Boston, you're my home

Send Us Your Tourists

noreply@blogger.com (Dirty Water) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 22:24:00 +0000

I am amused to find out that the feature travel destination in the Sunday Chicago Tribune on October 18th is CAMBRIDGE?????

Cambridge: the original college town
This city is more than worth your study time

The story offers gems like

If you must revisit the Cambridge Police Department's globally famous arrest and release of professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in July, don't go looking for his house. Instead, look for Gates, a regular customer, in the crowd at Mr. Bartley's Gourmet Burgers (aka Mr. Bartley's Burger Cottage, 1246 Massachusetts Ave.), a Mass Ave fixture since Bob Dylan and Joan Baez chowed down there in the 1960s.

Look both ways. The streets are teeming with New England drivers (not known for their congeniality) and Cambridge pedestrians, which is just a fancy way of saying jaywalkers. Maybe the locals will think you're a dweeb, waiting for a green light. But sometimes dweebs live longer.

(update) The T's voice is HUMAN????? I DON'T THINK SO......

noreply@blogger.com (Dirty Water) — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 22:55:00 +0000

For years I thought the T's voice on the bus and subway was just a computer voice....well METRO tells us today it is a real person......who knew????

The voice behind the MBTA system

This can't be correct.....for a few reasons

The voice on the newer RED LINE trains at least sounds human and it isn't the same voice that is on the GREEN or BLUE Lines or the bus.
The voice that announces the SILVER Line at South Station is a yet another voice
Then we have the Mass Eye and Ear woman on selected trains....she human ( and sounds like Dorchester or Southie)

I was in Chicago last summer and the 'L and bus voice sounds very human and is called Happy CTA guy. Turns out he is a voiceover pro from Milwaukee. Then for station announcements they use a woman from Maine that tells people "Attention Customers...An Inbound Train From The Loop Is arriving Shortly"

Even the new computer voice at South Station sounds human however I wish they had recorded the guy that went...."Auuuuuuuuuuubuuuuuuuuuuundale" If they can record the clickty clack of the old board they could do that.

I really hope that guy doesn't really sound like this in real life

Faneuil Hall Marketplace Is 4th Most Visited Tourist Attraction In US

noreply@blogger.com (Dirty Water) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 22:36:00 +0000

YAHOO travel ranks the Top 10 most visited tourist attractions in the United States and Faneuil Hall Marketplace comes in 4th.

The Top 10 are

Times Square, New York City:
37.6 million

2. The Las Vegas Strip, Nev.:
30 Million

3. National Mall and Memorial Parks, Washington, D.C.
25 million

4. Faneuil Hall Marketplace, Boston:
20 Million

5. Disney World's Magic Kingdom, Lake Buena Vista, Fla.:
17.1 million

6. Disneyland Park, Anaheim, Calif.:
14.9 million

7. Fisherman's Wharf/Golden Gate National Recreation Area, San Francisco:
14.1 million

8. Niagara Falls, N.Y.:
12 million

9. Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tenn./N.C.:
9.04 million

10. Navy Pier, Chicago:
8.6 million

Yahoo writes

Built in 1742 by Peter Faneuil, a wealthy Boston merchant, Faneuil Hall served as a commercial center of the city for centuries and a site for famous orations, like Samuel Adams' independence-rallying speech to colonists. Faneuil also includes the restored 19th-century Quincy Market. Today, shoppers account for a large share of visitors, and while we've excluded shopping-only malls (like Minnesota's Mall of America) from this list, Faneuil's historic significance vaults it to the status of cultural attraction.

Gee I remember when nothing was there but MONDO'S

Why isn't Fenway Park on the ballot???

noreply@blogger.com (Dirty Water) — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 22:52:00 +0000

The US Mint is at it again and they have asked Massachusetts to submit one preferred and three alternate Massachusetts national sites to be featured on the reverse of a quarter. Beginning in 2010, the Mint will release five new quarter designs annually based on the order in which the selected sites gained federal designation.

So Governor Patrick's website is polling the citizens which is fine

The website says

We have taken the liberty of reducing the list of thousands of potential sites down to the possibilities below based on their local and national significance.
How to Vote
The voting is now open. Please note that you can only submit one site at a time, but you can vote as often as you would like until 5:00 p.m. February 26, 2009. If your preferred site does not appear on this list, you can still vote for it by calling 1-800-227-MASS [6277].

I must ask the question.

Why isn't Fenway Park on this list??????

A Red Sox fan pleads to MLB...come clean NOW!!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Dirty Water) — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 02:40:00 +0000

I urge all to read the report posted on the Sports illustrated website Saturday morning before reading my post.

Sources tell SI Alex Rodriguez tested positive for steroids in 2003

I guess I can not be shocked any more by revelations about steroid use by baseball players. My reaction to the news that A-Rod had tested positive back in 2003 just saddened me. Like millions of baseball fans I was hoping he could catch Barry Bonds and become the all time home run king with no questions asked. How naive we all were...

As a fan of the Red Sox and MLB and also someone who earns a living being a tech at games here is what really concerns me

from SI
The list of the 104 players whose urine samples tested positive is under seal in California. However, two sources familiar with the evidence that the government has gathered in its investigation of steroid use in baseball and two other sources with knowledge of the testing results have told Sports Illustrated that Rodriguez is one of the 104 players identified as having tested positive, in his case for testosterone and an anabolic steroid known by the brand name Primobolan. All four sources spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the evidence.

So there are still 103 names out there waiting to be leaked...one by one all summer long. MLB and the players association can not let that happen....just come clean with the names now as how much worse can it get at this point?

In 1998 I was as caught up in the Mark McGwire-Sammy Sosa chase on Roger Maris' HR record as anyone. I remember being in a packed Harvard Square bar when McGwire broke the record and fans were excited. I should have known better based on what happened at Fenway Park 10 years before.

October 5th, 1988 was Game 1 of the ALCS at Fenway Park between Oakland and the Red Sox. A week before sprinter Ben Johnson had been disqualified from his world record 100 meter run at the Seoul Olympics for having Stanozolol in his urine. A Boston columnist wondered how baseball would treat that situation. That afternoon when Jose Canseco came up to bat the park erupted in jeers as the chant S-T-E-R-O-I-D-S, S-T-E-R-O-I-D-S were directed at Jose who simply laughed. MLB executives most likely laughed as well. (BTW he had the game winning HR later in a 2-1 victory)

As a Red Sox fan I want those 103 names released to help erase doubt that any of the 2004 or 2007 World Series champs could be tainted. The city would be devestated if it came out that Pedro, Pappi, Manny or anybody else was dirty. But by the same token a cloud not of their doing hangs over them now especially David Ortiz. In the last 2 years Papi has lost much of his power and I pray it is because of an injury but the reality is now you have to wonder.

The Red Sox have so far come across unscathed in this scandal but fans certainly have their doubts about Nomar and Mo Vaughn. Nomar did not help himself with his infamous SI cover earlier this decade.

http://i.cdn.turner.com/sivault/si_online/covers/images/2001/0305_large.jpg

But I worry most about my son who is now 17. His first real solid baseball memory is that of McGwire breaking the record when he was just 6 and how it had to be a big deal because FOX was showing it live. He has become a huge sports fan and in his short time on the planet has seen 3 Super Bowl winners, a Celtics championship and the Red Sox winning the World Series. But now he questions if it really mattered, was it on the level?

Baseball you must clear the air on this.

Thank You John Updike from Red Sox Nation

noreply@blogger.com (Dirty Water) — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 19:51:00 +0000

Since my return to Boston I have had little to blog about. i could complain about the snow but everybody else is. :)

Tuesday we lost a giant in the literary world in John Updike. You all know his wonderful novels but many younger Red Sox fans may not know of his love for the Red Sox and Ted Williams.

I was 10 and just had started 6th Grade in September of 1960. Back in those innocent days we could leave school at 2 PM and make it to Fenway for the last few innings of a day game. Usually after the 5th inning they just let you in for free. Updike wrote an essay for the New Yorker about one of those games....the last game Ted Williams ever played.

reprinted with the permission of The New Yorker Enjoy!!!

Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu
by John Updike
Author: John Updike ©. Published: 1960-10-22. Appeared On: The New Yorker.

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities. Its right field is one of the deepest in the American League, while its left field is the shortest; the high left-field wall, three hundred and fifteen feet from home plate along the foul line, virtually thrusts its surface at right-handed hitters. On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 28th, as I took a seat behind third base, a uniformed groundkeeper was treading the top of this wall, picking batting-practice home runs out of the screen, like a mushroom gatherer seen in Wordsworthian perspective on the verge of a cliff. The day was overcast, chill, and uninspirational. The Boston team was the worst in twenty-seven seasons. A jangling medley of incompetent youth and aging competence, the Red Sox were finishing in seventh place only because the Kansas City Athletics had locked them out of the cellar. They were scheduled to play the Baltimore Orioles, a much nimbler blend of May and December, who had been dumped from pennant contention a week before by the insatiable Yankees. I, and 10,453 others, had shown up primarily because this was the Red Sox's last home game of the season, and therefore the last time in all eternity that their regular left fielder, known to the headlines as TED, KID, SPLINTER, THUMPER, TW, and, most cloyingly, MISTER WONDERFUL, would play in Boston. "WHAT WILL WE DO WITHOUT TED? HUB FANS ASK" ran the headline on a newspaper being read by a bulb-nosed cigar smoker a few rows away. Williams' retirement had been announced, doubted (he had been threatening retirement for years), confirmed by Tom Yawkey, the Red Sox owner, and at last widely accepted as the sad but probable truth. He was forty-two and had redeemed his abysmal season of 1959 with a—considering his advanced age—fine one. He had been giving away his gloves and bats and had grudgingly consented to a sentimental ceremony today. This was not necessarily his last game; the Red Sox were scheduled to travel to New York and wind up the season with three games there.

I arrived early. The Orioles were hitting fungos on the field. The day before, they had spitefully smothered the Red Sox, 17-4, and neither their faces nor their drab gray visiting-team uniforms seemed very gracious. I wondered who had invited them to the party. Between our heads and the lowering clouds a frenzied organ was thundering through, with an appositeness perhaps accidental, "You maaaade me love you, I didn't wanna do it, I didn't wanna do it . . ."
The affair between Boston and Ted Williams has been no mere summer romance; it has been a marriage, composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories. It falls into three stages, which may be termed Youth, Maturity, and Age; or Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis; or Jason, Achilles, and Nestor.
First, there was the by now legendary epoch when the young bridegroom came out of the West, announced "All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street folks will say 'There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.' " The dowagers of local journalism attempted to give elementary deportment lessons to this child who spake as a god, and to their horror were themselves rebuked. Thus began the long exchange of backbiting, bat-flipping, booing, and spitting that has distinguished Williams' public relations. The spitting incidents of 1957 and 1958 and the similar dockside courtesies that Williams has now and then extended to the grandstand should be judged against this background: the left-field stands at Fenway for twenty years have held a large number of customers who have bought their way in primarily for the privilege of showering abuse on Williams. Greatness necessarily attracts debunkers, but in Williams' case the hostility has been systematic and unappeasable. His basic offense against the fans has been to wish that they weren't there. Seeking a perfectionist's vacuum, he has quixotically desired to sever the game from the ground of paid spectatorship and publicity that supports it. Hence his refusal to tip his cap to the crowd or turn the other cheek to newsmen. It has been a costly theory—it has probably cost him, among other evidences of good will, two Most Valuable Player awards, which are voted by reporters—but he has held to it from his rookie year on. While his critics, oral and literary, remained beyond the reach of his discipline, the opposing pitchers were accessible, and he spanked them to the tune of .406 in 1941. He slumped to .356 in 1942 and went off to war.

In 1946, Williams returned from three years as a Marine pilot to the second of his baseball avatars, that of Achilles, the hero of incomparable prowess and beauty who nevertheless was to be found sulking in his tent while the Trojans (mostly Yankees) fought through to the ships. Yawkey, a timber and mining maharajah, had surrounded his central jewel with many gems of slightly lesser water, such as Bobby Doerr, Dom DiMaggio, Rudy York, Birdie Tebbetts, and Johnny Pesky. Throughout the late forties, the Red Sox were the best paper team in baseball, yet they had little three-dimensional to show for it, and if this was a tragedy, Williams was Hamlet. A succinct review of the indictment—and a fair sample of appreciative sports-page prose—appeared the very day of Williams' valedictory, in a column by Huck Finnegan in the Boston American (no sentimentalist, Huck):

Williams' career, in contrast [to Babe Ruth's], has been a series of failures except for his averages. He flopped in the only World Series he ever played in (1946) when he batted only .200. He flopped in the playoff game with Cleveland in 1948. He flopped in the final game of the 1949 season with the pennant hinging on the outcome (Yanks 5, Sox 3). He flopped in 1950 when he returned to the lineup after a two-month absence and ruined the morale of a club that seemed pennant-bound under Steve O'Neill. It has always been Williams' records first, the team second, and the Sox non-winning record is proof enough of that.

There are answers to all this, of course. The fatal weakness of the great Sox slugging teams was not-quite-good-enough pitching rather than Williams' failure to hit a home run every time he came to bat. Again, Williams' depressing effect on his teammates has never been proved. Despite ample coaching to the contrary, most insisted that they liked him. He has been generous with advice to any player who asked for it. In an increasingly combative baseball atmosphere, he continued to duck beanballs docilely. With umpires he was gracious to a fault. This courtesy itself annoyed his critics, whom there was no pleasing. And against the ten crucial games (the seven World Series games with the St. Louis Cardinals, the 1948 playoff with the Cleveland Indians, and the two-game series with the Yankees at the end of the 1949 season, winning either one of which would have given the Red Sox the pennant) that make up the Achilles' heel of Williams' record, a mass of statistics can be set showing that day in and day out he was no slouch in the clutch. The correspondence columns of the Boston papers now and then suffer a sharp flurry of arithmetic on this score; indeed, for Williams to have distributed all his hits so they did nobody else any good would constitute a feat of placement unparalleled in the annals of selfishness.
Whatever residue of truth remains of the Finnegan charge those of us who love Williams must transmute as best we can, in our own personal crucibles. My personal memories of Williams begin when I was a boy in Pennsylvania, with two last-place teams in Philadelphia to keep me company. For me, "W'ms, lf" was a figment of the box scores who always seemed to be going 3-for-5. He radiated, from afar, the hard blue glow of high purpose. I remember listening over the radio to the All-Star Game of 1946, in which Williams hit two singles and two home runs, the second one off a Rip Sewell "blooper" pitch; it was like hitting a balloon out of the park. I remember watching one of his home runs from the bleachers of Shibe Park; it went over the first baseman's head and rose meticulously along a straight line and was still rising when it cleared the fence. The trajectory seemed qualitatively different from anything anyone else might hit. For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill. Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out.

Irrelevance—since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical—always threatens its interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional heroics that sportswriters feed upon but by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art. Insofar as the clutch hitter is not a sportswriter's myth, he is a vulgarity, like a writer who writes only for money. It may be that, compared to managers' dreams such as Joe DiMaggio and the always helpful Stan Musial, Williams is an icy star. But of all team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner. It is an essentially lonely game. No other player visible to my generation has concentrated within himself so much of the sport's poignance, has so assiduously refined his natural skills, has so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy.

By the time I went to college, near Boston, the lesser stars Yawkey had assembled around Williams had faded, and his craftsmanship, his rigorous pride, had become itself a kind of heroism. This brittle and temperamental player developed an unexpected quality of persistence. He was always coming back—back from Korea, back from a broken collarbone, a shattered elbow, a bruised heel, back from drastic bouts of flu and ptomaine poisoning. Hardly a season went by without some enfeebling mishap, yet he always came back, and always looked like himself. The delicate mechanism of timing and power seemed locked, shockproof, in some case outside his body. In addition to injuries, there were a heavily publicized divorce, and the usual storms with the press, and the Williams Shift—the maneuver, custom-built by Lou Boudreau, of the Cleveland Indians, whereby three infielders were concentrated on the right side of the infield, where a left-handed pull hitter like Williams generally hits the ball. Williams could easily have learned to punch singles through the vacancy on his left and fattened his average hugely. This was what Ty Cobb, the Einstein of average, told him to do. But the game had changed since Cobb; Williams believed that his value to the club and to the game was as a slugger, so he went on pulling the ball, trying to blast it through three men, and paid the price of perhaps fifteen points of lifetime average. Like Ruth before him, he bought the occasional home run at the cost of many directed singles—a calculated sacrifice certainly not, in the case of a hitter as average-minded as Williams, entirely selfish.

After a prime so harassed and hobbled, Williams was granted by the relenting fates a golden twilight. He became at the end of his career perhaps the best old hitter of the century. The dividing line came between the 1956 and the 1957 seasons. In September of the first year, he and Mickey Mantle were contending for the batting championship. Both were hitting around .350, and there was no one else near them. The season ended with a three-game series between the Yankees and the Sox, and, living in New York then, I went up to the Stadium. Williams was slightly shy of the four hundred at-bats needed to qualify; the fear was expressed that the Yankee pitchers would walk him to protect Mantle. Instead, they pitched to him—a wise decision. He looked terrible at the plate, tired and discouraged and unconvincing. He never looked very good to me in the Stadium. (Last week, in Life, Williams, a sportswriter himself now, wrote gloomily of the Stadium, "There's the bigness of it. There are those high stands and all those people smoking—and, of course, the shadows. . . . It takes at least one series to get accustomed to the Stadium and even then you're not sure.") The final outcome in 1956 was Mantle .353, Williams .345.

The next year, I moved from New York to New England, and it made all the difference. For in September of 1957, in the same situation, the story was reversed. Mantle finally hit .365; it was the best season of his career. But Williams, though sick and old, had run away from him. A bout of flu had laid him low in September. He emerged from his cave in the Hotel Somerset haggard but irresistible; he hit four successive pinch-hit home runs. "I feel terrible," he confessed, "but every time I take a swing at the ball it goes out of the park." He ended the season with thirty-eight home runs and an average of .388, the highest in either league since his own .406, and, coming from a decrepit man of thirty-nine, an even more supernal figure. With eight or so of the "leg hits" that a younger man would have beaten out, it would have been .400. And the next year, Williams, who in 1949 and 1953 had lost batting championships by decimal whiskers to George Kell and Mickey Vernon, sneaked in behind his teammate Pete Runnels and filched his sixth title, a bargain at .328.

In 1959, it seemed all over. The dinosaur thrashed around in the .200 swamp for the first half of the season, and was even benched ("rested," Manager Mike Higgins tactfully said.) Old foes like the late Bill Cunningham began to offer batting tips. Cunningham thought Williams was jiggling his elbows; in truth, Williams' neck was so stiff he could hardly turn his head to look at the pitcher. When he swung, it looked like a Calder mobile with one thread cut; it reminded you that since 1953 Williams' shoulders had been wired together. A solicitous pall settled over the sports pages. In the two decades since Williams had come to Boston, his status had imperceptibly shifted from that of a naughty prodigy to that of a municipal monument. As his shadow in the record books lengthened, the Red Sox teams around him declined, and the entire American League seemed to be losing life and color to the National. The inconsistency of the new superstars—Mantle, Colavito, and Kaline—served to make Williams appear all the more singular. And off the field, his private philanthropy—in particular, his zealous chairmanship of the Jimmy Fund, a charity for children with cancer—gave him a civic presence somewhat like that of Richard Cardinal Cushing. In religion, Williams appears to be a humanist, and a selective one at that, but he and the Cardinal, when their good works intersect and they appear in the public eye together, make a handsome and heartening pair.

Humiliated by his '59 season, Williams determined, once more, to come back. I, as a specimen Williams partisan, was both glad and fearful. All baseball fans believe in miracles; the question is, how many do you believe in? He looked like a ghost in spring training. Manager Jurges warned us ahead of time that if Williams didn't come through he would be benched, just like anybody else. As it turned out, it was Jurges who was benched. Williams entered the 1960 season needing eight home runs to have a lifetime total of 500; after one time at bat in Washington, he needed seven. For a stretch, he was hitting a home run every second game that he played. He passed Lou Gehrig's lifetime total, then the number 500, then Mel Ott's total, and finished with 521, thirteen behind Jimmy Foxx, who alone stands between Williams and Babe Ruth's unapproachable 714. The summer was a statistician's picnic. His two-thousandth walk came and went, his eighteen-hundredth run batted in, his sixteenth All-Star Game. At one point, he hit a home run off a pitcher, Don Lee, off whose father, Thornton Lee, he had hit a home run a generation before. The only comparable season for a forty-two-year-old man was Ty Cobb's in 1928. Cobb batted .323 and hit one homer. Williams batted .316 but hit twenty-nine homers.
In sum, though generally conceded to be the greatest hitter of his era, he did not establish himself as "the greatest hitter who ever lived." Cobb, for average, and Ruth, for power, remain supreme. Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, Joe Jackson, and Lefty O'Doul, among players since 1900, have higher lifetime averages than Williams' .344. Unlike Foxx, Gehrig, Hack Wilson, Hank Greenberg, and Ralph Kiner, Williams never came close to matching Babe Ruth's season home-run total of sixty. In the list of major-league batting records, not one is held by Williams. He is second in walks drawn, third in home runs, fifth in lifetime averages, sixth in runs batted in, eighth in runs scored and in total bases, fourteenth in doubles, and thirtieth in hits. But if we allow him merely average seasons for the four-plus seasons he lost to two wars, and add another season for the months he lost to injuries, we get a man who in all the power totals would be second, and not a very distant second, to Ruth. And if we further allow that these years would have been not merely average but prime years, if we allow for all the months when Williams was playing in sub-par condition, if we permit his early and later years in baseball to be some sort of index of what the middle years could have been, if we give him a right-field fence that is not, like Fenway's, one of the most distant in the league, and if—the least excusable "if"—we imagine him condescending to outsmart the Williams Shift, we can defensibly assemble, like a colossus induced from the sizable fragments that do remain, a statistical figure not incommensurate with his grandiose ambition. From the statistics that are on the books, a good case can be made that in the combination of power and average Williams is first; nobody else ranks so high in both categories. Finally, there is the witness of the eyes; men whose memories go back to Shoeless Joe Jackson—another unlucky natural—rank him and Williams together as the best-looking hitters they have seen. It was for our last look that ten thousand of us had come.

Two girls, one of them with pert buckteeth and eyes as black as vest buttons, the other with white skin and flesh-colored hair, like an underdeveloped photograph of a redhead, came and sat on my right. On my other side was one of those frowning, chestless young-old men who can frequently be seen, often wearing sailor hats, attending ball games alone. He did not once open his program but instead tapped it, rolled up, on his knee as he gave the game his disconsolate attention. A young lady, with freckles and a depressed, dainty nose that by an optical illusion seemed to thrust her lips forward for a kiss, sauntered down into the box seats and with striking aplomb took a seat right behind the roof of the Oriole dugout. She wore a blue coat with a Northeastern University emblem sewed to it. The girls beside me took it into their heads that this was Williams' daughter. She looked too old to me, and why would she be sitting behind the visitors' dugout? On the other hand, from the way she sat there, staring at the sky and French-inhaling, she clearly was somebody. Other fans came and eclipsed her from view. The crowd looked less like a weekday ballpark crowd than like the folks you might find in Yellowstone National Park, or emerging from automobiles at the top of scenic Mount Mansfield. There were a lot of competitively well-dressed couples of tourist age, and not a few babes in arms. A row of five seats in front of me was abruptly filled with a woman and four children, the youngest of them two years old, if that. Some day, presumably, he could tell his grandchildren that he saw Williams play. Along with these tots and second-honeymooners, there were Harvard freshmen, giving off that peculiar nervous glow created when a quantity of insouciance is saturated with insecurity; thick-necked Army officers with brass on their shoulders and lead in their voices; pepperings of priests; perfumed bouquets of Roxbury Fabian fans; shiny salesmen from Albany and Fall River; and those gray, hoarse men—taxidrivers, slaughterers, and bartenders—who will continue to click through the turnstiles long after everyone else has deserted to television and tramporamas. Behind me, two young male voices blossomed, cracking a joke about God's five proofs that Thomas Aquinas exists—typical Boston College levity.

The batting cage was trundled away. The Orioles fluttered to the sidelines. Diagonally across the field, by the Red Sox dugout, a cluster of men in overcoats were festering like maggots. I could see a splinter of white uniform, and Williams' head, held at a self-deprecating and evasive tilt. Williams' conversational stance is that of a six-foot-three-inch man under a six-foot ceiling. He moved away to the patter of flash bulbs, and began playing catch with a young Negro outfielder named Willie Tasby. His arm, never very powerful, had grown lax with the years, and his throwing motion was a kind of muscular drawl. To catch the ball, he flicked his glove hand onto his left shoulder (he batted left but threw right, as every schoolboy ought to know) and let the ball plop into it comically. This catch session with Tasby was the only time all afternoon I saw him grin.

A tight little flock of human sparrows who, from the lambent and pampered pink of their faces, could only have been Boston politicians moved toward the plate. The loudspeakers mammothly coughed as someone huffed on the microphone. The ceremonies began. Curt Gowdy, the Red Sox radio and television announcer, who sounds like everybody's brother-in-law, delivered a brief sermon, taking the two words "pride" and "champion" as his text. It began, "Twenty-one years ago, a skinny kid from San Diego, California . . ." and ended, "I don't think we'll ever see another like him." Robert Tibolt, chairman of the board of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, presented Williams with a big Paul Revere silver bowl. Harry Carlson, a member of the sports committee of the Boston Chamber, gave him a plaque, whose inscription he did not read in its entirety, out of deference to Williams' distaste for this sort of fuss. Mayor Collins presented the Jimmy Fund with a thousand-dollar check.

Then the occasion himself stooped to the microphone, and his voice sounded, after the others, very Californian; it seemed to be coming, excellently amplified, from a great distance, adolescently young and as smooth as a butternut. His thanks for the gifts had not died from our ears before he glided, as if helplessly, into "In spite of all the terrible things that have been said about me by the maestros of the keyboard up there . . ." He glanced up at the press rows suspended above home plate. (All the Boston reporters, incidentally, reported the phrase as "knights of the keyboard," but I heard it as "maestros" and prefer it that way.) The crowd tittered, appalled. A frightful vision flashed upon me, of the press gallery pelting Williams with erasers, of Williams clambering up the foul screen to slug journalists, of a riot, of Mayor Collins being crushed. ". . . And they were terrible things," Williams insisted, with level melancholy, into the mike. "I'd like to forget them, but I can't." He paused, swallowed his memories, and went on, "I want to say that my years in Boston have been the greatest thing in my life." The crowd, like an immense sail going limp in a change of wind, sighed with relief. Taking all the parts himself, Williams then acted out a vivacious little morality drama in which an imaginary tempter came to him at the beginning of his career and said, "Ted, you can play anywhere you like." Leaping nimbly into the role of his younger self (who in biographical actuality had yearned to be a Yankee), Williams gallantly chose Boston over all the other cities, and told us that Tom Yawkey was the greatest owner in baseball and we were the greatest fans. We applauded ourselves heartily. The umpire came out and dusted the plate. The voice of doom announced over the loudspeakers that after Williams' retirement his uniform number, 9, would be permanently retired—the first time the Red Sox had so honored a player. We cheered. The national anthem was played. We cheered. The game began.

Williams was third in the batting order, so he came up in the bottom of the first inning, and Steve Barber, a young pitcher who was not yet born when Williams began playing for the Red Sox, offered him four pitches, at all of which he disdained to swing, since none of them were within the strike zone. This demonstrated simultaneously that Williams' eyes were razor-sharp and that Barber's control wasn't. Shortly, the bases were full, with Williams on second. "Oh, I hope he gets held up at third! That would be wonderful,'' the girl beside me moaned, and, sure enough, the man at bat walked and Williams was delivered into our foreground. He struck the pose of Donatello's David, the third-base bag being Goliath's head. Fiddling with his cap, swapping small talk with the Oriole third baseman (who seemed delighted to have him drop in), swinging his arms with a sort of prancing nervousness, he looked fine—flexible, hard, and not unbecomingly substantial through the middle. The long neck, the small head, the knickers whose cuffs were worn down near his ankles—all these points, often observed by caricaturists, were visible in the flesh.

One of the collegiate voices behind me said, "He looks old, doesn't he, old; big deep wrinkles in his face . . ."
"Yeah," the other voice said, "but he looks like an old hawk, doesn't he?"
With each pitch, Williams danced down the baseline, waving his arms and stirring dust, ponderous but menacing, like an attacking goose. It occurred to about a dozen humorists at once to shout "Steal home! Go, go!" Williams' speed afoot was never legendary. Lou Clinton, a young Sox outfielder, hit a fairly deep fly to center field. Williams tagged up and ran home. As he slid across the plate, the ball, thrown with unusual heft by Jackie Brandt, the Oriole center fielder, hit him on the back.
"Boy, he was really loafing, wasn't he?" one of the boys behind me said.
"It's cold," the other explained. "He doesn't play well when it's cold. He likes heat. He's a hedonist."

The run that Williams scored was the second and last of the inning. Gus Triandos, of the Orioles, quickly evened the score by plunking a home run over the handy left-field wall. Williams, who had had this wall at his back for twenty years, played the ball flawlessly. He didn't budge. He just stood there, in the center of the little patch of grass that his patient footsteps had worn brown, and, limp with lack of interest, watched the ball pass overhead. It was not a very interesting game. Mike Higgins, the Red Sox manager, with nothing to lose, had restricted his major-league players to the left-field line—along with Williams, Frank Malzone, a first-rate third baseman, played the game—and had peopled the rest of the terrain with unpredictable youngsters fresh, or not so fresh, off the farms. Other than Williams' recurrent appearances at the plate, the maladresse of the Sox infield was the sole focus of suspense; the second baseman turned every grounder into a juggling act, while the shortstop did a breathtaking impersonation of an open window. With this sort of assistance, the Orioles wheedled their way into a 4-2 lead. They had early replaced Barber with another young pitcher, Jack Fisher. Fortunately (as it turned out), Fisher is no cutie; he is willing to burn the ball through the strike zone, and inning after inning this tactic punctured Higgins' string of test balloons.

Whenever Williams appeared at the plate—pounding the dirt from his cleats, gouging a pit in the batter's box with his left foot, wringing resin out of the bat handle with his vehement grip, switching the stick at the pitcher with an electric ferocity—it was like having a familiar Leonardo appear in a shuffle of Saturday Evening Post covers. This man, you realized—and here, perhaps, was the difference, greater than the difference in gifts—really intended to hit the ball. In the third inning, he hoisted a high fly to deep center. In the fifth, we thought he had it; he smacked the ball hard and high into the heart of his power zone, but the deep right field in Fenway and the heavy air and a casual east wind defeated him. The ball died. Al Pilarcik leaned his back against the big "380" painted on the right-field wall and caught it. On another day, in another park, it would have been gone. (After the game, Williams said, "I didn't think I could hit one any harder than that. The conditions weren't good.")

The afternoon grew so glowering that in the sixth inning the arc lights were turned on—always a wan sight in the daytime, like the burning headlights of a funeral procession. Aided by the gloom, Fisher was slicing through the Sox rookies, and Williams did not come to bat in the seventh. He was second up in the eighth. This was almost certainly his last time to come to the plate in Fenway Park, and instead of merely cheering, as we had at his three previous appearances, we stood, all of us—stood and applauded. Have you ever heard applause in a ballpark? Just applause—no calling, no whistling, just an ocean of handclaps, minute after minute, burst after burst, crowding and running together in continuous succession like the pushes of surf at the edge of the sand. It was a sombre and considered tumult. There was not a boo in it. It seemed to renew itself out of a shifting set of memories as the kid, the Marine, the veteran of feuds and failures and injuries, the friend of children, and the enduring old pro evolved down the bright tunnel of twenty-one summers toward this moment. At last, the umpire signalled for Fisher to pitch; with the other players, he had been frozen in position. Only Williams had moved during the ovation, switching his bat impatiently, ignoring everything except his cherished task. Fisher wound up, and the applause sank into a hush.

Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy; the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.

Fisher, after his unsettling wait, was wide with the first pitch. He put the second one over, and Williams swung mightily and missed. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic swing, so long and smooth and quick, exposed, naked in its failure. Fisher threw the third time, Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass; the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and, as far as I could see, vanished.

Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn't tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted "We want Ted" for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.

Every true story has an anticlimax. The men on the field refused to disappear, as would have seemed decent, in the smoke of Williams' miracle. Fisher continued to pitch, and escaped further harm. At the end of the inning, Higgins sent Williams out to his left-field position, then instantly replaced him with Carrol Hardy, so we had a long last look at Williams as he ran out there and then back, his uniform jogging, his eyes steadfast on the ground. It was nice, and we were grateful, but it left a funny taste.

One of the scholasticists behind me said, "Let's go. We've seen everything. I don't want to spoil it." This seemed a sound aesthetic decision. Williams' last word had been so exquisitely chosen, such a perfect fusion of expectation, intention, and execution, that already it felt a little unreal in my head, and I wanted to get out before the castle collapsed. But the game, though played by clumsy midgets under the feeble glow of the arc lights, began to tug at my attention, and I loitered in the runway until it was over. Williams' homer had, quite incidentally, made the score 4-3. In the bottom of the ninth inning, with one out, Marlin Coughtry, the second-base juggler, singled. Vic Wertz, pinch-hitting, doubled off the left-field wall, Coughtry advancing to third. Pumpsie Green walked, to load the bases. Willie Tasby hit a double-play ball to the third baseman, but in making the pivot throw Billy Klaus, an ex-Red Sox infielder, reverted to form and threw the ball past the first baseman and into the Red Sox dugout. The Sox won, 5-4. On the car radio as I drove home I heard that Williams had decided not to accompany the team to New York. So he knew how to do even that, the hardest thing.

Quit.

You have to love MBCR

noreply@blogger.com (Dirty Water) — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 01:25:00 +0000

Back in Boston after 4 months with my daughter in Seattle who nursed me back to health after some surgery. ( went to the same cancer center as Jon Lester with same results!!!!!!

So after taking Amtrak clear across America ( believe me eastern Montana and North Dakota are BORING) I arrive at South Station to see this sign.

Why would this train line even be programmed into the new boards????? ( and the date is just a little off too )

Nice to see nothing has changed

A Nation Invades Chicago (and for some they have no choice)

noreply@blogger.com (Dirty Water) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:48:00 +0000

A long weekend of baseball on the south side of Chicago and the final result was the Sox won all 4 games.
(Red Sox 2 White Sox 2 )

Red Sox Nation was at U.S. Cellular Field in force all weekend and for the most part was very well behaved.

We met a couple Monday night and their reason for being in Chicago saddened me. They are from Randolph and ardent Red Sox (and especially Coco) fans. I asked if they get to Fenway often and their reply stunned me. They don't go to Fenway *NOT* because they can't get or afford tickets but because they fear for their safety because of their race.

'The Cell' as the park is called by the locals is a very nice place to watch a game and unlike the ballpark 8 miles to the north the fans know exactly what is happening on the field. This was proven in the sixth inning when White Sox pitcher John Danks hit Jacoby Ellsbury with a pitch and a loud groan was heard as Danks' perfect game was gone. These fans know their baseball and the only pink hats I saw were Boston ones. The concessions I sampled were quite tasty and priced far more reasonably than Fenway. One nice feature for those who like to keep score is you can buy a scorecard for only $1 and they also sell beer at the seats.

One thing Red Sox and White Sox fans share is Hall of Fame catcher Carlton Fisk. His number 27 is retired at Fenway and the number 72 is retired at USCF. In the center field bleachers there is a statue of Fisk.

In some ways a White Sox game reminds me of minor league games in Lowell or Pawtucket as their are a lot of gimmicks between innings from hamburger races on the scoreboard to a goal scoring contest sponsored by the hockey Blackhawks and the fans seem to enjoy them.

Leaving the park we saw a sign that would make Yogi Berra proud. I mean how can you enjoy the game when you have left?????

The park is located 5 miles south of 'The Loop' Unlike Boston there is plenty parking and the park is located just off the Dan Ryan Expressway. The park is also served by 2 subway stations. The lines at the SOX-35th St station after the game is just as bad as Kenmore.

Overall if you ever want to see The Olde Town Team on the road I would highly recommend Chicago. It might be the finest city in the United States.

I had never been to Wrigley Field....what a night

noreply@blogger.com (Dirty Water) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:55:00 +0000

I am in the middle of a baseball vacation and we will see our beloved Sox tonight and tomorrow in Kansas City and then in Chicago this weekend.

I had never seen a game at Wrigley Field so last night we went to the old ballpark at Clark and Addison. I won't remember much of the game but I will never forget the sheer terror of thinking I am going to die with 40,000 other people. The Chicago Tribune explains

The clock on top of the venerable Wrigley Field scoreboard read 8:06 p.m. Monday when tornado sirens began to wail in the darkness. Action between the Cubs and Astros had been suspended already for nearly a half-hour.

Then, minutes after the sirens howled, the wind started blowing out. Like, really out. Like carry-a-ball-to-the- Michigan-shoreline out.

Rain pulled a U-turn within the stadium. Debris floated along a river of standing water on the warning track behind home plate.

All of it giving a new, unsettling meaning to "It's Gonna Happen."

When the sirens went off the Cubs tried to tell the fans to seek refuge under the stands. Cubs fans may be very loyal but they are not stupid as if a tornado hits it most likely would not be wise to be under the upper deck of a almost 100 year old ballpark. 40,000 people vanished in minutes.

At this point it was an official game and of course they were finished for the evening.... nope

We were a mile away munching on a burger some 3 hours later and watching the Red Sox lose on NESN when suddenly the TV showed the game had resumed. We rushed back to Wrigley and joined about 81 other fans to watch the game.

In the eight inning the sky turned white and the loudest thunder I have ever heard at the same instant sent the players running for their lives. The game was finally called and the Cubs lost.

The Cubs fans we met we all friendly and they are SO HOPEFUL that this is NEXT year. They all want to play the Red Sox in the World Series something the Cubs have not been in since 1945.
Nobody that we spoke to wants an all Chicago World Series as Cubs fans fear if they met the crosstown White Sox they would lose.

Wrigley Field is not in good shape. Fans explained to me that renovations like those at Fenway Park are almost impossible to make because the City of Chicago has given the park 'landmark' status.

It is the only park in MLB that does not have a video replay board because the city will not allow it. However they do serve beer in the seats.

Sadly the Cubs have more 'pink hats' than we do.

On to Kansas City

Thank You New York Yankees ( Yup I typed that )

noreply@blogger.com (Dirty Water) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:52:00 +0000

On Sunday evening I took my teenage son to Yankee Stadium so he could experience all that The Stadium in The Bronx can offer ( the history, the smells, the garbage etc )

I had bought the tickets months ago from Ticketmaster.com and chose the will-call option. After waiting in line nearly 30 minutes at the window I gave the clerk my ID and confirmation from Ticketmaster.

NO TICKETS

Of course I asked for the ticket manager and after about 10 minutes I was told to go into the lobby of the Yankees offices. At this point I was waiting for George Constanza to appear.

I did get some dirty looks as both of us were dressed as Boston fans.

The manager could not have been nicer and explained that somehow my tickets had been resold even though he could see that the credit card had been charged and i had a confirmation.

He then gave me 2 seats that were about as close to home plate as possible AND gave me $100 in Yankees dollars to use for concessions including beer. ( $ 8.50 for Coors Light and I thought Fenway was bad )

Sorry it took me a few days to post this but i was having trouble downloading pictures from my phone ( had to get a new USB cable )

So I just want to pass on that the Yankees could not have handled the situation nicer.

Flying to Chicago O'Hare??? USE MIDWAY IN JULY or else.....

noreply@blogger.com (Dirty Water) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:08:00 +0000

Just a heads up for anybody planning to fly to Chicago O'Hare for the next few weeks.

The CTA ( Chicago Transit Authority ) has shut down 4 miles of track that connect O'Hare Field with the rest of the L system in the city.

Passengers have to take shuttle buses to cover the 4 miles.

Those who don't want to deal with a shuttle bus can expect to pay $40-50 for a cab.

The Chicago Tribune has more.

Blue Line shuttle to O'Hare will test travelers' patience for rest of July

Never thought this day would come

noreply@blogger.com (Dirty Water) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:16:00 +0000

Using my laptop at a Back Bay bar (Pour House on Boylston)

When Tampa took the lead Wednesday night suddenly the entire bar was chanting TAMPA SUCKS.

Wondering how long before the website and t-shirts appear as we have to face facts.

Tampa Bay is for real

What the heck is that mascot supposed to be????

Here is an idea for Mayor Menino

noreply@blogger.com (Dirty Water) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 22:33:00 +0000

A friend was in Chicago over the weekend and saw this. It turns out they even have a website.

Could you imagine Boston having something like this??

Massachusetts has another champion!!!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Dirty Water) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:03:00 +0000

Massachusetts continues to dominate
sporting events of all kinds as Sean
Sears of Chicopee won the national
championship 2008 Bud Light/U.S.A. Rock Paper Scissors League Championship in Las Vegas on Sunday.

What the heck is Rock Paper Scissors??? After reading the Wikipedia entry on it I am more confused than ever.

If anybody reading this can shed some insight on this please comment. It looks like a variation of throwing fingers which is something I did as a kid.

You tube has this clip from last year.

Well whatever it is another championship for Massachusetts

UPDATE: Boston loses 3-2 to Cubs

noreply@blogger.com (Dirty Water) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 22:02:00 +0000

The Chicago Cubs defeated the Boston Braves 3-2 this afternoon at Wrigley

THE BOSTON BRAVES LIVE AGAIN

At 2:20 Eastern time tomorrow the Boston Braves take the field at Wrigley Field in Chicago to play the Cubs. Tomorrow marks 60 years of Cubs baseball on WGN-TV in Chicago and the teams will wear 1948 uniforms. The Atlanta players will wear a hat with the letter B and the famed Wrigley scoreboard will say BOSTON instead of ATLANTA

Select concessions (NOT BEER) will be sold at 1948 prices.

The Braves played at what is now known as Nickerson Field at BU and a small part of the old Braves Field is still used today. The park was much bigger than Fenway but was hampered by being next to the old New York Central railroad yards that would blow smoke into the seats.

WBZ announcer Steve LeVeille has a tribute website for the long forgotten Braves.

Had the Braves not left in 1953 for Milwaukee it is quite possible that in a few years they would have become more popular than the Red Sox as they went on to win 2 pennants and a World Series in Milwaukee led by a young slugger known as Henry Aaron.

Today we might be fans of Boston Braves Nation.

Boston is 37th best place to live in the world

noreply@blogger.com (Dirty Water) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:16:00 +0000

w00t!!!!!

Take that New York which ranks 49th

Quality of Living global city rankings – Mercer survey

We did not rank in the Top 50 for personal safety but no US city was ranked. Canada has several in the Top 50. ( even Montreal which I find suspect )

The day the BEAT LA chant was born (1982)

noreply@blogger.com (Dirty Water) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 21:06:00 +0000

Hard to believe this was 26 years ago.

For the past 5 days BEAT LA has replaced YANKEES SUCK in the lexicon. But how did the chant become part of celtics lore? It wasn't against the Lakers...it happened against Philadelphia.

Game 7 of the 1982 NBA Eastern Finals. As it became obvious the Celtics would lose the game the Celtics fans gave Dr. J and the 76ers a message.

It really is one of the best moments in Boston Sports History.

Here is a longer version of that 4th Quarter

The Beaver Turns 60

noreply@blogger.com (Dirty Water) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 20:23:00 +0000

A couple of days ago Baby Boomers like my self were given a reality check. Jerry 'The Beaver' Mathers turned 60 years old

That makes me feel very old

Others turning 60 in 2008

* John Carpenter
*Joe Roth
* Leslie Marmon Silko
* Rhea Perlman
* Ronnie Van Zant (d. 1977)
* Wayne Kramer
* Todd Rundgren
* Alice Cooper
* Raymond Kurzweil
* Teller
* Kate Pierson
* Stevie Nicks
* Dianne Wiest
*Bernadette Peters
* James Ellroy
* James Taylor
* Billy Crystal
* William Gibson
* Errol Morris
* Richard Simmons
*Steven Tyler
* Elizabeth Blackburn
* Phylicia Rashad
* John Ritter (d. 2003)
* Sally Struthers
*Al Gore
* Jackson Browne
* Johnny Ramone (d. 2004)
* T. Coraghessan Boyle
* Lester Bangs (d. 1982)
* Samuel L. Jackson
* Mikhail Baryshnikov
* Andrew Lloyd Webber
* Jimmy Cliff
* Brian Eno
* Grace Jones
* John Bonham (d. 1980)
* Nick Drake (d. 1974)
* Raffi
*Olivia Newton-John
* Cat Stevens
* Garry Trudeau
* Robert Plant
* Phil Hartman (d. 1998)
* Art Spiegelman
* Prince Charles
* Gérard Depardieu

I guess we boomers now have to say
DON'T TRUST ANYBODY UNDER 30

Why do Celtics fans love 'Gino'???????

noreply@blogger.com (Dirty Water) — Thu, 29 May 2008 20:03:00 +0000

OK I don't even want to pretend I understand this love affair Celtics fans at the Garden have with Gino.

You don't know who Gino is????? Well Bob Ryan explains

To me disco was a bad dream. I swear every woman I knew in the late 70's owned a copy of Saturday Night Fever and listened to KISS 108 when it was a disco outlet.

Now 30 years later when GINO appears on the Garden scoreboard it means the game is safely in control ( wonder when he showed up last night )

I suppose it could be worse....the Celtics could have used 'Hey Mickey' by Toni Basil which to me sums up the 80's.

So I will never complain about Sweet Caroline ever again.

I have heard the Celtics have tried to find him so he can dance live in the Garden during the finals ( hopefully next Thursday ) but no luck as of yet.

If you have never been to a Celtics game here is what it looks like on the scoreboard...UGH

but right now I want to see him dancing until June :)

Bad day for Green Lines - MBTA and CTA in Chicago

noreply@blogger.com (Dirty Water) — Wed, 28 May 2008 23:21:00 +0000

I think the universe does not like the color GREEN today Hopefully this is not an omen for the CELTICS tonight at the Garden

In Newton

Two trains collided on the Green Line near the Brae Burn Country Club in Newton Wednesday afternoon. The collision happened on Dorset Road around 6 p.m. on the D-Line between the Waban and Woodland stops.

and in Chicago this morning
CTA: Operator Error Played Role In Green Line Derailment

14 People Taken To Hospitals, Others Refuse Treatment

NESN scorebox change is driving me nuts

noreply@blogger.com (Dirty Water) — Sat, 10 May 2008 20:53:00 +0000

Anybody who watches Red Sox games on NESN is familar with the box at the top of the screen that shows all the game information. However for some reason this season they are only showing the information when they use the center field camera. As soon as the ball is put into play the score box vanishes. Are they insane?

The other night I was clicking back and forth between the Red Sox and Celtics game and because of this change I had to wait 20 seconds to find out the score.

A have talked to a couple of bartenders and they said their customers hate it as since the sound is not always on the game they need the scorebox to keep track of what is going on. As far as I can tell no other team is doing this.

Anybody else bothered by this?

We need BPD officer Billy Dunn on road games

noreply@blogger.com (Dirty Water) — Sat, 10 May 2008 07:37:00 +0000

Friday night we saw Jonathan Papelbon unravel in the 9th inning against the Twins.

2 nights earlier he blew a save in Detroit.

Red Sox Nation is aghast.......what is wrong???????????

The answer is obvious...........Papelbon needs Boston Police detective Billy Dunn to greet him on road games.

Officer Dunn is a fixture in the Red Sox bullpen and has developed a friendship with Red Sox pitchers.

So how can it be arranged that Officer Dunn is available for road games????

During college football we routinely see police from whatever state running bodyguard for the coach. Why can't we do the same thing for the Red Sox bullpen?

No tax dollars are at play here as the Red Sox could simply pay the freight.

We need Officer Dunn in the bullpen for all road games as well.

Chicago Tribune columnist rips Boston Herald

noreply@blogger.com (Dirty Water) — Fri, 09 May 2008 20:43:00 +0000

Dan Pompei who covers the NFL for the Chicago Tribune on Friday just blasted the Boston Herald on their role in the Bill Belichick "Spygate" fiasco. He did not mince words

Forget Spygate, remember how good Bill Belichick is

On the day before the most recent Super Bowl, the Boston Herald ran a story stating a member of the team's video department taped the Rams' final walk-through on the day before the 2002 Super Bowl.

(later in article)

The Herald meanwhile, bit on a story that more responsible media outlets did not. The Herald was not the only outlet that had the information it printed Feb. 2, the day before the Super Bowl, but they were the only outlet that deemed the story solid enough to print.

OUCH!!!

I was the victim of a hate crime

noreply@blogger.com (Dirty Water) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:17:00 +0000

I haven't blogged for awhile simply because I was in the hospital for 10 days.

On April 17th I drove up to Montreal with 3 friends for Game 5 of the Bruins-Montreal playoffs.

The Bruins played their best game of the series and stayed alive to force a Game 6 in Boston 2 days later...a game I never got to see.

After the game we went to a well known Montreal bar which is in the heart of 'centre-ville' called the Peel Pub. The Montreal fans were in a bad mood because their team had lost but little did we know how upset some fans were.

We are all older and kept to ourselves the entire evening but when the bar closed we were accosted by 5 or 6 skinheads who were screaming at us in French. We were not wearing any Bruins gear ( but a couple of us had Red Sox hats ). I guess I made the mistake of responding in French and I was told after the fact that my response was more vulgar than I intended. I was sucker punched by one, and then as I fell I was kicked in the face and also hit the back of my head on a fire hydrant. Everything went black and I did not wake up until Sunday morning.

The fine doctors at L'Hôpital général de Montréal (Montreal General) which is part of McGill University saved my life and I can not even begin to say how grateful I am.

Because of the way medical insurance works in Quebec I will have to battle for awhile to see if my health plan in Massachusetts will be able to cover the bill. Last Tuesday the hospital did arrange for an ambulance from Vermont to pick me up and take me on a 6 hour joy ride thru the mountains feeling every bump until I finally got to Mass General.

The Montreal Police said we were simply the victims of hate towards anglophones ( English speaking persons ) and sadly Montreal is overrun by French speaking young punks.

I still have a headache and my vision is blurry and I will be going to Mass Eye and Ear tomorrow but at least I am home.

I simply do not understand hate.

RIP BostonNOW

noreply@blogger.com (Dirty Water) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 17:00:00 +0000

BostonNOW bites the dust. Today was the last issue.

Statement from publisher

This healthy, growing 119,000-circulation daily is suddenly compelled to halt operations due to rapidly deteriorating economic conditions in Iceland where interest rates reached 15.5% Thursday, the krona, their currency, has declined over 20% against the dollar since January, and inflation is now at 8.7%.“The death of any newspaper is a sad thing,” stated CEO Russel Pergament, “but the death of a vibrant, flourishing newspaper because of economic turmoil thousands of miles away is beyond sad and is something we never anticipated and for which we were totally unprepared.”“ Our overseas investors are honorable people who have endeavored to fulfill all obligations to this newspaper,” he continued, “but the tumult in foreign credit markets has forced a change in our original understanding and their focus now appears to be primarily upon their core retail holdings. North American media is not even a distant second.”“This newspaper, not even a year old, is right on track for profits in Year Three, just as the business plan called for,” says Publisher Mike Schroeder, “so this decision by our overseas investors, while perhaps understandable, is deeply troubling.”BostonNOW’s editorial content, especially its strong local reporting, has been picked up dozens of times by Boston’s paid dailies and TV outlets. The Economist magazine lauded BostonNOW in January as one of the finest free dailies in the United States.Since launching April 17th last year, BostonNOW has grown from 59,000 daily circulation to a CAC audited daily circulation of 119,000. America’s top retailers have found a good partner in BostonNOW and become loyal advertisers. Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s, TJX, H&M, Lord & Taylor, along with national telco and airline advertisers have been pleased by BostonNOW’s ability to connect with a dynamic young readership.Management’s primary concern right now is to help its suddenly displaced employees, who from scratch have created one of the most respected new dailies in the USA, find good newspaper and media work as soon as possible. A series of interviews, both on premises and off, are being set up with local media companies.