Category: History

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Blackhawks, Browns, Naps: Sports Franchises Named After Actual People

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How many U.S. pro sports franchises are named after an individual–an actual person? Two. Or one. Or maybe none, depending on who you believe and how you count.

I was wondering after watching the Chicago Blackhawks win the Stanley Cup. They'd be the first team I think of as being named after an individual, because they're indirectly named after a leader of the Native American Sauk tribe, Black Hawk (1767-1838); "indirectly" because the team's first owner reportedly named the team not after the chief himself, but after the U.S. Army's 86th Infantry Division, in which he had served in World War I. The 86th was known as the Blackhawk Division, the Army says, because it was originally drawn mostly from Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, the Sauks' territory, in part, before Enlightened Democracy arrived with its plows, canals, and railroads to tame the prairie.

blackhawk2.gifThe Black Hawk image allegedly handed down from history (above, from a history of North American Indians by way of Wikipedia) is not as logo friendly as the one the Chicago National Hockey League franchise came up with (left); I will say, aware of the sensitivities involved and as someone annoyed by the Boston Celtics' leprechaun, that I think the Blackhawk logo is kind of cool. It is a little odd, though–the chief has been made to look rather calm and stoic, and the profile is reminiscent of a mugshot.

The second actual historical personage with a U.S. pro team named after him is Paul Brown, the first head coach of the Cleveland Browns National Football League franchise. In fact, the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, which claims to be an authority on the past of that remarkable city on the shores of Lake Erie, declares outright in its entry on the Browns that the original franchise "was named after its first coach, Paul E. Brown … 'the father of the modern offense.' "

But: The story is not that simple, and there is an alternative theory expostulated in an above-average Wikipedia entry and in a 1995 article in the Baltimore Sun (written about the time the Browns moved moving from east to become the Ravens). First, it appears that back when the franchise was approved, its owner hired Brown and told him he could name the team; he's said to have not liked the idea of naming it after himself. Later, a naming contest was held, which produced the name Panthers, the moniker of an earlier Cleveland football franchise. The owner rejected the Panthers name, perhaps because the guy who owned the rights to it tried to charge him for it, whereupon the franchise was name the Browns. But according to one account, the name referred not to Paul Brown but to heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis, "the Brown Bomber," whose popularity the franchise sought to glom onto. (For what it's worth, Paul Brown apparently thought the team was named after him, Joe Louis or no Joe Louis; and in later years, I think Brown went on to help start another franchise, the Cincinnati Bengals.)

So those are my two. There must be others (one's eye is drawn to the American League's Cleveland Naps, which must have been a reference to the player Nap Lajoie). Anyone?

And by the way: Blackhawks win!

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Guest Observation: Colum McCann

The other morning, the soon to be late and already lamented “Talk of the Nation” featured the Irish novelist Colum McCann. He was talking about a new work, “Transatlantic,” which features fictional stories of historical figures who made the crossing, one way or the other, between Ireland and the New World. (One story involves a historic adventure I’d never heard of before, the first aviators to fly nonstop across the Atlantic: Alcock and Brown, eight years before Lindbergh (who made the first solo nonstop flight).

Former Maine Senator George Mitchell and his role in negotiating peace in Northern Ireland is one of the other “Transatlantic” subjects. McCann read a brief, poetic passage of the Mitchell section of the book:

“This is a section where I just wanted to create a myth for the idea of what he was doing, which was receiving all the words.

“It is as if, in a myth, he has visited an empty grain silo. In the beginning, he stood at the bottom in the resounding dark. Several figures gathered at the top of the silo. They peered down, shaded their eyes, began to drop their pieces of grain upon him. Words. A small rain at first, full of vanity, and history, and rancor, clattering in the emptiness.

“He stood and let it sound, metallic, around him, till it began to pour, and the grain took on a different sound, and he had to reach up and keep knocking the words aside just to get a little space to breathe, dust and chaff in the air all around him. From their very own fields, they were pouring down their winnowed bitterness, and in his silence, he just kept thrashing, spluttering, pushing the words away, a refusal to drown.

“What nobody noticed, not even himself, was that the grain kept rising, and the silo filled, but he kept rising with it, and the sounds grew different, word upon word falling around him, building beneath him, and now, at the top of the silo, he has clawed himself up and dusted himself off, and he stands there, equal with the pourers, who are astounded by the language that lies below them.

“They glance at each other. There are three ways down from the silo. They can fall into the grain and drown. They can jump off the edge and abandon it. Or they can learn to sow it very slowly at their feet.”

Neil Conan’s interview with McCann, embedded below, is a good one. His reading of the passage above takes place after the 12:00 mark in the audio.

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May Rain

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It rained last night in our part of the Bay Area. Not a lot–just enough to sort of wet everything down and leave water beaded everywhere on foliage this morning (like the neighbor’s parking-strip apple tree). In most of the country, rain in May would not be news. Here it’s rare, but not unheard of. As Jan Null, a local meteorologist who has pored over San Francisco’s precipitation history, told his email list over the weekend:

Rain in San Francisco at some point during the Memorial Day* weekend has occured on 34 occasions (21% of the the time) in the 163 years since rainfall records began in San Francisco in 1850. Rain has fallen on Saturday 15 times (9%), Sunday 23 times (14%) and on Monday 16 times (10%).

The last time there was rain at any point on a Memorial Day weekend was Sat., May 28, 2011, when 0.28 inches fell. The last time rain fall on the Monday of Memorial Day weekend was in 1993 when 0.01 inches fell. And the last time there was rain on all three days of the weekend was in 1932 with 0,26, 0.18 and 0.10 for a total of 0,54 inches.

The rainiest Memorial Day weekend was 1906 with a total of 1.64 inches, and the rainiest single day of a Memorial Day weekend was Sunday, May 27, 1990 with 1.42 inches.

* Formerly known as Decoration Day dating back to the Civil War.

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Illinois Road Trip: The Eternal Indian, and Other Stories

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Last September, our family gathered in Chicago for a memorial for my dad. It’s one of those events that seems like it happened both long ago and just yesterday; long ago in that I can’t believe that nearly nine months have passed, just yesterday in that some of the experiences of last summer seem so immediate.

Anyway, people came from all points of the compass. We had a short family gathering at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, just past the southern edge of Chicago, where Dad’s ashes were being placed in the same grave where Mark, our brother, who died in 1960, is buried and where Mom, who died in 2003, is also inurned. After our ceremony, we walked around and visited some of Mom’s family elsewhere in the cemetery, then we drove back up to my sister Ann’s house on the North Side for a memorial–a party, really–with other friends and family.

Early the next day, people started to head home: our older son Eamon and his wife Sakura to New York, my brother John, also to New York, and last Thom, our younger son, back to the Bay Area. That was on Monday, it was already mid-afternoon, traffic back into the city looked like it was backing up on the expressway outside O’Hare. As we left the airport I asked Kate whether she’d just like to go for a drive someplace instead of going back into the city. She was game.

We headed west with no particular destination in mind. But if you go west from Chicago, there’s one destination I automatically think of, and that’s the Mississippi River. That was one of Dad’s favorite trips, and I usually never hesitate to start out on a foolishly long drives, but as we tried to get free of the traffic in the northwestern suburbs, even I had to concede it didn’t seem realistic since we had to be back the next day to fly home ourselves.

So then I thought of another place that seemed more reachable: the Black Hawk statue on the Rock River, near the town of Oregon.

Dad took us there when we were kids–it might have been the time he took us on a drive out to White Pines State Park with his mother, a trip during which I remember him getting our new gold Chevy Impala station wagon, complete with a 327-cubic-inch V8, up to 90 miles an hour on Illinois Highway 64. I would have been 13, and what I remember is that we pulled over on Highway 2, which goes up the west bank Rock River from Oregon to Rockford, to look at this statue on a bluff across the water. It made a huge impression–an impassive , blanket-clad stone figure gazing out across the river and off to the west.

So, driving west last September on Illinois Highway 72, I told Kate I thought we could get there before dark and that it would be well worth the trip. Along the way, we stopped to check out a historical marker in a town called Stillman Valley. The site turned out to be the burial place of militia members killed in the first battle of the Black Hawk War of 1832. (Yes, I had heard of Black Hawk’s War, but remembered it mostly for the name of its last skirmish, the Battle of Bad Axe, and the fact the brief conflict marked Abraham Lincoln’s first and only military service).

Driving on, we hit the Rock River at Byron and turned south. We made a detour so I could take pictures of the big nuclear power plant between Byron and Oregon. And eventually, we made it to Lowden State Park, home of the Black Hawk statue (titled by its creator, sculptor Lorado Taft, “The Eternal Indian”). As we parked, we encountered an older woman sitting in her car and finishing up her dinner, from the McDonald’s in Oregon. She directed us to the statue and said she’d be over in a few minutes to tell us about it.

So: I had my camera with me, and I had an audio app on my iPhone that was good enough to record our guide, Betty Croft. That’s her picture up above. We talked to her for an hour, until well after dark. It took me until the past week to actually sit down and listen to the audio and figure out what to make of it. Here it is (edited down to four minutes or so):

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Apocalypse Then

I've been working a little fitfully on an audio piece with a post-apocalypse theme. As soon as I started thinking about "post-apocalypse," I realized that I'd already lived through one–the aftermath of World War II–and grew up thinking that another apocalypse, a nuclear war, was imminent.

Was the shadow of that soon-to-come war really so tangible? Well, I remember the Chicago Tribune printing a map in 1962 that purported to show how far the Soviet missiles that had been discovered in Cuba could fly and seeing that our hometown was well within range. And then there were the movies–"Fail-Safe" and "The Bedford Incident" and "On the Beach" among others–that portrayed a world in which the nukes were turned loose for no particular reason.

Anyway, doing a little research, I came across some civil defense films from the 1950s designed to condition the public for the possibility of a nuclear war and instruct the citizenry how to respond to it. Here's the script for the beginning of a film titled "Let's Face It."

"Let’s face it: The threat of hydrogen bomb warfare is the greatest threat our nation has ever known. Enemy jet bombers carrying nuclear weapons can sweep in over a variety of routes and drop bombs on any important target in the United States. The threat of this destruction has affected our way of life in every city, village, and town from coast to coast. These are the signs of the times."

At this point, a siren sounds.

"Only in practice now, a rehearsal, a training exercise. But tomorrow, this siren may mean the real thing. And if you hear it—as you drive in your auto, as you sit in your office, as you work at your bench, wherever you are—what will you do? What will happen to you? Let’s face it. Your life, the fate of your community and the fate of your nation, depends on what you do when enemy bombers head for our cities."

Hear that? When enemy bombers head for our cities! Not "if." When!

I found another film that gives basic tips on surviving an atomic attack in your home and neighborhood. Surprisingly, it omits the timeless advice "kiss your ass goodbye" and focuses on strategies like throwing yourself face down on the pavement and covering your head with a coat (if caught out on the street in a surprise attack) or climbing under Dad's basement workbench with the rest of the family (if the air-raid sirens go off while you're watching "Ozzie and Harriet").

And here it is: eight-minutes plus of instruction that could save your life.

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Richard Nixon and Me

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My mom’s older brother, Bill Hogan, getting carried off to a paddy wagon during a demonstration in mid-1960s Chicago. His is one of two January 9 birthdays I think of every year. (Photo by way of my brother Chris.)

It’s Richard Nixon’s one hundredth birthday today. I always remember the date because it’s the same, ironically, as that of my Uncle Bill, a far-left-wing Roman Catholic priest (born in Chicago 14 years after the future president) who spent much of Nixon’s one-term-plus in office marching against him.

Nixon was a dominant figure in my consciousness growing up. My mom was a Democratic precinct captain in Park Forest, one of Chicago’s far southern suburbs, during the 1960 presidential campaign. She was Irish-American, Catholic, and liberal, and crazy about John F. Kennedy. She got hold of what I remember being a huge Kennedy poster, maybe four feet by six feet, and put it up in the living-room picture window. My dad thought it might invite a rock through the window.

Late in the campaign, Nixon stopped in Park Forest, then a rather liberal pocket of the suburbs, and we went to see him. As I remember it, he spoke from a platform set up near the clock tower in the center of the Park Forest Plaza, one of Chicagoland’s first shopping malls. After my dad found a spot in the packed parking lot and we were walking toward the plaza, someone who was leaving the event handed us several Kennedy signs on sticks. Mom and Dad gave the placards to me and my brothers, John and Chris. They wanted us to go up close to the stage and wave the signs while Nixon spoke. I was six. I was aware we were involved in some kind of prank, and I was happy to go along. We got up there, NIxon came on, and we started waving the signs. I don’t remember what he said, except for one thing. “I see a lot of you with Kennedy signs out there,” he remarked. “And I just hope you change your minds by Election Day.”

Mom really disliked Nixon. I remember her talking about his highly publicized attempt to save a home he was renting in Los Angeles in November 1961. Nixon got up on the roof and started spraying it down with a garden hose as the wind-driven wildfire fire approached; Mom saw Nixon’s act as grandstanding. She also remarked on what a bad sport he was when he declared “you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore” after losing the 1962 governor’s election in California.

And then, of course, he came back.

I guess it’s safe to say now that I’m the one who assassinated him. That’s right. I had a very detailed dream when I was about 16 that I shot Nixon. (Another dream I remember from my adolescence involved witnessing Indira Gandhi’s hanging by mob in India; still another involved some sort of romantic get-together with Joan Baez; I woke the next morning to encounter a story in the paper in which she declared she was bisexual.)

I’m guessing the Nixon dream occurred some time in the spring of 1970 or so, because it contained a shred of an event that really happened. In May of that year, there was a huge protest in Washington in reaction to Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam War to Cambodia and Laos and the subsequent killing of student protesters at Kent State (in Ohio) and Jackson State (in Mississippi). With the capital packed with angry students, Nixon did something that’s unimaginable today: He went out before dawn one morning, accompanied only by a driver, to visit some of the protesters at the Lincoln Memorial (I find his willingness to go out and talk as amazing to contemplate as Lincoln’s wandering around Washington unprotected during most of the Civil War).

In my dream, I was looking through a telescopic sight as Nixon arrived at the Lincoln Memorial in a military jeep, surrounded by army guys. A hot, sunny day. He was unshaven and sweaty looking–haggard–wearing a white dress shirt and black slacks, but in shirtsleeves. I understood there’d been a coup of some kind, and he was arriving at the Lincoln Memorial to give a speech announcing–what? That the military was taking over, I guess. He went up the memorial steps to speak, but before he said a word I shot him.

I escaped the area, then found myself in my grandmother’s living room–my dad’s mother’s house–on the North Side of Chicago. The TV was on–a small black-and-white model. One clip was being played over and over: The moment Nixon was shot, then falling. The image’s viewpoint was the same as mine through the telescopic sight. I turned away from the TV, glanced out the window, and saw figures moving behind cars parked at the curb. Police. I’d been tracked down, and they were sure to kill me.

And that’s all I remember of that dream.

Several years later, in waking life, I hitchhiked east to see if I could get into the Senate Watergate hearings. I was short on money and unprepared for how much a hotel cost in Washington, so I wound up doing something else you can’t imagine anymore: I slept out with my pathetic little blanket on the grounds of the Washington Monument. Sleeping outdoors did assure I’d get up early for the predawn distribution of tickets to the day’s hearing. I did get in, and what I remember was Dick Cavett sitting in a seat a few rows in front of where I stood, at the back of the Senate Caucus Room (I’m guessing he hadn’t needed to show up at 5 in the morning for the ticket giveaway).

The very next year, I thumbed out to Shenandoah National Park in Virginia and was in a campground there the night Nixon resigned. After that, there was a long hiatus in our relationship, broken by the occasional TV interview (his) or book (his) or embarrassing presidential tape (his) or opera (a Berkeley composer’s). In 1994, we went down to the Nixon Library and Museum in Yorba Linda a couple of weeks after his funeral. If you’re down there, it’s worth a stop just to see how thoroughly a man’s career can be sanitized.

For today, all that’s ancient history. Richard Milhous Nixon: Happy 100th birthday.

And in passing, below is another piece of ancient history I’ve been sitting on. It’s the first piece I ever wrote for a daily paper, 40 years ago last month. As you can see, my theme was Nixon then, too. (Also there’s the hair. And the byline. But those are stories for another day. Click for a larger, and perhaps readable, image.)

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An Election Day Tale: Dewey Defeats Truman

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Election Day, 1948, Chicago.

This was a few years before my dad met my mom–by his account, she asked him out to dinner at Schrafft’s when they were both working at a Chicago urban renewal agency. He was at home on Nashville Avenue, a business student at Northwestern, a year and a half or so after his short hitch with the Army was over. By his account, he was lying on the living-room couch in the dark, listening to election returns on the radio. It seemed the vote might be going for Truman over his Republican challenger, Thomas Dewey of New York. But an announcer mentioned the Chicago Tribune was already calling the race and that an early edition declaring Dewey the winner was on the street. Dad said he went out to a newsstand and bought a copy just as as a Tribune delivery driver was trying to retrieve the early edition. (That’s the copy pictured above.)

One of the things I noticed when I was a kid looking at that front page was how little evidence the Tribune had to declare a winner. Much of the South looked like a lock for States’ Rights candidate Strom Thurmond. The Trib’s front-page copy mentioned polls were still open in most of the country, and where voting was over, the count was so preliminary–well, you just have to admire the power of wishful thinking. Of course the Tribune had to be first with the news: its owner, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, was an arch-anti-Democrat and sworn foe of FDR and everything he stood for. A 1936 story on the Democratic National Convention was headlined, “The Soviets Gather at Philadelphia.” A subhead in this 1948 edition’s lead election story reads, “New Deal Repudiated.”

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What also got my attention, and still does, are signs the front page had been prepared in great haste. Several lines of type in the lead story’s second paragraph were inserted upside down. Also, the first three pages seem to be cast in a “typewriter” Courier typeface that appears slapdash and irregular, with some lines askew and poorly spaced; the type is different from the interior pages, which are set in what I assume was the paper’s regular type. (After some accidental research, the explanation for the appearance of those pages appears to be that the paper’s typesetters were on strike and that the copy in question was indeed typed, then cut and pasted somehow, then photographed for reproduction on the press. (See “Dewey Defeats Truman: The Rarely Told Story of Chicago Tribune’s Most Famous Issue” and “The Eleven Editions of the November 3, 1948, Chicago Tribune” — the latter a fascinating breakdown of what the paper published and when that day.)

Perhaps what I admire most about this journalistic exercise is the reporting on display in the lead story. In perhaps the only story he’s remembered for, the Trib’s Washington bureau chief, Arthur Sears Henning, declared the outcome of the vote:

“Dewey and Warren won a sweeping victory in the Presidential election yesterday.

“The early returns showed the Republican ticket leading Truman and Barkley pretty consistently in northern and western states. The indications were that the complete returns would disclose that Dewey won the Presidency by an overwhelming majority of electoral votes.”

Since the numbers didn’t bear out the tale, what was the source of that intelligence? Herbert Brownell, Dewey’s campaign manager.

Brownell, wrote Henning, “claimed that on the basis of the complete returns ‘we will wind up sweeping two-thirds of the states for the Republican ticket.’ ”

“As states definitely in the Republican column in the light of the fragmentary returns Brownell named Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, Vermont, and South Dakota. Four years ago the Republicans carried only five of these states.

” ‘At this moment,’ said Brownell, ‘the polls have closed in 12 of the 48 states outside the solid south. These states have a total of 120 votes in the electoral college.

” ‘On the basis of reports which I have been receiving from organization leaders thruout the country, I am confident that the Dewey-Warren ticket has already carried 10 of these 12 states with a total of 101 of the 120 electoral votes.

” ‘In the other two states–Kentucky and West Virginia–returns are not yet conclusive but the trend to the Dewey-Warren ticket is heartening.’ “

Brownell wasn’t completely off-base, though Illinois, Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky all went for Truman. Still, the paper went out on that limb on the basis of 12 states and hearsay about “reports from organizers.”

Henning’s eventual successor as head of the Tribune Washington bureau, Walter Trohan, was in Chicago that night covering congressional elections for the paper. He recorded an account of parts of his bureau tenure for the Harry S Truman Library in 1970. He said an election evening phone call with Ohio Senator Robert Taft, who had lost the Republican nomination to Dewey, led him to believe the Trib’s story and banner headline were wrong. About the 72-year-old Henning’s insistence that Dewey was winning, Trohan said, “Why he became so stubborn I don’t know; I guess age.” Trohan was eventually called on to write a new version of the story for later editions, with Truman the victor. But before that happened, he was asked to appear on a local TV show to discuss the returns:

“… And that night it was terrible, about 10 o’clock, before — we were still carrying the headline, I was called to go on TV to discuss the congressional election. And I went up and there was Henning, and there was the wife of the publisher, and some very important people, a dozen people or so. The announcer was a fellow with a charming voice, but no sense, in a very nice pearl-shaped tone, said, ‘Well, Walter,’ and I had never met him before in my life, ‘how is Mr. Dewey going to get along with majority Congress?’

“I said, ‘He isn’t going to have a majority Congress, the Democrats have won the Congress.’

“He said, ‘You mean that Dewey will have to work with a hostile Congress?’

“And I said, ‘No, I don’t mean anything of the kind. Mr. Dewey ain’t going to be there either.’ “

But Henning and the Trib were already committed to a different version not only of the story, but of history. Henning’s rather brief piece ended with this bit of context under the previously mentioned subhead, “New Deal Repudiated”:

“The Republican victory brought to a close the 16 year reign of the New Deal which began in the country’s most devastating depression, introduced a collectivist economy, produced a four-term President, embraced a disastrous war and left the nation a 250 billion dollar debt and heritage of foreign policy containing the seeds of another war.”

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‘Seek Help If Having Trouble Coping’

Looking for news about power restoration in New Jersey, I’m drawn to these tweets from a customer of Jersey Central Power and Light:

@brianaericson 1h Brian Anders Ericson @jcp_l 30 degrees in house. Can’t stay warm. Still no power. Town comfort center closed. No one to stay with. I’m disappointed in jcp&l

@jcp_l also my fish are dead and there is a thin layer of ice at the top of their tank. I am officially angry.

Elsewhere, I note a picture of a cabin cruiser rather oddly (or humorously) named the Graf Spee–anyone recall how that ended up?–being hauled off a commuter rail line north of New York City, near our friends Jan and Christian’s place in Hastings on Hudson.

And then there’s the nor’easter that’s on the way.

I’m an inveterate reader of National Weather Service arcana: forecast discussions, quantitative precipitation forecasts, river stage summaries, and special weather statements. I went looking for news of the approaching storm and found the following instead. It was issued earlier today (Monday, November 5, 2012) by the NWS office in New York City. It says so much without a single specific mention of meteorological phenomena.

SPECIAL WEATHER STATEMENT

NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NEW YORK NY

1101 AM EST MON NOV 5 2012

THE FOLLOWING MESSAGE IS TRANSMITTED AT THE REQUEST OF THE CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION (CDC):

IN THE WAKE OF SANDY…IT IS IMPORTANT FOR CITIZENS TO REMEMBER THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION TO PROTECT YOUR LIFE AND HEALTH AND THAT OF YOUR FAMILY:

* DRINK CLEAN…SAFE WATER AND EAT SAFE…UNCONTAMINATED FOOD

* KEEP GENERATORS OUTSIDE AT LEAST 25 FT FROM DOORS…WINDOWS AND VENTS

* DO NOT GRILL INSIDE YOUR HOME…THE FUMES CAN KILL

* NEVER TOUCH A DOWNED POWER LINE OR ANYTHING TOUCHING ONE

* USE 1 CUP OF BLEACH FOR EACH GALLON OF WATER TO REMOVE MOLD

* NEVER MIX BLEACH AND AMMONIA…THE FUMES CAN KILL

* WASHING YOUR HANDS PREVENTS ILLNESS

* SEEK HELP IF HAVING TROUBLE COPING

FOR MORE LIFE SAVING HEALTH RELATED INFORMATION CALL THE CDC AT

800-232-4636…TTY 888-232-6348. HTTP://EMERGENCY.CDC.GOV/DISASTERS/

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Night of the Night Heron

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A black-crowned night heron, one of several we see hanging around the ferry dock at Jack London Square in Oakland. We usually spot two hanging out on the rocks right at the water line south/east of the dock. They are in the midst of some pretty heavy human traffic, but they are still skittish when they detect you getting close. Over the past half-year or so, a great blue heron has been frequenting the same area. Last night it was roosting on the dock next to the USS Potomac, FDR’s presidential yacht.

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Let’s Go Oakland

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It’s been years since I paid more than passing attention to baseball, but it happened again this summer. It was a purely selfish thing: the teams that I had followed most avidly, the Cubs and the Athletics, had become perennial disappointments. In the case of the Cubs, they’re deserving objects of ridicule and a model of how weirdly wrong a franchise can go: since they play in a “destination” ballpark, the home nine’s wretched performance on the field has no bearing on the organization’s ability to pack the stands game in and game out.

The A’s case is different. Heck, there’s a book and movie out there that explains the general manager’s technique of finding undervalued talent, and he is well known for putting together a roster of kids and cast-offs who win more games than anyone would expect. A less celebrated side of the A’s way of doing baseball is that very few players get to stick around long enough for the fans to get attached to them. Do the A’s have a standout first baseman or shortstop or pitcher? You know that when they’re eligible for free agency, they’ll be gone. So the cast of characters change and change and change, and while the teams the A’s have fielded the past few seasons may have made some sort of economic sense–at least from the standpoint of an owner who wants to take the team to a new city and seems utterly uninterested in investing a dime, or more than a dime–the results have been a little dispiriting for the casual fan and unlikely to win any new converts.

The A’s ballpark, the Oakland Coliseum, has become the opposite of a baseball shrine. The limitations of a multi-purpose stadium were built into the place, but it had its graceful points if you were willing to see them. The park featured a beautiful view to the Oakland Hills to the east (though yes, right in the center of the vista was a working rock quarry). Back in the ’90s, the city and county made a deal to get the Raiders to come back, and part of the deal was to remodel the stadium. The result was a grossly ill-proportioned concrete monstrosity that bans the view of anything that might soothe the eye. So, regular outings to the Coliseum is a hard sell to anyone who’s not already a convinced follower of the local teams.

This season? Well, this season was certainly different. The A’s, with the usual collection of odd parts, played their first 61 games in the expected fashion. On June 10, the team was 26-35. From that point on, they won more games than any team in the major leagues, going 68-33. Wow, was that fun to see. And so by August–did I hear someone say, “Fair-weather fan”?–I started going out to see what was happening out at the Coliseum.

That’s all by way of saying that an NPR sports show, “Only A Game,” was looking for a story on Bay Area postseason baseball (the Giants are in the playoffs, too, if anyone is wondering). The story will air tomorrow (I’ll put up a link when I see one audio is embedded below). And just for the exercise of showing what a radio script looks like, I’m including that below (including the speculative host intro). Here it is:

**

Major League Baseball’s post-season continues this weekend … with the San Francisco Giants returning home to play the St. Louis Cardinals tomorrow in their National League Championship Series. The Giants go into Game Six against the defending champions … hoping to get back to the World Series … and reclaim the crown they won two years ago.

Across the Bay from the Giants’ sparkling ballpark … another team made the playoffs this year. Dan Brekke of NPR member station KQED reports on the surprising Oakland Athletics … a franchise that battles the best in the American League … and sometimes its own fans.

Track …

Back in early June … this is the last thing an A’s fan would have expected to hear … as the year wound down.

Ambi 1/Glen Kuiper game call:

Swing and a miss! He struck him out! And the Oakland Athletics are going to the postseason! Un-be-lievable!:10

The A’s turned a mediocre spring into a summer of conquest. Their roster of unknowns, re-treads, and rookies ended the regular season by sweeping past the Texas Rangers to steal the American League West Division title.

And then … on to the playoffs.

Ambi: Let’s go Oakland chanting.

(Play two or three reps, then end abruptly)

But … before we continue with that feel-good story, a word about Oakland, the A’s … and Bay Area baseball.

The A’s owner … developer Lew Wolff … is determined to take the team to San Jose … build a new stadium … and sell luxury boxes to the Silicon Valley super-rich.

So … a lot of A’s fans aren’t crazy about Lew Wolff. There’s little love lost for the Giants, either, who seem to have everything the Athletics don’t: a beautiful waterfront stadium, a sell-out every game, and money to go out and buy top-level talent.

Something else the Giants have: the territorial rights to Wolff’s coveted new home in San Jose. So far, they’ve blocked the move.

So for now … Oakland fans and Wolff are stuck with each other … in a historic but hideously remodeled ballpark … that ranks near the bottom of the major leagues in attendance.

Ambi 2 or 3:

Let’s go Oakland ambi(in clear for two or three reps, then under)

But all that seemed to change … as the A’s made the playoffs … and came home to play the Detroit Tigers on October 9th.

The Oakland Coliseum was packed … and loud

Ambi 4: Crowd roar

But even then … lots of customers were unhappy with management. With fans begging for tickets … the team left 10-thousand upper-deck seats covered with tarps … and off-limits.The A’s explained they wanted to maintain an “intimate” feeling at the game. For fans … it was just another sign that the organization doesn’t care about them.

Cut 1: “Brad from Santa Cruz”

They probably wouldn’t sell it out and it would look weird. But I agree, that’s a pretty lame reason [… internal edit …]Let’s let the people watch some baseball, know what I mean? :08

Butt to:

Cut 2: “Essence Harden”

EH: It’s completely insane.[…internal edit …]. I understand that during the normal season there might not be enough to fill up those seats. But this game sold out almost immediately, and the idea of having those tarps on there still is completely horrible to the tons and tons of A’s fans that would love to have seats right now.

DB: And why do you think they didn’t open it?

EH: I think Lew Wolff hates us so much. I don’t know why. :20

A’s management did relent … announcing it would open the upper-deck seats … for the league championship and World Series.

That was before the A’s ran into Justin Verlander in the deciding game of their divisional series match-up with the Tigers. He pitched a shutout … and it turned out the tarps could stay on all winter. Some fans complained Wolff had jinxed the team … by finally agreeing to open the upper deck.

But the fans … and the surprising team they had come out to cheer … had a final moment together.

As the Tigers celebrated on the infield … the Coliseum crowd gave the Athletics one last ovation.

Ambi 5: Out on “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” ambi? (Not sure the song pops enough).

For Only A Game, I’m Dan Brekke in San Francisco.

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