Perception is reality, the saying goes. Modern players can never transcend time, athletes only care about the money and the fan is never wrong. Yet, all you need to do is dig a little deeper to find the truth. As a freelance sportswriter, my job is to give the audience a story around what just happened. As a consumer, I expect that sports will always provide more than I bargained for. As a fan, my hopes are to be enlightened by more than points. Welcome to the mind of a sports scribe.
MLB Extra Innings is a lifesaver. When there isn't much compelling entertainment on television, it's the long reliever when you need to make it to your desired programming destination. It also gives you a glimpse into ballparks that you may not have a chance to see in person or are anxious for the day you do.
Since chances are slim on another park visit this season, I was thinking of the places I'd like to see, though not necessarily because of the lauded nooks and crannies that you may hear about from baseball types, but for completely random and silly reasons. Here are three.
San Diego's PETCO Park: Certainly, it's beloved by many visiting announcers and players. Yet, while watching Atlanta's Adam LaRoche and San Diego's Kyle Blanks launch homers into right center field, I couldn't help but to laugh at adults throwing themselves into a sandbox to grab the balls. A SANDBOX?!?!
Though as this Flickr user points out here, it may not be the most responsible idea a team ever considered for ballpark design.
Milwaukee's Miller Park: Heard some very good things about this place over the last few years, but I will only go if I'm allowed to go down that slide (and not for just home runs, like Bernie Brewer here).
LandShark Stadium in Miami: Yeah, you're questioning my sanity now, I understand. Yet, you have to understand something. I want to be this guy (thanks to Random Pixels). I KNOW it'll get me on TV.
Of course, outside of LandShark, I would love to see all of the modern stadiums along with the seemingly required trek to Chicago for Wrigley Field (though I want to hang out with the Southsiders at the Cell). Yet, when watching on television, sometimes it's the utterly random and silly that catch my eye as opposed to the revered and celebrated.
This was in this past edition of the New York Beacon (in the print edition only here in the city). There may be a point or two worth discussing among all of you baseball fans, especially those of you have had the chance to visit a few ballparks around the country.
Again, keep in mind that I have yet to visit the new Yankee Stadium for a game, though you've seen a video weeks before it opened this past spring.
By now, you’ve heard and read about, if not witnessed the story, play itself out during these forty-two home games at the new Stadium. By some baseball media and executives, it has been dubbed Coors Field East after the long ball-happy home of the Colorado Rockies. The Bombers have sent 78 balls into the seats while their opponents added 61 of their own for a grand total of 139 souvenirs in a half-season of home games. The story has legs not only because of how much the park’s construction was (about $1.5 billion), but beyond the new amenities, the Stadium’s dimensions are identical to its predecessor as if the park was just shoved across the street.
Yet, what few, if anyone has talked about is that for opposing teams and the newest Yankees, the new Stadium is just the latest in a long line of new structures they visit every few days.
Save for four teams (Boston, Minnesota, Oakland and Florida), every other opponent on the Yanks’ schedule this season plays in either a relatively new stadium or in the case of Kansas City, a remodeled one. Most of the players in the majors since Baltimore ushered in the league’s stadium boom in 1991 have grown accustomed, if not have played their entire careers in new facilities. Since those stadiums are still building their own histories, the intangibles do not exist in the level that they did at the House that Ruth Built. Eighty-five years of big games in front of nearly 58,000 rowdy fans reminding them of the Yankees’ prestige placed opponents at a huge psychological disadvantage when playing there.
Even as a fan or media member, there’s a different feel to walking in an older stadium such as Boston’s Fenway Park, Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles or Chicago’s Wrigley Field, where generations have walked through the same corridors and sat in the same seats over decades. With stadiums such as San Francisco’s AT&T Park or PNC Park in Pittsburgh - considered two of the best buildings in the game – only the players can take comfort in knowing that none of the new facilities have a distinct home-field advantage just yet. With that unique ambiance – or annoyance for non-Yankees – missing, this is just another new ballpark, no matter which team plays there.
In a sport obsessed with attaching some statistical reason why things happen, intimidation has no number to account for. You can’t put a statistic on it, but it’s an undeniable factor on performance. The new Stadium has enough games to tell us that until Yankee fans can finish transferring that mystique from across the street, that home run tally will keep rising to absurd levels.
