The random baseball player in Bruce Springsteen's 'We Take Care of Our Own' video

There he is. He pops up during the refrain in the final minute. He fades in next to Bruce Springsteen's head, then fades out in the sun, back to Bruce.

I've just noticed this report that says Bruce will be the leadoff act for tomorrow night's Grammy Awards show. An appropriate place for The Boss. I presume he'll be performing "We Take Care Of Our Own," rather than something off of The Promise, the only thing he's nominated for (in some category about box set packaging or something).

On a personal note ...

Matt and me and Nolan

I first went to Cooperstown in 1988, when my family stopped over for a night in August on our way to Boston and Maine for our regular summer vacation. The second trip came in 1992, when we went -- and my sister and I each brought along a friend -- for Tom Seaver's induction into the Hall of Fame. That's the origin of this photo, Matt and myself next to a display after a long day of touring the Hall. I've long wanted to go back, not really caring when, and in fact thinking I'd do it in the offseason, when it would both be less crowded and, at least for lodging, cheaper (not to mention easier to reserve).

Then, rather suddenly last Saturday, it was determined that Casey and I will be going to Cooperstown on Thursday to spend the night. Friday is our fifth anniversary and in discussing what we wanted to do this year, we weren't really keen on another fancy dinner in New York City, which we've done for each of the past four. Last year, after reading a story in The Times about Block Island just after the summer season, I suggested that a four-day weekend on the island would be a good fifth-anniversary trip. But as September approached, we re-evaluated and determined four days away wasn't in our best interests, so we started thinking of other options.

Casey brought up the idea of using our National Parks Pass, bought in March and thus expiring in March 2011, but there's not much outside of NYC/NJ within four hours where we could use it. So I started putting into Google Maps random destinations to see how long the drive was from our home. Gettysburg fit within four hours, as did Cooperstown. I suggested the latter but played it down. Casey, after briefly perusing some dining options in town, was more enthused. "Let's do that," she declared.

So we booked a room at the Tunnicliff Inn, with plans to drive up on Thursday after Casey finishes work at noon, walk around town to decide where to eat, and then spend Friday at the Hall. We don't have a set time to be back, other than before too late Friday, because Casey has to work on Saturday morning.

Strangely, though, each day seems to have brought a new Cooperstown connection since we decided on this quick getaway. First, the Hall will be featured on Wednesday's "Ghost Hunters" on SyFy. And then there was this post on Baseball-Reference about the recent visit by one of the site's editors.

Before deciding on Cooperstown, we consulted the traditional anniversary gifts and saw that the fifth is wood, but that didn't give us any ideas. So now we're wondering if we should mark the occasion with a personalized bat. It's much better than the designated modern gift: silverware.

Beyond our lodging, the Hall of Fame and Friday's lunch, I don't think we'll plan much ahead of time. With Thursday morning now open, we can leave earlier and get into town to have a slightly later lunch on Thursday afternoon, then take more time to walk around a bit. We'll decide where to eat that night after we've checked out a few places in person. That Baseball-Reference post already has me eager to walk around the village for the first time in 18 years and see how it stands up to the memories of my 16-year-old self. And I wonder if I'll remember anything from inside the Hall that isn't in the photos I took or the video Matt and I made as we walked the galleries. (A video I hope to soon digitize, though it won't be before this trip.)

A quiet, start-of-autumn getaway to the shores of Otsego Lake should be the perfect break from hectic city/suburb life and a nice chance to recharge before the craziness of October.

I wasn't there: Indians-Senators, 1939

A coworker of mine has what might be described as a throwback blog called Cladrite Radio and today he wrote about a somewhat recent posting of the full-day audio archives from Sept. 21, 1939, of WJSV in Washington, D.C. I think the most apt description of these recordings is an audio time machine.

What stood out to me for the purposes of this post are at the 4 p.m. and 5:45 timestamps -- at 4 is most of a broadcast of the Indians-Senators game from that day (Spoiler alert: don't click on the link if you don't want to know who wins! The broadcast picks up in the fourth inning and continues through the end of the game in Part 12.) and 105 minutes later is a sports report. I haven't listened all the way through (yet), but if you're so inclined, the ballgame at 4 p.m. starts at the beginning of Part 11 and the sports report is just about at the 46-minute mark of Part 12.

People still come, Ray

What's out there

I've been to heaven. Twice, in fact.

I first learned you could go there on your own time during my junior year of college. A friend of mine from western Illinois, Joe, had a photo of himself with several friends, a few I knew, together on the ballfield in the cornfield in Dyersville, Iowa. Until that point, I don't think I knew that the Field of Dreams was still there, still a pilgrimage site for fans of the game and the movie, still a little piece of heaven in the Iowa corn.

I'd first read about it a few years earlier, while in high school, but my first trip didn't come until some years later, during my post-graduate cross-country sojurn. I put Dyersville on the map as one of my definite stops and made it there on a perfect Saturday afternoon:

The map took me to Dyersville, the AAA took me north, signs took me east, and my deep-rooted love of baseball took me to Don Lansing’s farm and the Field of Dreams. It sat there, just like in the movie, as everyone expects it to — a little piece of heaven cut out of the cornfield. Turning down the driveway, seeing cars parked by the house, it all just felt right. Like on this perfect, warm sunny Iowa August day, that we should all be here, out in the field, standing at the plate, walking in the corn. Fathers pitched to sons, daughters took their cuts, mothers watched with cameras in hand. Some had brought chairs and sat in the shade along right field — there for several hours, no doubt. Everyone, it seemed, was smiling. People did come, and it was as they’d remembered it — maybe not form childhood, but from the movie. Out on the field, the men talked, chatted, joked together — a group of them may have come together. But standing there in perfect Iowa afternoon, I had the feeling that maybe they hadn’t known each other. Then, stepping on that field, they began to look familiar; they realized they were all fans — all kids again. And they talked like old buddies.

Everything from the movie came to life — the people on the field in pure enjoyment; the crunch of the gravel and red-dirt infield; the chirp of the crickets and rush of the wind; and the coarse rustle of the corn stalks tickled by the wind or brushed aside by the curious visitors investigating “what’s out there.” Before leaving, I magically remembered I had brought along a baseball tape, and I found James Earl Jones’ “People will come” speech. I sat there listening to it in stereo, for all the background sounds existed on that perfect Iowa afternoon.

The second trip was 10 times cooler. For his bachelor party, my friend Brad had a long May weekend of bars, baseball and cigars lined up, beginning with a reserved room at Chicago's ESPNZone, then a Cubs-Brewers game the following day (a cold, rain-delayed experience, though we did meet up with some nice folks in the left-field bleachers who graciously saved us some space; we ended up chatting with them and pondered when the Cubs would call up the pitching prospect who was lighting up the minor leagues, Mark Prior). Following the ballgame, we got a late start west, deciding on dinner at a Hooter's before we'd left Chicagoland and arriving at a new Super 8 or Comfort Inn just off U.S. 20 in Dyersville late that night. The next morning, we warmed up by playing catch in the parking lot as the stragglers in the group packed up and then -- after a quick breakfast at McDonald's during which we discussed Brad's brother's former soccer teammate, DeMarcus Beasley, and his prospects for that summer's World Cup -- headed off to the Lansings' farm.

Brad's "other friend Dan," as he still refers to him (to me) to this day, had called ahead to arrange for us to meet with Becky Lansing before we took the field. As the website explains, the Lansings have continued to offer use of the field from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., every day, from April through November, politely explaining that they do not take reservations for groups, individuals or events. But if we arrived early -- on a Monday in May especially -- she had said, we'd likely have the field to ourselves for an hour or so.

Though Dan, as the best man, organized the trip, the idea had been Brad's. "What I liked about the game is that everybody could play, everybody could relate to it," he told me afterward for a potential story I'd hoped to write about our experience. I never did, but I kept my notes, so now I'm doing something with them.

"I had friends there from my dorm in college," Brad said, "from the college newspaper, from work, from law school, and I had a brother at the game, too. That’s five different circles of friends, five different times of my life represented. When you have so many different groups, getting them to meld together can be really hard, particularly when their paths will only cross for a weekend. The people are thrown together, and with only a couple days it’s hard for people to get to know the others, hard to get to know them any more than beyond the typical superficial questions -- where are you from, what do you do, et cetera.

"But when you get together to play baseball, everybody knows what to do. You don’t have to preface the game by explaining the rules to anyone. It’s baseball. And after the game is over, everybody has something in common with each other -- they played a game of baseball together."



Not only did we play a game, but we got some one-on-one (group) time with Becky Lansing. Before taking the field, we sat ourselves down on the bleachers -- the same set along the first-base line with "Ray loves Annie" etched into the top bench -- as Becky gave us some of the backstory to how her farm was chosen, what filming was like, and what the next 13 years had brought.

"The Dubuque Chamber of Commerce and the Iowa Film Board came by in late 1987," she said. "They were looking for a long lane with a two-story white house. They looked at 250 farms from Georgia to Canada."

The Lansings' farm, which has been in Don Lansing's family for 105 years now (97 when we visited in '02) was almost perfect. The house -- in which Don himself was born -- was showing its years and needed a little work.

"The front of the house is the east side, away from the field," Becky told us. "So they put in a new door, fixed up the porch and put in bay windows."

Filming took 15 weeks during the summer of 1988, and the field wasn't supposed to remain when they were finished.

"It took four days to build the ballfield," Becky said. "What you see in the movie is what is happening. It covers three and a half acres. To a young farm family, losing that much corn might make a difference. It’s $7,000-8,000 worth of crops here [in 2002].

"The original contract with the studio was to have them put everything back -- replant all the corn -- after filming was finished. Next door, they put all the corn back in left field the week the movie premiered. A year and a half later, they put the field back in."

"Next door" is the neighbors' property, including left field. I first learned of the movie site in an article discussing that corner of the field (I believe it was in Beckett Baseball Card Monthly) in the early '90s. While the diamond, backstop, bleachers and farmhouse from the movie all sit on Don and Becky Lansing's land, left field was in fact cut out of the neighbors' corn. Parallel to the Lansings' lane leading to the field and farmhouse is another driveway. Between the two are a series of telephone poles and power lines that mark the property line. Since then, there have been two sides to the Field of Dreams: Drive down the right driveway and you're on Don and Becky's farm; buy from their souvenir stand and the money goes to help maintain the field. Drive down the left driveway and you're on "left field" land. Buy from that stand and the money goes into the bank.

"We pay Universal Studios royalties, a portion of the proceeds from the shop," Becky explained. "The rest of the money goes back into maintenance. This is not a money-making opportunity.

"Left field was leased to private investors, but our intensions were to keep it small and simple. They wanted to build a corn maze in left field, but you can get lost in my corn for free!"

Of course, in mid-May, there was no corn in which we could get lost. We had to settle for our imaginations, but otherwise, visitors to the site feel like they're in the movie.

"We work three times as hard to keep it that way," Becky said. "Corporate America comes in every year, but we turn them away. People notice every single detail if it changes from the movie.

"Donny and I do all the field maintenance. We close at 6 p.m. because the field needs to rest and we need to rest."

When it was time to play ball, we divided up into our predetermined teams -- the Yankees (Brad's favorite team since his days growing up in the Bronx suburb of Fort Wayne, Ind.) vs. the Cubs (Brad's adopted National League team from his post-college years in Chicago) for a nine-inning pickup game. Because Dan had ordered numbered T-shirts for each of us that we'd be taking home, I requested to join him on the Cubs, even though Brad, our friend Matt and most of the other Notre Dame grads would be on the Yankees (the Cubs consisted of Brad's Chicago friends, those from his recently completed first year of law school, and the friends of his brothers invited along for this outing to help fill out the teams). I still have that Cubs T-shirt, but doubt that would be the case had it been a navy-blue NY shirt.

The warmth of the morning sun was nullified by the cold wind whipping across the barren cornfields, so many of us were bundled up under our team shirts. I found swinging and throwing to be restricted, but I still managed to attempt an athletic, off-balance throw on a dribbler down the third-base line (the runner was safe, if I recall), collect a couple of base hits and drive in a run with a respectably deep (read: deep enough that no infielders had a shot and the center fielder didn't have to sprint in from his position) fly ball.

What made the morning so special was that, like in the movie, we were two teams of former players getting one more chance to play baseball on a private field in an idylic setting, something we could never be sure we'd be able to do again. And now, eight years later, I still have yet to take a baseball field with a glove on my hand and spikes on my feet and play nine-on-nine with overhand pitching. The closest I've come is regular batting practice/shagging flies with some friends from work these past few years or the occassional softball game among friends, but never the combination of nine-on-nine (or more) and overhand pitching. As we enjoyed ourselves, Becky spent some time watching, standing behind the backstop or beside the bleachers as we laughed and ran and swung and threw.

"The only two things that weren’t perfect that day were the final score and the fact that mid-May is too early for six-foot-tall corn stalks," Brad told me. "The game was close until the sixth or seventh, but they [the Cubs] broke it open after that. I had a chance to close the gap when I batted with the bases loaded and two outs in the seventh (I think), but I grounded out. What a waste. And it would have been cool to have had the opportunity to knock a ball into the corn stalks and watch it disappear like James Earl Jones. But those are minor complaints. After all, I still went 2-for-5."

The Cubs won, 15-3, even after some in-game trading in an attempt to even out the squads. My final line was 2-for-6, with that RBI and a run scored. I batted sixth and played third base. We kept score, and afterward Dan sent around the box score with all our names and batting averages listed. The pack rat that I am -- both digitally and physically -- I dug up my old laptop and inserted the -- get this -- floppy disk to transfer the box score and the file with Brad's comments onto a flash drive and then onto my current laptop. I found Becky's comments in one of the dozen reporter's notebooks I still have packed away. I'd always toyed with the idea of crafting a first-person account of our trip for a potential submission, such as to the Notre Dame alumni magazine, but I never truly made the effort. Now, with the farm up for sale, I wanted to get it all down.

We finished our game just as the first visitors to follow us began to arrive, but we took our time packing our things. Becky opened up the souvenir shed to take our donations (on a cold May weekday, it seems the business hours of the stand were customized to when someone showed up) and then allowed us where most visitors aren't allowed to go: Onto the porch of the farmhouse for a group photo she took with our cameras, mine included.

Looking back, we could've asked for more -- a warmer morning, a later date so that the corn was growing -- but had we gotten either of those, we probably wouldn't have had the field to ourselves for so long, or had the chance to visit so long with Becky. If more visitors had been there as we were preparing to leave, we might not have been allowed onto the porch for a photo. I'm not sure I'd change a thing about that day; I'd only ask for the chance to do it again. Hopefully, the new owners keep things the way they are.

"My husband’s favorite actor from the movie was James Earl Jones," Becky said eight years ago. "He said to us, 'What do you want for the farm?'"

I wonder if he's still interested. If only Brad, Matt, myself and a few others had the resources to pull together $5.4 million -- and someone to live on the farm and continue maintenance so that we could all reconvene there once a year for another game.

"Playing a game of baseball, I thought, was a better event for a bachelor party than the typical events," Brad said, "because after you’ve been to a few bachelor parties, your memories of them can run together. Bars in Chicago look pretty similar to bars in New York (although they do look a lot better than bars in South Bend -- trust me.) But how many times does a bachelor party involve playing in a baseball game?

"The point is, I realized that the bachelor party was one of the few instances I’d ever have where 18 guys I know had to do what I wanted. And what I wanted to do was play baseball with my friends. As you get older, how many more chances do you have to do that?"

As we now know, none so far. Brad and his wife have two children and live in Virginia, outside Washington, D.C., where they work. Brad's National League allegiance has shifted from the Cubs to the Nationals -- and now, it's the Nats that seem to be the team on the rise out of those two. I'm married, living in northern New Jersey, and working in New York. Matt remains close friends with the two of us and, married himself, lives in South Jersey, working in Trenton. The three of us have managed to get together at least once a year since then and have included ballgames in many of those meetings, but for those we're drinking beer and cheering on the home team, not putting on gloves and swinging bats.

As great as Brad's idea and Dan's planning were, all the credit to such a memorable trip goes to Don and Becky Lansing, simply for keeping the field. They had a once-in-a-lifetime experience in having a movie filmed at their home, and they could've quickly gone back to the way life was afterward, but they didn't. And it all started with the first visitor.

"The first person to come was from New York," Becky told us in 2002. "We were sitting down here on a Saturday afternoon and he just drove up the lane. He said he just saw the movie and had to stop by. It’s a pretty amazing story -- art imitating life and life imitating art."

They kept coming from there: 7,000 in the first year, doubling each year until topping out at 55,000 annually. After 20 summers, Don and Becky Lansing have earned their retirement.

"We hope to keep the farm the way it was portrayed in the movie," Becky said eight years ago. "We can’t promise it will always be that way when we get up to our retirement years, but right now it’s really important.

"Sometimes, we lose sight of the wonder of it all. When we do get a chance to talk to people, we get a chance to relive it."

Thank you for that, Don and Becky.

Ernie Harwell's legacy

I love this thought:

There’s a man in Mobile who remembers a triple he saw Honus Wagner hit in Pittsburgh 46 years ago. That’s baseball. So is the scout reporting that a 16-year-old sandlot pitcher in Cheyenne is the new “Walter Johnson.”

And also this one:

In baseball, democracy shines its clearest. Here the only race that matters is the race to the bag. The creed is the rule book. Color is something to distinguish one team’s uniform from another.

Those are from "A Game for All America," an essay written for The Sporting News in 1955. The author became famous for the words he spoke more than those he wrote. It was Ernie Harwell, the longtime voice of the Tigers who passed away last night.

I don't have any personal memories of listening to Harwell on the radio, but I do recall summer nights when I'd lie in my New Jersey bedroom and slowly turn the AM dial on my radio and see what ballgames I could tune in from across the Northeast. I don't know that I ever got a WJR affiliate, but I know I heard the radio voices of the Blue Jays, Indians, Pirates and Orioles in addition to the much-closer Mets, Yankees and Phillies. And Harwell just fits that memory, even if I can't recall a specific game I heard him describe.

Ernie's death reminds us that there aren't many iconic announcers left. On a national level, Vin Scully may be the only one. Loud noises and flashy graphics and the announcers that fit the mold just can't come close to the subtle storytelling of the Scullys, the Harwells, the Bob Murphys and the Harry Kalases. Harwell, Scully and other broadcasters of yestercentury became nationally known because of coast-to-coast broadcasts on ABC, CBS and NBC (radio and TV). Their counterparts of today on Fox and ESPN just shout at us.

On the local level, there's Bob Uecker in Milwaukee, Jerry Coleman in San Diego, Dave Niehaus in Seattle. And though many of us know Uecker from national broadcasts, Major League, beer commercials and Mr. Belvedere, he's a regional announcer to anyone too young to remember when the Blue Jays won a World Series. So even though we can get any game and any announcing team on our phones or computers with At Bat, it's not going to create the lasting memories for today's young fans that these distinctive voices have for those of us in our 30s and older.

There's not much else I can say about Harwell, but there's a lot of great stuff that has been said:

The Detroit Free-Press obituary

MLB.com's tribute page

An NPR feature from 2002

When Ernie met The Babe, also from NPR

A fond farewell from Larry at Wezen-Ball

Farewell, Ernie. You and Jack Buck will make quite the team up there.

My year on the disabled list

As a kid, I played baseball from sometime in maybe the second grade through my junior year of high school. When I wasn't good enough to make varsity before my senior year and realized that I would be practicing every day and playing sparingly in games, I decided to enjoy the spring afternoons with my friends.

But I think my development had stalled four years earlier. In the spring of 1990, as I was finishing eighth grade, I was asked to play on a local all-star team. I think it was in Colt League, but I can't be sure. It would've been a chance to play a higher level of competition before getting to high school. Maybe if I'd had that opportunity, I'd have handled the transition a bit better. Or maybe I would've learned then that the Red Bank JV would be the best I'd ever do.

I didn't get that chance, though. On the final day of Easter break, I was pitching in a scrimmage on a field less than two miles from my house. I had friends on my team and knew some guys on the other team, but because it was just a scrimmage, my parents didn't come to watch.

I threw a wild pitch with a runner on third. He broke for home; I ran in to cover the plate. The catcher tossed me the ball as I slid in; I caught it and turned to tag the runner in one motion. My arm was straight, elbow locked. The runner -- a year younger than me and actually smaller (I'd max out at 5-foot-7, 140 pounds in high school, so that probably should've been another clue at my baseball future) -- didn't slide so much as jump into me. I broke my arm, both bones just above my wrist. I'll save the graphic details, but let's just say that there was no doubt.

I looked down and couldn't believe what I saw; I was in immediate shock. I looked up and saw my coach, one of the player's dads who was serving as home-plate ump, and he was speechless. I shook off my glove, held my arm and walked to the bench. Someone handed me an ice pack before the father of my best friend, Will, put me in his car and drove me to the emergency room, but not without stopping at home to tell my mom to follow us over.

The doctor fitted me for a cast that went halfway up my upper arm, immobilizing it in an L shape for about four or six weeks. I desperately wanted to go to school the next day, but my parents insisted I stay home. It was the only day I missed that year. (For some reason, just once in my life, I wanted to have perfect attendance. I did it sophomore year of high school and then didn't hesitate to take a "day off" junior and senior years.)

Needless to say, I missed that entire baseball season, though I went to all the games, kept score and compiled stats. The cast was cut down to only my forearm after those initial four or six weeks and I was once again able to bend my elbow. Unable to not pick up a bat for an entire summer, I played Wiffle ball by learning to bat left-handed, though because I couldn't -- in baseball terms -- break my left wrist, most of the swing was one-handed. I modeled it after Will Clark's sweet, smooth stroke.

Though I had a waterproof fiberglass cast, the padding beneath it was cotton, so I showered with a series of New York Times delivery bags rubberbanded to my arm to keep it all dry. But after a class outing to a pool in June resulted in a wet cast, I couldn't let it keep me from my summer fun, so I occasionally swam with it on despite the lingering dampness and eventual odor akin to that of wet dog.

I recall all of this now (though two weeks later than I had originally planned after I found the hospital bracelet, dated April 22, 1990, and realized it has now been 20 years) because I came across the card I've scanned in here. During one of those first days after the accident, my mom wrote to the Mets and explained what had happened. A few more days later, this card with a photo of the 1989 team arrived, along with the 1990 media guide and perhaps one or two other things that may have been misplaced over the years. But I still have the media guide, this card and the hospital bracelet, all of which now take me back to that spring and summer when I began to make the transition from trying to be a baseball player to learning more about the statistics side and enjoying that aspect of it.

If only I'd found this card last year -- I could've made new copies and sent it out to the likes of Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran, Carlos Delgado ...

Photo Friday: Angels vs. Yankees, 1992

Donnie Baseball stands in

Didn't get around to today's slideshow as early as I have the past two weeks, so no attempt at a soundtrack today and no particular reason for choosing this set.

This was a late-August game between two teams going nowhere in 1992: the Angels and Yankees. California, as the Angels were known then, won, 7-3, and Tim Salmon hit his first Major League home run, which is why this particular game always stood out in my memory. Years ago, when I discovered Retrosheet.org and its archive of box scores, I wanted to track down every game I'd attended. Finding this one was easy, because I remembered Salmon's milestone. Same goes for Mo Vaughn, who hit his first homer about two months before this in Baltimore's Memorial Stadium (I'll eventually post my pics from that day).

Nothing particularly wonderful about this set. It was before I'd gotten my first SLR camera, so I'm using my mom's point-and-shoot, the first camera I'd used that had a zoom function. But the settings couldn't be adjusted, even if I knew what to do back then at almost 16 years old, so there is definitely some blurring that could've been prevented had I known what to do. So even though they might not hold up to my personal standards today, I've decided to include them for what they are: The memory and record of what I focused on and what I saw 17 years ago.

Firing up the DVR for Cobb Field

Cobb Field by trimworksconst on Flickr

As I have shown with Tiger Stadium, I'm always a bit saddened when a historic ballpark becomes obsolete and the only viable option for teams that want to remain relevant in their communities is to replace it. This goes both for places I've visited and those I never got to see -- or even knew existed.

That is the case with Cobb Field, formerly of Billings, Mont. I never knew about the place, and from the looks of things, it was what you'd expect from a Depression-era field -- little more than a grandstand stretching from first to third base, a rickety press box perched on top. Tonight, the field (named for the owner who brought the Billings Mustangs to town in 1948) will be featured in a documentary on MLB Network (preview) that will give an inside look at a day in the life of the old ballyard in its final season, 2007.

There's always something that draws me to these little fields, often tucked into the community, sometimes merely across the street from people's homes -- only a long foul ball away from a thump on the roof or a cracked window. I've visited two of them: Dwyer Stadium, home of the Batavia Muckdogs in upstate New York, and World War Memorial Stadium, the former home of the Greensboro Bats in North Carolina. The latter, dedicated in 1926, memorializes the first World War and was used in both Bull Durham (the bus pulls up in front during a road trip) and Leatherheads. (Photos to come in a future Photo Friday post.) I guess it's the whole "humble roots" aspect of the game and the quaint image of minor league life in the middle of the 20th century -- you know, back when ballplayers juiced themselves on little more than liquor and greenies.

Still a fan of the summer of '98

Mark McGwire at Wrigley Field, May 1, 1998

I graduated from college in 1998, so that was a special summer for me, too. I set up my spring semester schedule to only have classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. My friends and I popped champagne on our apartment balcony after our last finals. We caught a Cardinals-Cubs game at Wrigley Field on a pleasant May afternoon. After the commencement ceremony -- which took place on the same day the Yankees gave away Beanie Babies for a game against the Twins (and David Wells pitched pretty well, I believe) -- I came home to New Jersey and spent six weeks going to a few graduation parties and planning my cross-country trip.

And all that summer, as I drove out to California and back, I followed what has become known as the Great Home Run Chase. Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and the ghost of Roger Maris. I saw McGwire hit home run No. 12 that season, a ninth-inning two-run shot off of Rod Beck in a game the Cubs won, 6-5. When I stayed in Major League cities, I checked the schedules to see if the Cardinals were in town, just missing them in San Diego when I was in L.A. and in Colorado when I got into Denver. And in a small bit of personal symmetry, I was back on campus in South Bend, watching the Labor Day afternoon game on ESPN when McGwire hit his 61st long ball that season. An interview for a job with a local newspaper kept me in town the next night, too, when I watched him hit his 62nd. I might've teared up watching it happen.

It was all so compelling: missing first base in the excitement, high-fives from Cubs infielders as he rounded the bases, a bear hug with his son at home plate, Sammy Sosa's sprint in from right field, his tearful embrace with Maris' widow and sons. As baseball fans, how could we not become enthralled? The 1994-95 strike was still pretty raw, robbing fans of the World Series for the first time since John McGraw didn't feel the Boston Red Sox, of the inferior "American League," were a worthy opponent to his National League pennant-winning Giants in 1904. Cal Ripken may have broken Lou Gehrig's consecutive-games streak in '95, but that came too close to the strike -- and he would've broken it sooner if it weren't for the strike -- to help the healing. We didn't have enough distance.

Three years, it seems, was enough distance to bring us back, to capture our attention with a chase at one of the game's great records. We all watched, and few of us, I think, questioned it. Mike Lupica wrote a book about it. I bought it and read it and still love the cover image.

But even if we did suspect at the time that McGwire might not be all natural, we did so in a less accusatory tone. Yeah, it may have happened, but who can really say? It wasn't like today, when accusations of performance-enhancing are not brushed off so easily and we find ourselves pausing to contemplate whether or not we think the player mentioned compiled his stats solely on his own ability. When McGwire first appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot, Lupica said that he doesn't think McGwire should be elected. Bill Simmons called him on it. We're all still trying to figure this out.

In 80 plate appearances against three admitted or widely suspected performance-enhancing pitchers, McGwire hit four home runs -- two each off of Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte and none against Jason Grimsley. He struck out 14 times vs. Clemens (in 53 at-bats), five vs. Pettitte (in 21) and had none against Grimsley (but with four walks in six at-bats). But now that our suspicions are being proven, will we look at the steroid era any differently? Will it someday come to the point that, yeah, hitters were juicing, but they were facing pitchers who weren't clean, either? Are others going to come forward? Is Sammy Sosa next?

I never thought I'd be saying this, but I may not care anymore who was on steroids. With every new player whose name comes up, I think my outrage subsides a bit. I liked McGwire in the '90s and I can't say I like him any less now. I'm a bit disappointed, both in the fact that he decided to cheat and that he waited so long to come clean. But he still came clean faster than Pete Rose did for his transgressions and some of these other players we've got at the top of our suspected users lists. Knowing what I know now, confirmed, may sadden the 33-year-old me, but the 21-year-old from 1998 still remembers a great summer.

So maybe it's time Bud Selig and the baseball writers just give amnesty to all the steroid and HGH users from the past up until the Mitchell Report came out. If you used then, 'fess up, and all's good. Yeah, the numbers McGwire, Sosa and Barry Bonds put up may not be fair to Roger Maris, Babe Ruth (Sosa broke Ruth's record for home runs in one month) or Hank Aaron, but the 162-game schedule also wasn't fair to Ruth and so many other advances in baseball and technology have also tilted the playing field -- literally, in some cases. From expansion several times over to night games to domed stadiums to maple bats to elbow guards to dietary supplements to training regimens to ballpark design, the game has changed over the decades. Even comparing players of the same era is not fool-proof. Did Ted Williams hit 160 more home runs than Joe DiMaggio because he was more powerful, or did Yankee Stadium's Death Valley in left-center rob DiMaggio of a glut of long balls? Or what if DiMaggio hit left-handed? Sadly, maybe this is another variable to consider. Maybe, as others have written, the Steroid Era has to be treated like antithesis to the Dead Ball Era.

I'm not going to go out and buy a McGwire jersey and I don't see myself making an extra effort to get to batting practice and cheer him as hitting coach when the Cardinals come to New York. But I won't boo him, either. I won't make signs or yell insults. Maybe I've come to accept it, or maybe I'm just scared that the next name will be someone I truly adored, a name that will really upset me and shatter those memories of past summers.

Photo Friday: Rangers vs. Red Sox, 1993

Juan Gonzalez

Tonight I'm posting what I hope will be the first in a weekly -- or at least bi-weekly -- feature wherein I go back to my film negatives and scan in photos I've taken since I got my first SLR camera in high school. This is the first batch of those images.

I got the camera as an early birthday present in August 1993 because my friend Matt and I were about to go up to Boston for a couple of nights to see a game at Fenway Park and take a visit to Boston College as we prepared to enter our senior year in high school. I was much more stoked about the ballgame.

Nolan Ryan was one of my favorite players, so he was my focus during batting practice, but unfortunately, he kept to the outfield and didn't venture near us along the left-field line. So then I kept my eye on the young stars at the time -- Rafael Palmeiro, Juan Gonzalez and Ivan Rodriguez. Ah, so innocent then ...

I don't remember where we stayed, but I think we drove up on Monday, the day of the game, and went home the next day, after touring campus in the morning. We paid to park in a gas station close to Fenway Park. I don't know what it cost, but I'm sure it's double that now. I hear the gas stations and other lots near the park get $50 or more. When we went back in May, we walked from my college roommate's place about a mile away.

In my mind, I can think of several games I've shot as a fan -- a Padres-Phillies game at the Vet that included a brawl started by a hard slide to the plate, the first Devil Rays-Mets game that doubled as Hideo Nomo's Mets debut during interleague play in 1998, and my one and only visit to Tiger Stadium for a three-game series vs. the Red Sox in 1999. And even though the prints are scattered about the house in albums and frames, I can't wait to go through the negatives and see the pictures again for the first time in a long time.

I even went an extra step and put together a video slideshow. Not sure I'll take the time to do this every week, but I was inspired with the first try.

Finding the treasures in a pack of cards

Here we are in another year -- and another chance for me to make promises about being a better updater of this blog, of trying harder to use this space as an outlet for my thoughts and ideas on the game. And writing, like other pursuits, is one which is best kept fresh and in top form with regular practice and challenges. Yet, I've let it slide much too often.

Finally, I've realized that because my job involves baseball around the clock (and writing about it in short form, like headlines and paragraphs), one of the last things I want to do in my free computer and blog time is to write more about it. So no promises this time, other than I'll try. I've found a way to keep my photo blog fresh and interesting (to me, which is all I really care about), so perhaps something will strike me for this one, too.

Today, though, I picked up a box of Bowman Prospects. It must be noted that a "box" today is nothing like it was in the late 80s when I was collecting. Then, a box contained 36 wax packs and cost about $16. Packs held 15 cards, giving you 540 cards in one box. The Bowman "box" I bought today at Target held seven packs of seven cards, for a mere 49 -- and cost $20.

The purchase was for one main purpose -- I hoped to obtain a card of Jeff Samardzija. After opening about three packs containing various prospects whose names, if not faces, were familiar, I got a Samardzija in the mother lode of packs (for me, at least). Behind Samardzija's square-jawed glare was Mets prospect Fernando Martinez, and behind him sat former New Jersey prep standout Rick Porcello.

But then the next pack held the top card in the box. There was a chance that, in the seven packs I'd bought, I'd find a "relic" card (one with a piece of jersey worn by the player depicted) or an authentic autographed card.

I got the second one, my first authentic autographed card of any kind obtained this way (in a pack of cards rather than at a ballpark). And as a bonus, it meant just a little bit more that it was of the Mets' Daniel Murphy.

I don't actively collect cards anymore, but I do enjoy buying a few packs (or a "box" or two) each year. I'm sure I will again when the 2009s come out in February. And it's finds like those today that make it worthwhile and bring back a little bit of the joy and excitement I felt in opening those wax packs and peeling the cardboard gum off the cardboard of a Mark McGwire or Will Clark on a 1989 Topps card.

Looking back on the 1992 Hall of Fame Game

Like most of baseball, I went about my day last Monday as I normally would. I didn't take any time out of my day to visit MLB.com and listen to the coverage of the Hall of Fame from Cooperstown, the annual exhibition that used to be played the Monday following Induction Weekend. The Cubs and Padres were to play, but Mother Nature had other ideas and washed out the game.

At first, I didn't care. It didn't bother me that an exhibition game I had barely paid attention to over the past 15 years wouldn't be played anymore. It wasn't until I read Tom Verducci's "Requiem for the Game" that I realized that I will miss it, even if I rarely acknowledged it was there.

The truth is, the Hall of Fame Game has changed twice recently and wasn't what it was in 1992, when my family and I saw the Mets and White Sox face off following the inductions of Tom Seaver and Rollie Fingers. The first was in 1997, when Interleague Play came along and made a Mets-White Sox or any other NL-AL matchup less unique. As a result, baseball relaxed its rules on choosing one team from each league for the game, bringing the Dodgers and Padres to town that year. (In 1986, the Royals and Rangers played the first intraleague HOF Game, but it didn't become a frequent occurrence until 1997.) The second change was in 2003, when the Phillies (with minor league lefty Cole Hamels on the mound) and Rays played on June 16, moving the game off of Induction Weekend.

I was 15 in the summer of '92, so there was no widespread internet, let along blogs (we called them "diaries" or "journals" back then), so I don't know that I've ever written down my memories of that weekend. I do have video of it. We borrowed a camera from a family friend and my buddy Matt and I used it to record some of the induction (it was the first held at the Clark Sports Center on the outskirts of Cooperstown, instead of at the actual Hall of Fame, because of renovations there) and our tour through the museum. Not adept in video editing -- and, again, not having the computer technology of "digital" and "iMovie" -- we created a soundtrack by ... fastening headphones to the camera's microphone with rubber bands, and playing a cassette tape in a Walkman. We called it "Coop '92," and I really need to find out where that is and watch it again.

But as for the HOF Game itself, we hadn't been able to purchase tickets before they sold out, so my mom volunteered to go over to Doubleday Field the morning of the game and wait on line for standby tickets, should any be released because of cancellations or whatever causes people to pass up an opportunity to see Major League players at a town ballfield. While she waited, Matt and I continued to explore town, particularly shops selling baseball cards, and walked around the ballpark. We met up with Mom at a designated time (because, say it with me, no cellphones then, either) and she announced that she had secured three tickets. That's all we needed, because my sister and Matt's had no interest in going, and since they were two years younger, couldn't really be allowed to roam Cooperstown by themselves for three hours, so my dad volunteered to chaperone them.

While standing in line, my mom took note of all the uniformed Mets personnel who walked past her on their way from the dugout to the only men's room at the ballpark, a park-like facility with concrete floors and, I imagine, troughs that was accessible only from the parking lot. I think she was most excited to see Howard Johnson. She was also soon approached by a man who had come to turn in three tickets he couldn't use. There were two pairs (probably a purchase limit) that weren't together, and his wife would be sitting in one of the seats, so after chatting up my mom, he felt comfortable having her sit with his spouse. "It's better than turning them in and not knowing what she'll get," he said. So Mom became friends for an afternoon with some guy's wife, and Matt and I sat only a few rows up from the field down the left-field line.

Bobby Jones -- that would be Bobby J. Jones, the Mets' first-round draft pick the previous year -- was called up from nearby Double-A Binghamton to make the start, and he carried a perfect game into the seventh inning. He and two other hurlers combined on the only one-hitter in HOF Game history. The Mets won, 3-0, on a solo home run by Chico Walker (who, until I looked up the history of this game, I didn't not recall as a Met for a single at-bat) and a two-run double by Daryl Boston, both of which happened in the eighth inning.

Boston played left field, so we saw a lot of him -- particularly late in the game, when he started acknowledging us and getting the crowd along the line to chant his name. He and right fielder Dave Gallagher were engaged in a competition to see who could get the fans on his side of the field to cheer his name louder. I'm pretty sure we won it for Daryl.

Other than wanting to see Seaver (he ignored me on his way into the ballpark -- my closest chance at getting his autograph in my lifetime) and White Sox third baseman Robin Ventura (who won the pregame home run derby, which I don't remember, so we might not have had our tickets yet), I don't recall what my expectations were for the game. (It wasn't the best of Mets teams, though they did have a former Yankee starting at second base -- Willie Randolph.) I marveled at the houses just beyond the outfield fence, clearly the best real estate in Cooperstown, I believed then -- before I became a homeowner and would have to be concerned about things like broken windows. But if you're going to have your windows broken by an errant baseball, wouldn't you rather it be from someone in a Major League uniform than the neighbors' kid? And before the game, when Matt and I were for some reason separated inside the ballpark, he recounted a scene he witnessed along the right-field line, when the Mets' John Franco took a liking to one fan's hat commemorating the game and traded his team-issued on-field cap for the fan's commemorative lid. Even though he was a Yankees fan, I think Matt felt a little disappointment that Franco didn't notice his hat first and offer the trade.

But now those moments are gone forever. As Verducci and Hal Bodley lamented, the HOF Game was an important link of baseball's present and past. Both writers alluded to the big-shot player who expresses disdain at having to trek to upstate New York during the middle of the season, yet once he arrives and gets a tour and sees the quaint field nestled in the center of the quaint town, reverses course and voices his appreciation at having made the trip.

It's a shame the game has to die, but I can see why. Verducci touches on all of them. But why can't baseball fix it, instead of pulling the plug? The NFL has it right, but making the game a preseason exhibition tied to its inductions. But baseball can't have a preseason game in upstate New York, not when local residents haven't put away their shovels for the season yet in late March. What MLB could do is extend the All-Star break by a day -- some teams get both the Wednesday and Thursday after the game off anyway -- and stage the game on that Thursday. Every team would be off, making scheduling easier. Or simply choose from among the teams that have that extra day after the Midsummer Classic. There are only four games -- that's 22 teams off -- playing that day this year.

Baseball keeps moving further and further away from the small-town, easily accessible game it was long before I was born. Many of these changes are natural, necessary and inevitable. But some of them -- like bringing the big stars of the Cubs and Padres, or any other combo of teams, to a small town in upstate New York where the game is celebrated year-round -- don't have to be made. It's a shame that this one was.

As seen on the radio

I don't often read in bed anymore, another lost pastime swallowed up into the sensory overload brought on by digital cable and sleep timers on the TV. But tonight, as I spread out in the center of our queen-size bed, my fiancee away for the night, I began my weekly ritual wherein I meander, page-by-page, through the latest issue of Sports Illustrated.

Just past the letters to the editor and the contributors page came Steve Rushin's column, which, once I finished reading, made me put the magazine down and give in to yet another diversion -- the computer in my lap, my lap still in bed. I couldn't put this off until morning. If XM Satellite Radio hasn't already begun thinking of how to use this column in advertising its product, it will soon. I was debating the purchase myself, strictly on the strength of having 15 baseball games a day at my earlobes, but I hesitated when consulting the Sunday circulars and discovering the awful truth about such technology these days: You can't have it all. Baseball is on XM, but the NFL is on Sirius. XM has CNN, MSNBC and the Weather Channel, but Sirius has ESPN and Notre Dame sports. And, sadly, XM has right-wing blowhards and football and basketball from the ACC, Pac 10 and Big Ten. But to read Rushin's experiences from one week of surfing the satellites pretty much sold me. In fact, I picked up my TV remote and turned the Indians-Angels game I was watching (with my MLB Extra Innings package) to the Dodgers-Padres matchup to hear Vin Scully tell me Mark Sweeney's degree from the University of Maine.

Clearly, though Rushin didn't tune into a Pirates game, or he might not have been misled by Dan Gladden on a Twins broadcast. For it was in Pittsburgh along the Allegheny that the aluminum beer bottle was developed and marketed, not the Twin Cities of the Mississippi.

But maybe he did and just got confused. If I had 15 ballgames per day, at least five days a week, at my disposal, I might mix up some of the minutiae too.

In a week or so, I'll probably know.

An uphill bat-tle

As I sit here watching the Mets and Pirates (and the Yankees and Red Sox ... OK, and the Rockies and Cardinals and the Brewers and Astros), I look at the batter's boxes and remember how bad public fields are.

If I ever have a son, I'm going to do what a family friend did with his: Teach him to hit left-handed. Growing up, the lefties have the advantage. There's often maybe three out of 15 guys on a team who hit from the left side, so there's a good chance he'll be in the lineup, so long as he can get the bat on the ball. Also, there aren't too many left-handed pitchers at the lower levels.

But perhaps the best argument for left-handed hitters at the high school level and lower is the batter's box. With so many right-handed hitters, that batter's box becomes three dimensional. I remember digging in to many an at bat and having my right foot settled deep in the back of the box, sometimes up past my ankle. It took me from 5' 6" to 5'4".

The varsity fields were generally better, but in some cases the smooth, flat dirt would be kicked away by the end of the first to reveal the harder, packed dirt underneath. On some fields, there was no chance to get a foothold in the box. It was like coming to bat beneath the Windows at Arches National Park: You might as well be kicking at the slickrock. At more than one school, I remember having to adjust to the point that my back foot was at an angle not normally considered comfortable for batting.

On the rare instances I came to the plate and found a flat, well-groomed hitting area, I almost felt out of place. It was almost uncomfortable. How could I be expected to hit when I didn't have to step up with my front foot or climb out of a trench to run to first in an attempt to beat out an infield hit? God, sometimes, I felt as if I was running in place when trying to make my first step out of the box.

But not at Shea. Not at Fenway. A major league field is as well-kept as a museum's grounds or a landscaper's biggest client. Patches of dead grass are resodded, infields smoothed over and replenished with dirt when needed. Pitching mounds are resculpted every now and then. I've walked on professional fields -- Tiger Stadium, Yankee Stadium, Shea Stadium, FirstEnergy Park in Lakewood, N.J., where the head groundskeeper, Bill Butler, left after the team's first three years to take over the duties at Shea this season. The grass is soft like a deep-pile carpet, the warning track a gravelly, crunchy border like the walkway in Field of Dreams with the closeup of Doc Graham's feet when he steps out of the past and into old age to save Gaby Hoffman from choking.

In high school, you had uneven, clumpy outfields, bare patches in the infield (if there was infield grass at all) and tufts of grass growing in the baselines. The colors melded. But in a perfect place such as Fenway, the lines are sharp, the brown meeting the green but going no further, the white lines stretching off into the distance.

And the batters are all on even ground.