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

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QUOTES
Welcome to World Cup 2022, the most absurd thing that the routinely absurd world of sports has ever produced.
Those extreme descriptions were what virtually the entire world, save for those who had walked off with bags of cash from Qatar, called the awarding of soccer’s greatest event to the incredibly tiny, incredibly wealthy country back in 2010.
Twelve years ago, many were convinced this event couldn’t possibly happen: staging the world’s biggest sporting event in a country the size of Connecticut, one with zero soccer culture and even less soccer infrastructure? The tournament couldn’t possibly take place in 120-degree heat, and FIFA, the governing body of soccer, most certainly wouldn’t upend football leagues around the world to change the traditional summer schedule, could it?
And, for God’s sake, what about the beer?
Those were just the logistical concerns. The moral concerns are far more distressing. FIFA, so busy paying lip service to equality, couldn’t possibly expect the world to embrace a country where you could go to prison for being gay, where women’s rights are severely curtailed and female victims of sexual assault could go to prison, charged with engaging in extramarital sex. And all those questions came before the global realization that the World Cup was being built on the backs of migrant labor: modern-day slaves held in Qatar with virtually no rights, low wages and no ability to leave. Migrants make up 90% of Qatar’s stated population of 3 million. The country’s native-born equal about 300,000, or roughly the size of Anaheim.
---Ann Killion, columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle.

This Will Get Baseball Fans Through the Next Month -1

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