This Will Get Baseball Fans Through the Next Month -1

1/26/2014

Al Lang Field, St. Petersburg, 1957

Craig N. Oren

1/26/2014 02:47:27 am

So that must be the Yankees' camp. I believe the Yankees stayed there for only a few more years, then moved to Fort Lauderdale. I've heard that black players more more welcome in Fort Lauderdale. Remember the old motto: in Florida, if you want to go north, go south.

George Vecsey

1/26/2014 04:57:21 am

Correct. Yanks moved in 1962, bought into a motel on A1A in Fort Laud..The Yankee Clipper. I used to hang out with my friends Bill Robinson and Ruben Amaro there. Black Cardinals were living in private homes until Bill White and Gibson shamed Busch to buy a motel near the Skyway The Mets had their players in the Colonial Inn out in St. Pete Beach. GV

Ed Martin

1/26/2014 07:54:53 am

My baseball-loving friends here love McKechnie Field in Bradenton, home of the Pirates and a minor league offspring. It was first built in 1923 (renovation 1993- I think) and has that old steel pillars look. Sarasota has the Reds in a nice layout. VHS, a perennial power is already swinging bats.

Meanwhile long- range weather says cold and maybe snow, but no blizzard in Joisey, but I am hoping for a blizzard which will initiate "the Vecsey Curse" a critical event in NFL history!

George Vecsey

1/26/2014 09:49:45 am

Ed, thanks for remembering. I really did predict -- more accurately, I called in -- a blizzard for this Sunday. Right now it looks like a mix of rain and snow.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/sports/football/28vescey.html?_r=0

I remember McKechnie Field (I remember McKechnie!)
In 1980, I went into the Pirates' clubhouse before the game, and when I came out, still batting practice, I saw my 11-year-old son playing pepper, on the field, in deep LF with one of the Pirates. Later, I asked him how he got on the field. "He asked me if I wanted to," my son said. That was spring training, back then.
GV

1/26/2014 10:08:31 am

E1-- Reds gone from Sarasota Ed Smith Field. Now home of Orioles from Balmer.

Bill McKechnie trivia: as manager uniquely won world series with two different teams, pennants with three (tied with one other manager). Love the story about your son. Those were the good old days.

George Vecsey

1/27/2014 12:48:40 am

Now that I think about it, it was one of the visiting KC Royals in deep LF.
This is how informal spring training used to be. After the game, Bill Robinson invited my son into the clubhouse for a few minutes. Bill Madlock and Dave Parker came out of the shower, wearing only bling, and having a very scatological conversation. Bill, a very straight guy, said, "Uh, David, I think maybe we should go outside." Spring training is locked down these days. But the good news is that it is coming soon. Hang in there. GV

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

This Will Get Baseball Fans Through the Next Month -1

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