Baseball. Blogging. Whenever.

Monday, March 16, 2009

Stadiums Citi and Yankee

A stadium is a stage set as sure as anything on Broadway, and it determines the tone of the dramas within. Citi Field suggests a team that wants to be liked, even to the point of claiming some history that isn’t its own. Yankee Stadium, however, reflects an organization that is in the business of being admired, and is built to serve as a backdrop for the image of the Yankees, at once connected to the city and rising grandly above it.

The stadium is bigger and more imposing than everything around it, of course, but it seems to grow out of its surroundings, and this somehow rescues the building from its own pomposity.

Pudge to the Astros

Catcher Ivan Rodriguez has agree to a one-year, $1.5 million contract with the Houston Astros, a source told ESPN's Steve Phillips on Monday. Rodriguez can make an additional $1.5 million in performances bonuses. At the World Baseball Classic this spring, Rodriguez, a 14-time major league All-Star, is hitting .600 (9-for-15) in four games for Puerto Rico . . .

. . . Rodriguez has caught 2,173 games, trailing only Carlton Fisk (2,226) and Boone (2,225) in terms of longevity behind the plate.

Credit crunch? What credit crunch?

The New York Yankees earlier this month borrowed $105 million from a group of banks led by Goldman Sachs to cover final cost overruns at the new Yankee Stadium, sources said.

The loan brings the total debt on the stadium, which opens next month, to more than $1.3 billion. Despite concerns about the economy’s effect on sales at the new stadium, the Yankees, in the loan document, project healthy revenue, sources said.

The collateral for the loan is limited to sponsorships, premium seating and ticket sales, categories that are expected to total $330 million this season, said a finance source who’s read the loan prospectus, which cited the figure. Concessions revenue is housed in the team’s new Legends Hospitality partnership with the Dallas Cowboys . . .

. . . Another source said that when adding in the Yankees’ fees from the YES Network and other media, and calculating in concessions revenue, total dollars generated by the team should exceed $450 million. That would make the club one of the highest-revenue clubs in pro sports, if not the highest.

What’s Next

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

Gods and Mortals

When Aaron Rowand took a seat at Mays’ table in the Giants’ clubhouse last week, something important was happening. For all the talk of Rowand’s prolonged hitting slump during his first season with the Giants, his fielding troubles might have been more crucial.

Rowand did not always get great jumps on balls and overthrew cutoff men far more than a seven-year major-leaguer should. Mays had some answers. He told Rowand to close the gap between his fingers when he grips the ball and throw more on a downward slope, as a pitcher does. Mays also said Rowand needs to crouch more as the pitch is thrown, allowing for a more catlike step toward long flyballs.

Rowand is a great talker. In this conversation, he was a great listener.

“There’s no doubt he is the greatest center fielder of all time,” Rowand said. “To have a chance to sit down and talk to him, first it’s getting over the intimidation factor. He’s an imposing figure. He’s one of the greatest of all time of anybody who’s ever laced up a pair of cleats.

“Talking to him about playing center field, talking to him about playing balls off the wall, grips, stuff like that, you’re not going to find a better source of information on this planet than the man who did it the best.”

On liability

The lawsuit stems from a June 2003 Quad City River Bandits game in Davenport that Tara Sweeney, 8, attended as part of a field trip organized by the Bettendorf parks and recreation department. Sweeney sat in the third or fourth row of bleachers about 30 feet past third base, beyond the area where a net protects spectators, according to court records.

When Sweeney turned her head to talk to a friend, a player lost control of his bat, which traveled about 120 feet and struck the girl in the head. Her mother had signed a liability waiver that absolved the city of responsibility for accidents or injuries on the field trip. But the Sweeneys argued that supervisors of the outing were nonetheless negligent.

A Scott County judge threw out the lawsuit.

But the Supreme Court ruled that the city had "a duty to ... protect the children's safety at the ballpark," adding that a jury could find parks employees put the child in an "unreasonably hazardous location" to watch the game.

Ron Silver: 1946-2009

Wolff to Oakland: “buh-bye!”

The Oakland A's have "exhausted" their time and resources with the city of Oakland in a search for a new home, and have "no interest in covering old ground again," A's owner Lew Wolff said in a statement released Friday . . .

. . . "We have fully exhausted our time and resources over the years with the city of Oakland, dating back to previous A's ownership," he said in the statement. "We recognize conditions have not changed. Letters to Major League Baseball offer nothing new or of any real substance. Outside stimulation to have us continue to play in an aging and shared facility may generate press and 'sound-bite' opportunities, but do not provide any tangible alterations in the circumstances we face."

The Oakland A's are reportedly looking at Las Vegas as a bargaining chip.

There was buzz Sunday that baseball commissioner Bud Selig was meeting with Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman and A's executives.

So much drama in the WBC

Batting Stance Guy

[Gar] Ryness has a singular talent: an ability to perform comically dead-on impressions of major league baseball hitters upon request. Little Leaguers have been known to try to imitate their favorite ballplayers. Ryness, 35, a married father of two, can do the starting lineups of all 30 teams.

Views of his YouTube videos number more than a million, and he appeared last year on several teams’ pregame shows. Sony also hired him to perform his impressions while wearing movement-tracking electrodes, helping programmers make the company’s MLB 2009: The Show video game look more realistic. Most recently, Ryness has made appearances on MLB Network’s team preview shows, displaying his encyclopedic knowledge of batters past and present. He has archived his body of work on a Web site, battingstanceguy.com.