer to new baseball than we are to old. But nonetheless, in the last couple of days I’ve felt a quickening somewhere in my blue-and-orange soul.
 Spring's coming. Promise. And it has nothing to do with our front office. Just having Sandy Alderson on the payroll is grounds for celebration, as is having him make smart hires and calmly explain to everybody from Mike Francesa to panicky Mets fans what is and isn’t happening, and that there’s a plan that’s being stuck to. (And hey, getting to talk to the man himself is certainly a welcome new experience.) Still, even the wisest doings of men in jackets and ties can only do so much.
This was different.
And welcome, as I was beginning to worry a bit.
After the 2010 season mercifully expired with Oliver Perez and a bunch of Jerry Manuel Veteran Leaders (TM) taking up space at Citi Field, I didn’t particularly want to think about my misbegotten baseball team for a while. The Giants and Rangers offered a welcome diversion, but then — as always happens — baseball was over and it was winter.
For a while filling my days wasn’t a problem: I was insanely, frighteningly busy in a medium-term freelance gig I’d taken, and I was trying to finish a book that had been squeezed into night-owl hours but whose deadline hadn’t moved. It was about the most tired I’d ever been — I registered the departures of Omar and Jerry and the arrivals of Sandy and J.P. and DePo with what approval I could muster, but mostly I just stayed tired.
And then when I got my breath back a bit, it was clear that the Mets weren’t going to be making big headlines. No Cliff Lees or Zack Greinkes or even Orlando Hudsons were going to be showing up to awkwardly button a jersey over a shirt and tie (seriously, this looks ridiculous) and say can-do things. No, it was Paulino and Carrasco time. I’ve watched the Knicks a bit, with what started as a professional duty turning into a genuine rooting interest. (Perhaps sensing the arrival of a Mets fan, they’ve now stopped winning.) Today I checked in on the Giants, decided to watch them finish off the Eagles, and found myself profoundly grateful that I didn’t really care as Tom Coughlin’s bunch gagged horribly. No offense meant to the Knicks and Giants (or the Jets, Nets, Rangers, Isles, Devils and anybody else), but the more I reallocate my portfolio of Sports Caring, the more I realize that for me there’s baseball and there’s everything else.
So what lifted my spirits? Baseball cards. Yes, in December.
Topps just released 2010 Bowman Draft Picks, news that I greeted with the kind of enthusiasm appropriate for a minor card set purporting to belong to a year that’s over. But then I noticed that Justin Turner had a card — Justin Turner who’d gone into The Holy Books with an evocative but inappropriate Norfolk Tides card from his time as an Oriole. Cool, I thought (becoming one of at least five or six people on the planet to do so), now I have a Justin Turner Mets card.
And hey, Topps made a Matt Harvey card — better get two of those, in case Harvey makes the big club. And ditto for potential future catcher/backup/trade bait/minor-league washout/who? Blake Forsythe. Thinking of Harvey made me think of Alderson’s announcement that the Mets would no longer abide by Bud Selig’s ridiculous slot criteria in the draft. Thinking about Turner made me think about Daniel Murphy and Ruben Tejada and Luis Castillo and Brad Emaus and a second-base competition in Port St. Lucie.
And that was a pure baseball thought — it wasn’t about the front office or cards or payrolls or draft picks. It wasn’t about being mad at Omar Minaya, or wondering about 2012. It was a brief vision of dirt and grass and sunshine, the pops of balls in gloves and the thunk of spring-training contact before little crowds.
Not so far away, I thought. And then, finally: That will be nice.
by Greg Prince on 18 December 2010 1:36 am Welcome to a special weekend edition of Flashback Friday: Take Me Out to 34 Ballparks, a celebration, critique and countdown of every major league ballpark one baseball fan has been fortunate enough to visit in a lifetime of going to ballgames.
BALLPARK: Oriole Park at Camden Yards
HOME TEAM: Baltimore Orioles
VISITS: 7, plus a tour
FIRST VISITED: April 26, 1994
CHRONOLOGY: 10th of 34
RANKING: 2nd of 34
Best ballgame you can go to? All things being equal, the one you sneak away to. Say a Tuesday afternoon. That’s daytime. That’s midweek. That’s when nobody’s supposed to be at a ballgame, yet somehow you show up and everybody’s there. Or not that many are there. But at least you’re there, if you’ve done your sneaking correctly.
If you do your sneaking to the right ballpark, it stays with you forever.
***
My right ballpark, when considered in every context possible, is not an unvarnished success story. Its unveiling foreshadowed or perhaps confirmed for us as sports fans some unfortunate facts of life. It plowed under and paved over aspects of the fan experience that used to be instantly accessible to us. In its wake, imitation would become the sincerest form of flattery — and if you imitate anything enough, the sensation attached to the original tends to flatten out around the facsimiles’ edges.
Oriole Park at Camden Yards, entering its twentieth season, can be seen as having left a few pockmarks within the greater ballpark psyche. But when viewed through the prism of a shockingly hot Tuesday afternoon in its third season, it was too good to be true.
Yet it was true.
***
First person I knew of to experience Camden Yards filed a glowing report:
Here’s the park at last — a low red brick façade, broken by archways. It faces on Camden Street for a distance, then bends away, paralleling the third-base line, toward home. Steel vertical beams, set back above the street wall, rise to a narrow green sunroof along the upper deck. Above that are light towers and flags (the flags stirring a bit), yet my eye, I notice, does not climb upward as this stadium draws closer but follows it horizontally, arch to arch. No dome here, no beetling concrete cyclotron over our heads. This is a pavilion — a park, right here in the city.
Goodness, how my special correspondent whetted my appetite to follow in his footsteps through downtown Baltimore. Never mind that this fellow wrote of a game that hadn’t taken place in a ballpark that was still being built. And make what you will of the identity of my guru in this matter: Roger Angell, writing in the New Yorker in the spring of 1990. Angell may have invented the circumstances, but he knew what was coming two years hence. The Orioles were building a ballpark like no other.
Or like every ballpark mythically used to be built. Either way, it promised to be different and I had never been so enticed by something that had yet to exist. It would take two years for Oriole Park at Camden Yards to open, and two years beyond that for my first of several pilgrimages. That’s four years of waiting and wanting.
The anticipation was worth every salivating second.
***
You don’t need to be Roger Angell to know the game changed once Camden Yards broke the seal on its wrought iron gates.
What game? Every game.
 Look around your ballpark, Mets fans. Look around each and every ballpark that’s opened or been renovated since 1992. There is an element of Oriole Park at Camden Yards evident everywhere, from Cleveland and Arlington (1994) all the way through Minneapolis (2010). If there’s not a direct architectural aping, it’s a sense of striving for what OP@CY accomplished so brilliantly. When you see a ballpark trying to incorporate some or all of the innate qualities we instinctively associate with the ideal baseball stadium — urban; intimate; old-timey — you’re looking at the coast-to-coast legacy of Camden Yards.
No ballpark, with the possible exception of steel & concrete pioneer Shibe Park, has had as pervasive and positive an impact on the baseball landscape as Oriole Park at Camden Yards. It hasn’t been twenty years since its first game, but we can probably add enduring to that list, too. Everything is going to resemble or imply the influence of Camden Yards for at least the next couple of generations (though I can’t wait to hear from the first post-Camden occupant who insists, “We can’t realistically compete in an outmoded 1990s/2000s facility.”)
The r-word eventually has to be broached in this discussion, because it has become something of an insult. When Camden Yards introduced it to our vocabulary, however, “retro” was not at all a bad thing, not when one considered what was being reached back to…and what was being reached over.
Camden Yards sounded the death knell for the multipurpose stadium. It absolutely killed circularity. No more round and pound. No more plopping down spaceships and laying in carpet. No more enormity. A lot less distance. An intangible feel for the game.
Some of Camden’s descendants have probably outdone Camden for nailing the retro ethic. That’s reasonable — somebody starts something, others pick up on it and hopefully improve it. Some of those who have come along in Camden’s wake, however, have missed the target. They’ve made retro come off as a little stale and a little same. The Veterans Stadium/Three Rivers/Riverfront crowd was labeled cookie-cutter. You get to enough of the newer ballparks, and there seems to be a bit of Pillsbury to their essence, too.
The prevailing wind may not be ideal, but it’s almost never awful. The game changed for the better, thanks to Camden Yards. Twenty-nine imitators would dull the overall effect, but it beats the pre-Camden world in which most of us grew up.
There was everything before Oriole Park at Camden Yards, and there is everything after. We didn’t need retrospect or hindsight to figure it out, either. One look at Camden Yards, and we had to know that everything we understood about going to a baseball game was up for grabs.
The old ballpark was dead. Long live the new ballpark.
And long live its endless warehouse as well.
***
By the spring of 1994, I could wait no longer. I had read Angell. I had watched highlights of its first actual game on April 6, 1992, from the Delta Shuttle departure lounge at National Airport in Washington. It was a local story for them. Lucky stiffs — Baltimore was so close. Standing around outside Shea on a Sunday morning in June 1993 (the day Anthony Young would make the wrong kind of history for the Mets) and waiting for Gate C to open, I purchased that year’s All-Star Game program. They didn’t usually sell it and I never would have bought it except the All-Star Game was going to be at Camden Yards, meaning the program was all about Camden Yards. My appetite was whetted more. Diagrams! They have diagrams from their planning! And pictures!
Same summer, I bought a book called Ballpark: Camden Yards and the Building of an American Dream, by Peter Richmond. It wasn’t hagiographic, but with its detailed reporting on how OP@CY came to be, it did nothing to cool my smoldering Oriole desire. Stephanie and I took our vacation in Toronto in ’93, but as our heads craned and our eyes squinted at SkyDome, my heart remained set on Camden.
It was all hearts and flowers for Camden Yards those first couple of years, with sellouts the rule. The only Orioles fan I actually knew was presumably in the crowd plenty. His name was Bob, someone I’d gotten to know professionally in D.C. I was so excited when that New Yorker article came out, I faxed it to him immediately. He appreciated the idea of the new park, he said, but Memorial Stadium is such a great place to watch a ballgame — had I ever been there? I had not.
Well, he said, you’ve got to go. It’s really special.
I never got to Memorial Stadium. Never gave it much thought. Memorial Stadium was a staple of postseasons when I was a kid — it was where the Mets played 40% of their first World Series — but it never did anything for me on TV. I wouldn’t have minded seeing it, but it was never a priority.
Camden was. A void the size of its warehouse was growing in my soul the longer I had to wait.
***
Washington would be my salvation. Something was always going on in Washington that I could cover, particularly in spring. Part of my beverage magazine beat was trade associations, most of which were headquartered in our nation’s capital (near the people who made the laws, so they could be convinced to make fewer of them). I checked the calendar and sure enough, the group that looked out for beer wholesalers’ interests was getting together in late April. I was covering their meeting in 1992, the day Camden commenced to being.
And would ya look at who else was getting together at the same time? The Orioles and the Athletics, just a little up the road in Baltimore. As impossible as it was billed to score a pair of tickets to an O’s game, maybe just one ticket wouldn’t be that difficult…
It wasn’t. I called Ticketmaster and, yup, a single could be had for Tuesday afternoon, the 26th. Pick it up at Will Call.
A Tuesday afternoon. Daytime. Midweek. Camden Yards. Me. There.
Sentences failed me, but the words were coalescing. I could do this! I could really go to Camden Yards!
I bought the ticket and then quickly reminded my editor that those beer wholesalers are having their legislative conference on the 25th, a Monday, and I better get down to Washington…yeah, the 25th and the, uh, 26th. Yup, I have to be out of the office on the 26th, no doubt about it. Big doings.
Very big doings.
***
Maybe it was because our magazine was based relatively close to LaGuardia, but the Delta Shuttle was my regular mode of transportation when I was D.C.-bound. Amtrak would become a part of my thinking in later years. For now, my challenge was weaving together a magnificent tapestry of logistics that involved air travel (and, you know, covering that meeting).
This is how it went down:
• Monday afternoon, fly to D.C.
• Monday evening, check in at hotel, cover reception.
• Tuesday morning, cab it to meeting, cab it back to hotel.
• Later Tuesday morning, check out of hotel, take the famed Washington Metro to Union Station.
• Check bag into coin-operated locker (which I don’t think they have anymore, but these were more innocent times).
• Purchase round-trip ticket for the MARC — Maryland Area Regional Commuter — train on the…get this…Camden Line.
• Contain excitement while boarding train.
There was a train that promised to roll you from Washington to not just Baltimore, but to Camden Yards itself. Made sense — the site for the ballpark had been a hub of activity for the B&O Railroad in the 19th century. President Lincoln’s body made a stop there as part of his long, sad procession home to Illinois in 1865. The warehouse that so dominated every image of Camden Yards was the B&O Warehouse. Longest building on the East Coast, it was described (impressive, if not exactly one of those distinctions you’d ever thought about before).
I took the LIRR to Shea regularly back in New York, so it wasn’t a terribly mysterious process, the train to the game thing, yet I was wandering into completely foreign territory as a commuter…it was like I was infiltrating somebody else’s routine. I rather relished that.
And a train, the old-time conveyance connected to baseball’s past, connecting me to the ballpark that promised to evoke sepia-toned nostalgia in living red-brick color. Wow. Washington was reasonably close to Baltimore, but the ride was scheduled to take an hour — not exactly Arlo Guthrie’s “City of New Orleans” down the spine of middle America, but definitely putting me in mind of it.
The sons of Pullman porters
And the sons of engineers
Ride their fathers’ magic carpets
Made of steel
Yes, a magic carpet this MARC train. This, I knew, is how you make your maiden voyage to Oriole Park at Camden Yards.
***
The conductor sings his song again — or blares out his apparently time-tested shtick in which he warns all daytripping Washingtonians that when it comes to drinking, the passengers will please refrain. Ain’t NO alcohol allowed as we glide into Maryland. That includes everything distributed by my long-ditched beer-wholesaling buddies (spending their glorious Tuesday lobbying legislators back on Capitol Hill) and anything stronger than cough syrup. To punctuate his reading of the riot act, the conductor’s got a closer that could give Lee Smith a run for his money:
“NO MAI-TAIS! NO YOUR-TAIS!”
Maybe the issue of imbibing came up on previous MARC runs, but not ours. We weren’t brimming with booze, or all that many people, even. A Tuesday afternoon. Daytime. Midweek. Not everybody was ditching his Inside-the-Beltway responsibilities. I wasn’t ditching mine, either. I was simply detouring before returning to them. And I was totally enjoying the ride.
“No Mai-Tais. No your-tais.” I’ll bet the conductor was really proud of that.
***
When your MARC train pulls into the last stop on the Camden Line — Camden Station — you are deposited behind the B&O Warehouse. Up top, it has a message painted in white and orange letters:
WELCOME TO
ORIOLE PARK
at
CAMDEN YARDS
Y’know what, though? Until I did a search to confirm what it said, I swear I remembered it saying this:
WELCOME HOME
It may as well have. I stepped off the train at Camden Yards, and I felt as home as I’ve ever felt in a place I’d never been before.
I was at the ballpark. The only ballpark I could imagine.
***
“They got it right,” I heard myself tell myself. “They got it right.” The previous several years in which I read ballpark books and stared at ballpark illustrations and collected the postcards issued by an art house that specialized in ballpark prints…it was all leading to this journey, to this moment, to this ballpark.
“They got it right.” I don’t know how many times I whispered it. I don’t believe I ever stopped thinking it the entire day.
I began thinking it the second I got off the train. I kept thinking it as I soaked in the warehouse (the one the architects originally wanted to tear down; dopes) and the gorgeous, gorgeous brick façade of the park itself. Bricks have become a cliché when we talk about the retro style, but it was new to me in 1994 and new as a defining characteristic to all of baseball in the modern era.
They got it right!
The Will Call window required more I.D. than I was used to. I’m surprised I didn’t have to produce a birth certificate. Gentleman who requested my consumer credentials explained, “Tickets are so hard to come by, we have to make sure.” I didn’t have a problem with that. I didn’t have a problem standing in a relatively long line to have my ticket torn. I wasn’t thrilled when, because I didn’t know my way around, I was barked at by an usherette who told me I was in the wrong line (the short one) for the escalator (to the fancier seats), and that I needed to get in the right line (the long one) for the Terrace level (the less fancy seats), but I more or less let it go (except that I remember it more than sixteen years later).
Did I mention they got Oriole Park at Camden Yards right? That even with the slightly overdone name — does anybody who isn’t paid to actually call it Oriole Park? — and the implied (or not so subtly explicit) sense of class separation, that it was just the right place to be on that Tuesday afternoon? That the Baltimore skyline, accented by the Bromo Seltzer tower, complemented the Baltimore ballpark as if somebody took everything into account? That there was milling and teeming on the street between the park and the warehouse that was somehow part of the ballpark but was also a city street? Eutaw Street…they incorporated it into the footprint. Co-oped it during game hours, but it was open the rest of the time to pedestrians, just like the team store in the warehouse.
There was a team store in the warehouse! Of course there was, why wouldn’t there be, but again, this seemed revolutionary for my pre-Camden mentality. All the interesting food stands and beer stands and Boog’s Barbecue — why had not this been thought of before? Or if it had been thought of, why was it not executed anywhere else?
And how about that field? The angles of the outfield wall! And the ads for Coca-Cola and Budweiser that could have been from the first part of the century! And people….people, everywhere. People happy to have snuck away from wherever they were supposed to be on the sunniest Tuesday afternoon in the history of sunny Tuesday afternoons.
My seat, in short right, was not bad. Not bad at all, especially in light of demand. Camden Yards was where everybody wanted to be, yet I could be in not the worst seat in the house. Did this house have a worst seat? I looked all over the place: the sea of green seats; the thousand and one perfect touches (the end of each row, for example, incorporated the 1890s Baltimore Orioles logo into its grillwork); and the green grass (not a detail to be taken for granted while the Vet, et al, still stood); and the way you could see the bullpens (they weren’t hidden like I was used to); and this marriage of urban setting and National Pastime…
Christ, it’s like they thought of everything.
***
The home team won that Tuesday. Would’ve been wrong for them not to. Arthur Rhodes (not yet ageless) threw a complete game victory. Brady Anderson launched two home runs. I got up for long stretches — nice folks from West Virginia agreed to watch my shoulder bag for me so I wouldn’t have to schlep it everywhere — to explore and take pictures. It was the most photogenic ballpark ever built, I was sure. I went midgame to that team store. Dropped quite a few bucks in there. Had to try a crab cake sandwich. A few more bucks. Had to try views from Boog’s patio. The O’s-A’s result wasn’t of paramount concern to me, but I was able to follow it in the men’s room, where they piped in Jon Miller’s WBAL play-by-play.
They did think of everything!
The Orioles drew 47,565 that day. It was announced we had teamed to set a new Camden Yards weekday afternoon attendance record. Good for us! Good for us being smart enough, clever enough, highly prioritized enough to be the 47,565 who composed this crowd. You had to hand it to us — we had great taste in ballparks.
***
The southbound MARC would be out behind the warehouse after the game. It wouldn’t glide toward Union Station until a half-hour after the last pitch, the timetable said, but my commuter instinct kicked in and I exited the park in the eighth just to be sure. I still had an hourlong trip to Washington, the fetching of my luggage in that locker and then the jumping on a Metro to National Airport. My car was sitting in the Delta Shuttle lot at LaGuardia, so flying was back on my agenda.
I wasn’t damning the roundabout logistics, however. I got a good eight innings in. And I was warm all over. It was a blissful summer’s day in late April. I couldn’t have asked for more, except for the trains and planes to do their thing, and that they did.
It was all good as Baltimore disappeared behind my MARC. I was so sated from Camden Yards. It was so worth the wait and so worth the planning. I had no tangible complaints and not a regret in the world, not after spending that Tuesday afternoon at a place I’d all but dreamed of for four years.
***
The spell broke after I landed at LaGuardia, after I got my car, after I began driving home on the Grand Central. Heading east, en route to the Whitestone Expressway, I saw a real downer.
I saw Shea Stadium. It was where my team would be playing the San Diego Padres that night, and it wasn’t Camden Yards.
Everything changed after Tuesday afternoon in Baltimore. I had now seen what a ballpark could be, and it had made me way less appreciative of the charms of Shea. I had thought about turning off the Grand Central on the way home for the novelty of two games in two parks in one day, but I’m glad I didn’t. I probably would have resented Shea’s very existence. As it was, I was back out there the following Sunday, and all I could notice was how low and cramped and dark everything seemed inside. Camden was so bright and airy and hopeful. Shea was just relentlessly Shea.
In the wake of April 26, 1994, that wasn’t a compliment.
***
Once you’ve been to Camden Yards, the only ballpark you want to see next is Camden Yards. Circumstances conspired nicely on my behalf for the next five years and allowed me at least one visit per year through the end of the decade.
The first time, in May of ’95, was on the heels of another Washington beer wholesalers conference. The Orioles weren’t home, but they gave tours, so that — and the presence of yet another in a series of conveniently located craft brewers (I seemed to have one in every Major League city) — was a good enough excuse for an excursion. Stephanie was with me on this outing, which thrilled me because she’d been listening to me rave about Camden Yards for a solid year, starting with the night I returned from LaGuardia, trying to put the sight of Shea out of my mind. Now she’d get to see for herself why I was making such a fuss.
Stephanie was sold. I was re-sold. Even if the official tour guide version of Camden Yards was a little off (ours didn’t seem to know local boy Babe Ruth began his professional career pitching for the minor league Baltimore Orioles in 1914) and even if they seemed a little too anxious to show us one of their pricey suites we’d never be leasing, it was fantastic. We got to go on the field and in the dugout…of Camden Bleeping Yards! I learned the area beyond the outfield where ivy was sprouting overlooked a sod farm. When they needed to replace some grass, they would have it right where they needed it.
The sod farm at Camden Yards, I decided, was where I wanted at least half my ashes scattered. I think I still do.
We stayed overnight at the Holiday Inn one couldn’t help but pick out in the backdrop of all the ballpark pictures; it was the round building that seemed a little out of place, built (probably) in the ’60s when modernity was doing its number on stadium construction. But it was within walking distance of OP@CY (an AOLism, FYI) and it gave a great return view. Throughout the night, I’d get out of bed and open the curtain just to stare at Camden Yards. Just to make sure it didn’t disappear.
***
The following summer produced yet another urgent visit to the same craft brewer, one that would mesh with an Orioles home game. By then, my old Long Beach friend Fred was established as a researcher for Johns Hopkins and, not insignificantly, could regularly lay his hands on the lab’s season tickets. He suggested Stephanie and I come down for a Friday night game, and before the invitation was out of his mouth, we were in town.
Our first night game at Camden Yards. Still great. Don’t get me wrong, it was Camden Yards. Anytime was a good time. But, I dunno, it was a little less special. The Orioles were having a playoff season, and they were playing the Indians, who were in juggernaut mode. Good game on paper, but it took place mostly in the stratosphere. Home runs were being whacked left and right. Seven dingers, 23 runs total, 33 hits (offense in 1996; go figure). Camden Yards had been transformed into the frenzied confines, with 46,751 — to use a Fredism — going nuts.
It was exciting, to a point. And then it was numbing. And then it was too loud. Every Oriole home run was greeted by the Quad City DJ’s smash hit from that summer:
Come on ride the train!
(Woo-woo!)
Hey ride it…
This train was noisier than my MARC train from 1994. Everything about Camden Yards was noisier than from 1994. It was practically ear-splitting.
It didn’t need to be.
***
Fred was the right Baltimorean in the right place again in 1997 when the Mets were suddenly on the Orioles’ schedule. I couldn’t miss their first appearance in the vicinity since 1969, and Fred grabbed these Friday tickets for us. John Franco gave up the decisive hit to Cal Ripken in the twelfth; I discovered the best ballpark going wasn’t so great when your team loses there. I returned the next day solo and sat in a non-Hopkins seat for big Mets win, which was swell as all get-out, though I determined that seats up in the left field nosebleeds at Camden Yards aren’t all that intimate. The Mets swung through Charm City again in ’98, so I joined Fred again. It was all good until a torrential rain brought the tarp down on the field. This time I found out Camden Yards isn’t the best at handling tens of thousands of wet fans seeking dryness at the same time.
***
The Orioles’ brief run as an American League East contender halted in 1998 and has yet to reignite. Two trips to OP@CY since the Birds flew competitively south lessened the frenzy in their midst. Both of these drop-bys — 1999 versus the Twins; 2006 against the Athletics — restored a little dignity to Camden Yards in my judgment, though I imagine diehard Orioles fans would trade peace and quiet for another ride on the winning train. By now I wasn’t capable of being surprised by Camden, I didn’t think, but as it mellowed into adolescence, its grace was still extraordinary. You came at it or through it at just the right spot, and your breath was still taken away. They built it right and they built it in the right place.
I was also surprised that by 2006 it felt ever so slightly out-of-date. Not retro — aged. By then I’d been to the Camden 2.0’s, if you will: Pac Bell and PNC in particular. They were newer, they were more compact and efficient and they may have been prettier.
But they weren’t first. Camden owns that into eternity.
***
There’s a less wonderful legacy Camden Yards has given us, though I’m reluctant to bring it up considering how much beauty it enveloped me in that Tuesday in 1994. With Camden in operation, there was a clear message that the ballpark was not really designed any longer for spur-of-the-moment, cheap dates. The Orioles didn’t invent sports as business but their ballpark showed the industry that even the most sparkling setting for the grand old game could double as a cash register.
Everything at Camden Yards cost more than it seemed to cost at Shea. You weren’t dutybound to buy it, but who wants to not try that crab cake or take home that Camden Green sweatshirt? I’ve always been grateful for the warehouse gift shop employee who advised Stephanie and me on our 1995 tour to buy the batteries we needed for our camera at a nearby CVS where it would be significantly less expensive. It was a very standup thing to do that I couldn’t and can’t imagine a Mets “sales associate” doing if there were a CVS on 126th Street…but why did a package of batteries have to carry such an insane markup in the first place? Why did everything have to make you gulp before you bought it? On a larger scale, why was everybody so crazy about suites? They were the excuse every team owner threw around to bully some fiscally wary municipality into making with the helping hand — ’cause if ya don’t, we might find another city that will.
Camden Yards nailed the feel of a mythic ballpark in such exquisite fashion, that it seemed cruelly ironic that it also made baseball a less and less essential part of going to a baseball game. I was delighted to prowl the premises in 1994, and it was nice to have somewhere to take a walk with Stephanie when she got a bit restless by the fifth or sixth inning in 1996. Yet the more time I spent away from my seat was the less time I spent watching Cal Ripken or Chris Hoiles or any Oriole. Not that I cared about the Orioles, but I noticed I wasn’t alone in wandering the concourses and all. Orioles fans weren’t watching the Orioles 100% intently.
If it could happen there, it could happen anywhere. And it did as more Camdens, with more distractions and more amenities replaced the spartan stadia we were now rejecting en masse.
***
In 1979, when nobody was expecting it, the Orioles raced out to a big lead in their division and held it all year. Memorial Stadium quaked, and nobody set it to rocking more than Wild Bill Hagy, a Baltimore cab driver who gained national fame that autumn leading the postseason crowds through his widely memorable gesticulations. Hagy was, Jonathan Yardley wrote in Sports Illustrated a year later, “the high priest of the Summer of ’79”:
He wore rather scruffy clothes, a very large cowboy hat, a full beard and a most prepossessing beer belly. After the crowd of 40,000 greeted him enthusiastically, he did something that completely baffled me: he contorted his ample body into a semaphore and physically spelled out O-R-I-O-L-E-S while the crowd obediently shouted out each letter.
Given Wild Bill’s esteemed place in Oriole lore, I was saddened when I read a quote from him during the O’s first couple of years at Camden, before I got there. You’d figure the ballpark that got it right would be ideal for the man who literally spelled out what it meant to be a fan of the team that played there. But it was not so. Hagy’s opinion of Camden Yards was, “At Memorial Stadium, it was ‘ain’t the beer cold?’ [Oriole announcer Chuck Thompson’s catchphrase]. At Camden Yards, it’s ‘isn’t the Chablis chilled?’”
It wasn’t my fight, but I couldn’t imagine, based on my poring over pictures and periodicals, that there was anything an Orioles fan wouldn’t love about Camden Yards. Hagy must be a loon, I decided. But in the midst of my OP@CY reverie on that first Tuesday afternoon, I now and then peeked up toward left field, the corresponding spot to where Hagy held court at Memorial Stadium, and I kind of got it. I got that maybe something innocent is lost within the just-so nature of a place that’s too good to be true.
I still get it.
***
In the spring of 1991, a year after all anybody had to go on were architects’ sketches and Roger Angell’s imagination, Camden Yards was literally coming together. The local reaction was not one universal set of oohs and aahs. As preserved in Peter Richmond’s Ballpark, John Steadman of the Baltimore Sun, the town’s iconic columnist, dismissed the whole retro concept as it was taking shape for real:
As incredulous as it seems, Baltimore is the only city in America that is actually trying to create an old stadium. If it’s being built to look old and rundown, we already have one of those…
Unfair as Steadman’s advance assessment reads, building a “retro” ballpark to replace an allegedly outdated ballpark was a pretty counterintuitive equation. It worked — it worked great — but you can’t blame the Hagys and his less famous acolytes if they felt a little left out and bewildered by a process that abandoned a sentimental favorite that had served the Orioles for 38 seasons (most of them splendid).
So why the hell did the Memorial Stadiums of the world have to be vacated? And by invoking Memorial Stadium, what I’m really getting at…what I suppose I’m always getting at…is why the hell did Shea Stadium have to go?
Whatever unkind thoughts I kindled of Shea on that drive home in 1994 wore off once it became apparent we would be, at last, getting our version of Camden Yards. Except it was clear to me it wouldn’t be Camden Yards, or Pac Bell Park, or PNC Park. We’d be getting one of the late-period knockoffs that was making retro look tired. We’d be picking up on a revolutionary 1992 concept just in time for Opening Day 2009.
On the other hand, I was fine with authentically old and rundown. We already had one of those.
The situations in Baltimore and Queens were not exactly analogous when it came to swapping out used for new. Memorial Stadium and Camden Yards resided in different parts of town. Memorial was a true neighborhood park; houses were just up the block. Camden rose downtown — an urbanologist’s ideal, perhaps, but maybe away from the Birds’ hardcore fan base. Still, there were genuine fears in Baltimore that the Orioles might move to Washington if they weren’t provided a new publicly funded nest. It was framed as urgent that Memorial Stadium be traded in for Camden Yards. That the aesthetic result was smashing generally went unchallenged.
The Mets in their last decade at Shea never threatened to leave New York and nobody seriously suggested they would. They didn’t leave Flushing, for that matter. But they did leave not just 45 seasons of memories for Acuras and Range Rovers to park upon but also a facility with loads of affordable seats. Shea wasn’t intimate, but you could get in there many nights for five bucks as late as the late 2000s. It could get costly, too, but costly wasn’t your only option, whereas Shea’s successor dares you to not spend money. (In a recession, as it happens.)
I went to baseball games in an unamenable, multipurpose horseshoe for 36 years, and there was no doubt we were all there for the baseball. I’ve been going to baseball games amid quirky outfield fences and kitschy bridges and sponsored porches for two years and I sometimes forget to watch the game.
The food’s unquestionably better at Citi Field. I’m still waiting for everything else that matters to me to catch up.
***
Not being an Orioles fan, I wouldn’t try to speak to their deep-seated yearnings or residual resentments, so I did the next best thing. I sought out my Orioles fan acquaintance from twenty years ago, Bob, the guy I knew from beverage circles. I told him I’ve been doing this countdown of ballparks throughout 2010, and that Camden Yards is way up high on my list, yet his 1990 endorsement of Memorial Stadium had stuck with me for two decades. Considering how much I still missed Shea, it had gained resonance.
What I wanted to know from Bob was, was Memorial Stadium still a factor in his thoughts? Could Camden ever erase the hold Memorial had on him? And (though I didn’t put it to him this way), would I ever get over Shea and really and truly take to Citi?
After Bob expressed his astonishment that I’d remember a stray conversation from twenty years earlier (and threw in a good-natured “boo on you” for the Mets sticking it to the O’s in 1969), he was kind enough to update his Baltimore ballpark thoughts for me.
Yes, he loved Memorial Stadium. Yes, it was the greatest day of his life when he was seven years old and entered it for the first time: “walking through that tunnel, people milling by, vendors hawking their wares, the green field” — it was its own kind of miracle on 33rd Street. And then the Orioles got good, followed by great. He idolized Brooks Robinson and Frank Robinson and Jim Palmer. Why wouldn’t an Orioles fan of Bob’s vintage cherish Memorial Stadium?
“It was a magical place,” Bob attested, “because of the people who played there and the experiences you had there. The Wild Bill Hagys of the world, up in Section 34 spelling out ‘Orioles’ in a half-drunken stupor — and obviously the Colt games. It was a great place.”
The story didn’t end shielded in sainted recollection, however:
“Camden Yards gets built, and a few years pass and Memorial Stadium is still sitting there,” weeds popping up where opposing hitters once did, but now, as Bob put it, Baltimore “steals” the Cleveland Browns. They become the Ravens and will eventually get a new stadium of their own, practically next to Camden Yards. But until then, for a couple of years, “everybody gets to go back to Memorial Stadium.”
And?
“It was a dump.”
Bob didn’t love the Memorial Stadium of his youth any less, but there was no going back, no matter who was playing there temporarily. “It fell into disrepair,” he said of the Ravens’ 1996-97 stay. “We had gotten used to Camden Yards: spacious concourses, toilets working, sightlines. When we went back to Memorial Stadium, we had to sit on a metal bench.”
He and his Colt-deprived ilk coped uncomplainingly with the inconveniences. “After thirteen years [without football], we didn’t care,” Bob insisted. “We were happy there was a new team in town. But Memorial Stadium seemed a lot smaller, a lot colder. Not what you remember as a child and even as an adult.
“That was Memorial Stadium.”
This lifetime loyal Orioles fan loves Camden Yards for all the reasons one would suspect: the “real sense of history”; the “certain ambiance woven in”; the attention to detail, including the creation of a color now officially known as Camden Green. Yet Bob acknowledged without much lobbying on my part that something was lost in the “transition” from Memorial Stadium.
“It became a cause célèbre,” Bob recalled of Camden’s novelty phase. “A lot of Washington influence: George Will, James Carville — much more button-down. It wasn’t as raucous, not as many ‘true baseball fans.’”
Memorial Stadium in its Hagyan heyday, he said, was where you could “walk in and plunk down five bucks and go sit in the upper deck and swill your own beer.” There were no suites there. At Camden Yards, especially when it was a scene (and when the Orioles were winning), it felt more like one big “corporate party,” where beer was darn expensive and for “cab drivers in cowboy hats, it was a brave new world.”
A box seat at Memorial Stadium, Bob said, was $3.25. These days, a game for two parents and two kids, “even if you don’t get the greatest seats,” is going to approach “a couple hundred bucks.” It’s a different atmosphere, with a different focus thanks to all the distractions, but Bob affirms — thirteen consecutive losing seasons notwithstanding — “it’s still a lot of fun.”
***
Thanks Bob for the insights only an Orioles fan of your texture could share.
Thanks O’s, for getting it right — you did more good than harm with your marvelous ballpark, no matter the brave new world of commerce and caste you may not have intended to unleash on the rest of us.
Thanks beer wholesalers. You have great products and fantastic timing.
Thanks MARC. No train ever took me to a better place or a brighter Tuesday.
And thanks, as ever, Roger Angell, for leading me to Baltimore via your Camden Yards of the mind:
The warning track makes four angled bends within the foul poles — a tough proposition for the outfielders. I gauge the different distances and then glance back at the right-field pole, just to my left. This is a hitters’ park, especially if you bat left. “Let’s grab another beer,” one of my companions says, but I linger a moment, savoring the sunshine and the look of the triple-decked, old-green stands all around, just now beginning to fill up, and the bunting hanging from the front of the mezzanine. This is a fans’ park, I think. They’ve done it at last.
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