As another day comes to an end I find myself at the beginning of my vacation. I am done with work for a week and look forward to leaving the cold temperatures in Minneapolis. The temperature at this time last night was about 40. Tonight the temperature is in the high single digits. For those of you who have never experienced this weather phenomena in person, the difference between the high single digits and the low single digits is basically...............not a bloody thing. I sometimes refer to Minnesota as the world's largest cryogenics experiment. That's why so many people here look much younger than their actual age. No one's blood circulates during the winter, thus the aging process slows to a crawl. It's true. Take a look at my profile picture. Not bad for an 84-year old guy, eh?
The weather for Port St. Lucie looks very good for the week. Granted, weather forecasting is one of the greatest vocations to have in this country because how many other jobs allow you to predict something and be incorrect virtually 50-60% of the time, yet they still ask you to come back and do it again tomorrow? I can still recall weathermen like Tex Antoine (WABC) and Dr. Frank Field (WNBC) in the New York market standing in front of maps that were covered with all sorts of scrawled numbers and letters and the word "doppler" hadn't even been invented yet. But they still probably got the forecast spot on nearly as much as they do today. But no matter what the weather brings, I will be so pleased to be on the field that it won't matter one iota.
My glove is quickly getting into game shape. I certainly hope to not have a ball pop out on a routine play when I reach camp. Now, I am from the school of "a good musician never blames his instrument", but there's no such statement concerning an instrument which is not quite ready for prime time. Hopefully I will be able to play enough catch on Tuesday and early Wednesday that it feels like a.....glove. You know what I mean.
Evaluations by the coaching staff will take place on Wednesday morning. I don't have a lot of worry about my fielding prowess, but hitting the curveball is going to show my ultimate weakness. But if I see a fastball, I'm gonna sit on that bad boy like nobody's business. Being the quintessential "guess hitter", I am always looking for the pitch to be in a certain location rather than a certain speed. The pitcher vs. batter confrontation is one of the beautiful things about the game of baseball. The pitcher is thinking about what the batter is thinking and the batter is thinking about what the pitcher is thinking. Somewhere in the middle of that mental war the ball itself comes into play. It's kinda like chess, except one player has the chance to plunk his opponent in the rib cage either by chance or totally on purpose. If Bobby Fischer had thrown a rook at Boris Spassky at Reykjavik it would've made national news. If he had thrown a rook at him at a speed upwards of 90 mph it would've made INTERNATIONAL news.
I'm also taking my fielder's glove. I hope to maybe get a little time in over at third base, the position I grew up playing. I used to enjoy playing third base partly because no one else wanted to play it when I was young. I think that I had the mentality of wanting the ball hit to me by every batter, and since kids so often pull the ball, and the vast majority of kids I played with were right -handed batters, I got a lot of work over a the hot corner. I loved it. I've never been accused of being fast. I've have been accused of having quick reactions and third base fit my abilities. The outfield is not my favorite place to be. When I am playing in the outfield I am essentially a triple waiting to happen. I break too late, my first step is in, not out, I take the wrong angle to the ball. I know how to play the outfield, but my sheer lack of speed limits my skill set when on the grassy plains of the power alleys. Those who can, do. Those who can't, tell their coach that they can't.
The weather for Port St. Lucie looks very good for the week. Granted, weather forecasting is one of the greatest vocations to have in this country because how many other jobs allow you to predict something and be incorrect virtually 50-60% of the time, yet they still ask you to come back and do it again tomorrow? I can still recall weathermen like Tex Antoine (WABC) and Dr. Frank Field (WNBC) in the New York market standing in front of maps that were covered with all sorts of scrawled numbers and letters and the word "doppler" hadn't even been invented yet. But they still probably got the forecast spot on nearly as much as they do today. But no matter what the weather brings, I will be so pleased to be on the field that it won't matter one iota.
My glove is quickly getting into game shape. I certainly hope to not have a ball pop out on a routine play when I reach camp. Now, I am from the school of "a good musician never blames his instrument", but there's no such statement concerning an instrument which is not quite ready for prime time. Hopefully I will be able to play enough catch on Tuesday and early Wednesday that it feels like a.....glove. You know what I mean.
Evaluations by the coaching staff will take place on Wednesday morning. I don't have a lot of worry about my fielding prowess, but hitting the curveball is going to show my ultimate weakness. But if I see a fastball, I'm gonna sit on that bad boy like nobody's business. Being the quintessential "guess hitter", I am always looking for the pitch to be in a certain location rather than a certain speed. The pitcher vs. batter confrontation is one of the beautiful things about the game of baseball. The pitcher is thinking about what the batter is thinking and the batter is thinking about what the pitcher is thinking. Somewhere in the middle of that mental war the ball itself comes into play. It's kinda like chess, except one player has the chance to plunk his opponent in the rib cage either by chance or totally on purpose. If Bobby Fischer had thrown a rook at Boris Spassky at Reykjavik it would've made national news. If he had thrown a rook at him at a speed upwards of 90 mph it would've made INTERNATIONAL news.
I'm also taking my fielder's glove. I hope to maybe get a little time in over at third base, the position I grew up playing. I used to enjoy playing third base partly because no one else wanted to play it when I was young. I think that I had the mentality of wanting the ball hit to me by every batter, and since kids so often pull the ball, and the vast majority of kids I played with were right -handed batters, I got a lot of work over a the hot corner. I loved it. I've never been accused of being fast. I've have been accused of having quick reactions and third base fit my abilities. The outfield is not my favorite place to be. When I am playing in the outfield I am essentially a triple waiting to happen. I break too late, my first step is in, not out, I take the wrong angle to the ball. I know how to play the outfield, but my sheer lack of speed limits my skill set when on the grassy plains of the power alleys. Those who can, do. Those who can't, tell their coach that they can't.
Tomorrow afternoon I leave for Atlanta. An overnight and a chance to dine at one of my favorite restaurants awaits. I haven't been to Big Daddy's Dish on Old National Highway for about a year or so. The food is fantastic and is fare which cannot be gotten in Minnesota. But a chance to partake is something I am looking forward to. On Tuesday morning I leave for West Palm Beach and the short drive up to Port St. Lucie.
My fandom for the Mets continued following the 1973 season. Their mediocrity continued throughout the rest of the decade. I even had classmates who conspired with me to figure out a way to buy the club and turn it into a winner. After the death of Joan Payson, the team's original president, the team fell (almost literally) into the hands of Lorinda De Roulet, her daughter. She was president of the team for the last 5 years of the decade. During this time the team was woeful at best with players like Bruce Boisclair and George "The Stork" Theodore. Theodore looked much like his moniker, kinda gangly and uncoordinated to a point. They made terrible trades throughout the decade. For example they traded a young pitcher named Lynn Nolan Ryan (yes, the Nolan Ryan) for Jim Fregosi in an attempt to take care of their constant third base problems. There's even a song about the revolving door of players who played there in a short time span. Fregosi was awful and Nolan Ryan went on to become...... Nolan Ryan! Lorinda had a daughter named BeBe who reportedly asked, in an attempt to save money, if the foul balls could be washed and used again. That's what we had to put up with.
The early 80's weren't much better, but the team was purchased by a group led by Nelson Doubleday. The team started to make deals which had much better results and many of those deals were made by Frank Cashen, who had done a fine job rebuilding the Baltimore Orioles. it really started to come together with acquisitions of Keith Hernandez from St. Louis, Gary Carter from Montreal and Howard Johnson from the Detroit Tigers. Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry were home-grown players and the group began to gel in 1985. It all came together in 1986 when they dominated the league, but just barely escaped the Astros in the playoffs and were one strike away from losing the World Series to the Boston Red Sox before the incredible occurred and they won the series in 7 games. I was able to attend the victory parade on October 28th, my 25th birthday. I have a picture taken after the parade of myself on top of the north tower of the World Trade Center. I was lucky in the 80's to see a lot of Mets games on an independent Tampa station, WTOG Channel 44. This predates the Devil Rays/Rays existence and they realized that they could get good ratings by showing Mets games on a feed from WOR in New York. Mostly because Tampa-native Dwight Gooden was on the staff.
But that's where the championships ended. The Cardinals won the division in '87 and lost to, ironically for me, the Twins in the World Series. In '88 they won the division again but managed to lose the NLCS to the Dodgers, whom they had beaten in 10 of their 11 regular-season meetings. By this time the core group was starting to come apart at the seams, as we found out later. They made deals to keep the momentum going with players like Kevin McReynolds who was a great acquisition. But it was clear that after that pennant run changes would be made.
I moved to Minnesota one week after they lost to the Dodgers in the NLCS and moving away from the ability to see them on television on a regular basis.
At this time tomorrow I should be attending the opening night banquet at the PGA conference center. The first day will be behind me. I'm due to arrive around 2 p.m. There's a chance to workout on a practice field from 2:30-5:30. I will make it a point to be there. I can hardly wait to walk into the locker room and see my uniform for the first time. I won't actually try it on until Wednesday morning before the first official workout.
As I briefly mentioned yesterday the 1990's were the "lost years". I got out of touch with my team because of I lost confidence in them. Proximity to coverage was scarce as there weren't things like the baseball package on something called Primestar, a predecessor of DirecTv. (Google "Primestar").
I started as an usher working Twins games and also at other venues in Minneapolis. Before I moved there I recall thinking, as they closed out the Cardinals at the end of game 7 in 1987, that those people had better party excessively because that's the only championship they are going to win for a long time.
I worked part time along with my full-time gig selling electronics at a department store. The Twins finished dead last in the AL West in 1990. We had no reason to expect anything different the next year. But something happened that was not as planned. The Twins put together a great season and ended up in the playoffs. Now, I had already experienced the playoffs in Minneapols earlier that year as the North Stars made a monumental playoff run in late spring and made it to the finals. The Pittsburgh Penguins put an end to that Cinderella story, but this was different.
The playoffs began against the Toronto Blue Jays and before I knew it that series was over in 5 games. The World Series was due to start the following Saturday and in a great series the Twins won games 6 and 7 at home. I was lucky enough to be on the field at the end of both of those games. It was as loud an experience as I have ever encountered. It was amazing. I got home after the final game at 6 a.m. smelling like champagne. It was the morning of my 30th birthday. To say I never expected to experience such a thing would be a gross understatement.
I moved to full time with the team in February 1996. It was a dream come true. To be on the payroll of a major league baseball team, wow! I worked in the mailroom primarily, but I was also responsible for much of the office operations. I redesigned the team letterhead, business cards and helped out from time to time in the community relations department. I even spent two years as the backup mascot. Running around in a bear suit, acting the fool in total anonymity? Paradise!
Being a member of a major league baseball front office doesn't allow for following another team, especially when that team is in the other league. The crowds got small toward the end of the decade and deservedly so. About this time the Mets started to improve dramatically. They hired Bobby Valentine, the greatest athlete to ever come out of my hometown of Stamford a fellow alum of Rippowam High School. We had Bobby Valntine Night in 1978 and two buses of student took in a game at Shea to see him play for our team. By 2000 the team had picked up to where I'd left them in '89. They lost to the hated team from the Bronx in 5 games. They were doomed from game 1 because SOMEBODY stopped running when they thought Todd Zeile's deep fly was a homer and got thrown out at home. I knew it was over right then. It was only game 1, but I knew it was over. But I knew then I was on my way back to the Mets.
I left the Twins just prior to the start of the 2002 season. Not by my choice, but after some very difficult times I realized that this freed me up to follow my heart back to the orange and blue.
When I put on that uniform on Wednesday I will be all the way back.
Until tomorrow.........
P.S.-Damn you Timo Perez.
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