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OUT OF LEFT FIELD |
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RISES AGAIN  This is the famed Los Angeles Coliseum set up for football. But its enormous seating capacity has inspired its use for baseball, a game that just doesn't fit its layout. |
A Baseball Celebration
of The Temple of Greed
of TheColumnists.com
The Dodgers of Los Angeles have no shame but a lot of chutzpah (the Yiddish word for monumental gall). They actually made a party Saturday night out of a remembrance of one of the tawdry aspects of baseball history.
Fifty years ago, when the Dodgers scuttled
Brooklyn for Los Angeles, owner Walter (The Terrible) O’Malley
chose to have the Dodgers play their first four seasons in the
cavernous Los Angeles Coliseum rather than play in a real baseball
park, Los Angeles’ Wrigley Field.
It didn’t matter to O’Malley that the Coliseum was
no place to play baseball because it had a left-field line only
252 feet from home plate. It had a capacity of some 92,000 fans
and that represented a Temple of Greed far more appealing to
O’Malley than a legitimate ballpark, the Pacific Coast League’s
Wrigley Field, which had a capacity of only 25,000.
In this 50th year since the Dodgers checked into Los Angeles,
the current management chose to commemorate the bad old days
by having the Dodgers and Boston Red Sox play a game in the Coliseum
Saturday night. Charley Steinberg, the Dodgers’ marketing
man, talked about a resonance Los Angelinos would feel “that
is multigenerational. Grandparents want to take grandchildren
to the place where they first fell in love with the Dodgers.”
Why does he make me think of Boston lawyer Joseph Welch shaking his head and saying to Senator Joe McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”
The players, particularly pitchers, yowled about the short fence in left field. And lefty slugger Duke Snider of the Dodgers wailed about the distance of 440-feet to right-center field.
At the first World Series game played there in 1959 I heard some of the bleats of Chicago White Sox players getting their first look at the monstrosity during batting practice. Al Smith, a journeyman outfielder for the Sox, was particularly vocal so I figured he would be a good subject to underscore the travesty that was the Coliseum.
I acknowledged his feeling that the Coliseum was a joke and asked him this: “If they played the Series here in Wrigley Field, there would be a capacity of only 25,000, much less than the 92,000 in the Coliseum. You would get less of a World Series share, but it would be real baseball. Would you prefer that you played in Wrigley Field?”
Smith looked at me as if I were reaching into his wallet. He scoffed, then took some more batting practice swings, while blithely continuing to rail about the “ridiculous” ball park. So much for a player’s love of pure baseball.
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Many people didn’t like baseball opening the season with two games in Japan last week between Oakland and Boston. I liked it because it had a festive feeling to it; it gave us more baseball to open the season--three openings in a sense. Thanks to ESPN we could watch the pair of games from Tokyo (live at 6 a.m. or a repeat at 2 p.m.); another ESPN game Sunday night, Atlanta at Washington’s new ball park; and then opening games for the rest of the teams on Monday.
A dumb-dumber citation belongs to The New York Times’ Tokyo correspondent, Robert Whiting, for his lead sentence on his game story of the Red Sox ' exciting opening game victory in Tokyo.
He wrote:
“If Britney Spears played baseball, you would have some idea of what the past few days were like for Daisuke Matsuzaka on his first appearance back in Japan in a Boston Red Sox uniform.”
Britney Spears to make a point about adulation for a a baseball hero? Britney Spears?!?! Cut that man’s sushi allotment.
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In The Land of Baseball Proverbia
There’s no place like home plate
No man is so strong he can’t drop a pop fly.
A slugger never catches cold when the wind is blowing toward
the outfield fences.
To the Lilliputians Gulliver was Babe Ruth.
Anything can happen in baseball, but only after there are two
outs in the bottom of the ninth inning.
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By my lights there
are three reasons to pay attention to big time college basketball.
1. If you are an alumnus of one of the colleges.
2. If you are a sports degenerate who can get excited about even a tiddlywinks game if it were televised on ESPN.
3. If you are betting on a game off odds listed in newspapers. .
College basketball comes into its own this time of year because of gambling--the peculiar betting phenomenon known as brackets--filling out a form trying to correctly predict the results of the NCAA tournament. It sometimes seems as if the newspapers and TV put as much emphasis on the brackets--handicapping the teams, reporting the progress of millions, yes millions,--as they do the basketball
My not-so-mighty alma mater, Brooklyn College, doesn’t make tournaments, and I regard the big time schools most likely to dominate the NCAAs as semi-pros, so I prefer paying attention to amateurs like Amherst, a Division III power; Ursinus, Carnegie Tech and the like. But I enjoy the betting action attendant on the semi-pros and went into last weekend’s round of 16 with UCLA (my eventual winner), North Carolina and Memphis still alive among the top seeds. (I could use the money.)
The statistic I find most interesting among the hullabaloo of March Madness is this: Of the four top-seeded teams, only North Carolina has a graduation rate above 50 per cent for its players. Kansas has only 45 per cent, UCLA and Memphis only 40 per cent.
So much for education among the semi-pros.
©2008 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted March 31, 2008.
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