Baseball in SEC Country

I had done an Easter vacation trip for many years and then the pandemic started.  In 2020, I was supposed to do Louisville, Wichita, and Los Angeles during Easter vacation.  Of course, that didn’t happen (I ended up going to Louisville in the summer of 2021).  There was no Easter vacation trip in 2021 or 2022.  But this year I was able to take an Easter vacation trip once again.  I wanted to do three stops with stops 2 and 3 being Texas and Los Angeles.  I thought about going to Notre Dame and doing a baseball game there for my first stop.  But there were a number of reasons by I ended up not doing that:

1.  I’ve been to Notre Dame baseball games before (not many, but I’ve done it).

2.  The weather at Notre Dame in early April is a huge wild card.

3.  The Oklahoma City Dodgers were home and it would be easier to get from Oklahoma City to Texas.

4.  They’re the Oklahoma City Dodgers.  I’ve been to a lot of minor league games in the last decade, but the only time I’ve seen a Dodgers’ affiliate was in 2015 in Montana for a rookie league game (that level of the minor leagues doesn’t exist anymore).  This was triple-A so I would get to see some high ranking prospects and some players that I knew so that was cool.

5.  I had only been to Oklahoma in 2014 when I stopped at Mickey Mantle’s house during my Missouri (St. Louis and Kansas City)/Arkansas/Oklahoma/Kansas trip.  So this was the first time I was going to see a sporting event in Oklahoma and spend a night there.

I got to my hotel around 4:00 and the game was at 6:00 so I didn’t have time to do anything else really.  I took a walk around the stadium and saw the statues of Mickey Mantle, Johnny Bench, and Warren Spahn.  Those are three legendary players. Warren Spahn is a player I don’t think about much, but he has more wins than any left-handed pitcher ever (363). I would have to do more digging into numbers, but my initial thought is that the five greatest left-handed pitchers of the last 100 years are Sandy Koufax, Clayton Kershaw, Warren Spahn, Randy Johnson, and Steve Carlton (not necessarily in that order). My next group of five would be Lefty Grove, Tom Glavine, Whitey Ford, Carl Hubbell, and CC Sabathia.

It’s definitely appropriate to have a Mickey Mantle statue at a baseball stadium in  Oklahoma, but it does seem a little weird to have a Mickey Mantle statue outside a stadium that’s home to a team named the Dodgers.

Inside the stadium was pretty cool.  There was a pretty good selection of food and beer.  It was $2 beer night for the cheap stuff.  The good stuff was $3.  I had a COOP Aleworks American Lager.  I had a COOP beer as part of my four-state beer flight in Omaha in 2018.  There were a number of COOP beers on tap at the stadium.  I went with the American Lager because it seemed appropriate for my first baseball game of the season and also the tap handle said “OKLA” with the LA being the Dodgers’ logo.  It was pretty good, but I suspect I would have liked the Amber better.  I just had a hot dog to eat.  Like I said, there were other options, but again I went with the appropriate choice for my first game of the year.  Unfortunately, there was only yellow mustard available, which is the worst version of mustard (calling it mustard is a stretch).

This was my view for most of the game.

The game was the Dodgers against the Sugarland Space Cowboys.  Normally I don’t care about who wins a minor league game, but it was the Dodgers’ affiliate against the Astros’ affiliate so I definitely wanted the Dodgers to win.  The Dodgers’ number three and four prospects were playing.  Michael Busch was starting at second base and Gavin Stone was the starting pitcher.  Busch had a double and a walk.  Gavin Stone had a really good season in the minors last year.  He went from single-A to triple-A and was good at every level.  On this night, he was good for three innings, but then he gave up a solo home run in the fourth and he couldn’t get anybody out in the fifth.  The Dodgers trailed 3-0.  They ended up coming back and tied the game in the bottom of the ninth on a bases loaded walk with two outs.  Unfortunately they could not win the game on the ninth.  So it went to extra innings.  My policy on extra innings is that if it’s up to me, I will not watch extra innings of a game that I don’t care about (I cared about this one more than most minor league games, but it was still a minor league game so I didn’t really care).  That was not my policy before, but the runner on second base to start extra innings is pretty much tied with the DH for the stupidest rule in baseball (the difference is that the DH makes every game worse, but the runner on second base in extra innings only makes games that go to extra innings worse).  If it’s a game that I actually care about, I’ll stay.  If I don’t care but I’m with people, it’s up to them.  In this case, I was by myself and I didn’t really care so I got up and left as soon as the ninth inning ended.  The box score says there were 3,856 people there.  I’m guessing it was actually a little less that that (my guess before I saw the box score was about 3,000).  It was a Tuesday night in April so the small crowd isn’t too surprising. The stadium was pretty good.  It seems that it’s bigger than it needs to be.  There are two decks.  All the seats down the first base line on the second deck have been taken out and they have ads in those areas now.  So that’s not particularly aesthetically appealing, but it was a nice stadium other than that.  And although it wasn’t a big crowd, they were into the game.  So I’ll rank Chickasaw Bricktown Ballpark pretty high on my list of minor league stadiums. I was initially going to rank it behind Louisville Slugger Field, but then I remembered that they played Vin Scully saying “It’s time for Dodger baseball!” when the game was about to start and that bumped it up a spot. Here are the updated rankings (click on each ballpark if you want to read my blog post about them):

25. Arm & Hammer Park in Trenton

24. Dehler Park in Billings

23. Arvest Ballpark in Springdale

22. Autozone Park in Memphis

21. TD Bank Ballpark in Bridgewater, New Jersey

20. Memorial Stadium in Boise

19. KeySpan Park in Brooklyn

18. Newman Outdoor Field in Fargo

17. Isotopes Park in Albuquerque

16. TD Ameritrade Park in Omaha

15. Daniel S. Frawley Stadium in Wilmington

14. Sahlen Field in Buffalo

13. Greater Nevada Field in Reno

12. NBT Bank Stadium in Syracuse

11. Richmond County Bank Ballpark on Staten Island

10. Dickey-Stephens Park in Little Rock

9. Joseph L. Bruno Stadium in Troy

8. Bethpage Ballpark in Central Islip

7. Four Winds Field in South Bend

6. Louisville Slugger Field

5.  Chickasaw Bricktown Ballpark

4. Frontier Field in Rochester

3. Joseph P. Riley Jr. Park in Charleston

2. Dunkin Donuts Park in Hartford

1. Regions Field in Birmingham

The next day I was on the train to Fort Worth and a Lyft to my hotel.  Whenever I’m in Texas, I’m amazed at how much open space there is.  I guess it makes sense.  Texas has about 1.5 times the population of New York, but it’s 5.5 times bigger geographically.  If you compare Texas and California (after New York, the states where I’ve spent the most time are probably Indiana, Virginia, Florida, and California), Texas is about 1.7 times bigger than California, but California has a population that’s 1.3 times bigger than Texas.  So New York and California are much more densely populated than Texas.  Dallas/Arlington/Fort Worth are all medium-sized to big cities (Dallas is the 9th biggest by population in the US, Fort Worth is 13th, and Arlington is 50th), but most of the area seems rural to me.

That’s a statue of Nolan Ryan in the foreground.

After going to a game in Oakland in 2019, I had been to all 30 Major League Baseball stadiums.  But then Globe Life Field opened in 2020 and I was back down to 29.  I probably would have gone to Globe Life Field in 2020 if not for the pandemic.  I didn’t get around to going until this year.  It was built right by Globe Life Stadium (now Choctaw Stadium) and AT&T Stadium.  I got there early and Matt arrived shortly before the start of the game.  I wanted to get there early to get something to eat at the Hurtado Barbecue stand.  I had done my research on the stadium and there were some concession stands with barbecue that doesn’t measure up to Texas standards, but Hurtado was legit.  Normally, I’d wait to get food until the game started, but I had read that the lines at Hurtado were ridiculous and it was my first Major League game with the pitch clock.  So I didn’t want to spend four innings standing on line (I was thinking of the Shake Shack lines when Citi Field opened).  Also I was thinking about how I couldn’t remember what I ate at the old stadium when Matt and I went back in 2015 so I checked the blog post and it turns out that we had issues waiting on line back then and didn’t eat anything at the game.  So anyway, I was able to get brisket tacos without a wait.  They were quite tasty.  I walked around the stadium while I waited for Matt to arrive.

I was excited about seeing 2020 Dodgers hero Corey Seager.  He was amazing in the playoffs that year (NLCS and World Series MVP) and then the Dodgers traded for Trea Turner and the Dodgers didn’t seem to eager to keep Seager when he became a free agent (I’m sure they would have liked to have him back on a cheap contract, but they weren’t going to realistically compete with the offers he was getting from other teams when they had Trea Turner also).  I wish Seager was still a Dodger, but there were no hard feelings at all about Seager leaving.  But they announced the lineup and he wasn’t in it.  I went on the MLB app and he was listed as being one of the players on the bench.  But then I checked ESPN and saw the story that he was out four weeks with a hamstring injury.  So it was disappointing not to see him.

This was our view for the game.

Anyway, it ended up being a not very good game.  The Rangers took a 1-0 lead in the bottom of the first and then ended up losing 10-1.  The game took two hours and 24 minutes.  Matt and I talked about how this game would have taken like three hours and 20 minutes if it had been last year.  Attendance was 18,380.  It’s not too surprising that it was a small crowd considering it was a Wednesday night in April against the Royals. It was good to see Matt. I last saw him about 12 and a half months ago at Jon’s wedding. Hopefully I’ll be able to see Matt and some Notre Dame friends at a football game again in the not too distant future. It’s been far too long.

It was a bad game, but it was good to see Matt.

Globe Life Field will rank pretty high on the list of stadiums with a retractable roof.  Fortunately the roof was open.  Matt was saying how he had only been to games with the roof closed and he liked it better with the roof open.  I rank the stadiums based on my experiences there so experiencing it with the roof open will help its ranking.  It’s kind of unique in the way it’s built.  Of course, most stadiums you enter on the lowest level.  Then there’s Dodger Stadium where you can enter on any level.  But with Globe Life Field, you pretty much enter on the middle level.  The field is so far below street level that you enter the stadium pretty high up.  And the lowest level has suites and stuff that you would usually find higher up in most stadiums.  So that was interesting.  One negative is the artificial turf.  We had gotten down only having two stadiums with artificial turf (Toronto and Tampa Bay), but now we’re up to five (Toronto, Tampa Bay, Arizona, Miami, and Texas).  Four of those stadiums have retractable roofs.  What are we doing with this artificial turf?  One big positive is that the Dodgers won 11 playoff games at Globe Life Field.  They swept the Padres, they came back from 3-1 down against the Braves in the NLCS, and then they beat the Rays in the World Series (if you were going to play a neutral site World Series, I was happy that it was against the Rays so that I didn’t have to watch the Dodgers play World Series games in the Rays’ stadium).  The food selection was decent, but the beer selection needs work.  There was one concession stand called Crafthous ‘72, but it was all Anhueser Busch beer.  All the draft beer was Anhueser Busch stuff.  I found a concession stand with a decent selection in cans and I got a Rollertown Beerworks Big German (it was labeled as a Kolsch style ale from a Celina, Texas brewery).  It was very good.  But good beer should be more widely available throughout the stadium.  There is big variation throughout the majors as far as the beer selection.  Some have a very good selection and some just don’t at all.  I don’t get how some stadiums just don’t have a good beer selection in the year 2023.

So I’ve now seen Major League Baseball games played at 35 different stadiums. One of them was Sahlen Field in Buffalo. I included that one in my minor league rankings (14th) even though I’ve only seen a Major League game there because it didn’t really make sense to compare it to Major League stadiums. Anyway, let’s get to the rankings. Click on each stadium for a blog post about it (the Oakland Coliseum blog post contains more explanation of the rankings).

34.  Tropicana Field
33.  Oakland Coliseum
32.  SkyDome (You might know it as Rogers Center, but it will always be SkyDome to me)
31.  Chase Field
30.  Guaranteed Rate Field
29.  LoanDepot Park
28.  Minute Maid Park
27.  Turner Field
26.  Progressive Field
25.  Angels Stadium of Anaheim
24.  American Family Field
23.  Coors Field
22.  Shea Stadium
21.  Comerica Park
20.  Globe Life Park

19. Globe Life Field
18.  Truist Park
17.  Citi Field
16.  New Yankee Stadium
15.  Citizens Bank Park
14.  Oriole Park at Camden Yards
13.  Nationals Park
12.  Busch Stadium
11.  Great American Ballpark
10.  T-Mobile Park
9.  Target Field
8.  Oracle Park
7.  Kauffman Stadium
6.  Petco Park
5.  PNC Park
4.  Wrigley Field
3.  Old Yankee Stadium
1.  (Tie) Dodger Stadium/Fenway Park

Fall Baseball Thoughts

It’s been a long time since I blogged and I have a lot of thoughts.  I’ll divide this post with headings so read whatever you’re interested in.

Dodgers-Mets

I went to a bunch of baseball games this summer, but I didn’t get to my first Major League game of the year until the last day of August.  The Dodgers were in town for a three game series with the Mets.  I had tickets for my dad and me for the second game.  As it turned out, Clayton Kershaw was coming back from the injured list in the third game so we decided to go to that one also.

After the Dodgers won the first game of the series, it was Tyler Anderson against Jacob deGrom.  Both starters went seven innings.  Unfortunately Anderson gave up a two-run home run in the third to Starling Marte.  Mookie Betts hit a solo home run off of deGrom in the sixth.  And that was all the scoring.  Justin Turner hit a ball that would have tied it in the seventh, but Brandon Nimmo made a great catch.  The Mets had Timmy Trumpet there to play Edwin Diaz’s song live.  It would have been awesome if Diaz had blown the save after that, but he did not.  With the good pitching, the game only took two hours and 19 minutes.  Attendance was 41,799.

It was a big crowd on a Wednesday night for a possible playoff preview (but hopefully not, given the result).

His name is Timmy Trumpet and he plays the trumpet.  What are the odds?

In the final game of the series, it was Clayton Kershaw against Chris Bassett.  Kershaw had a rough first inning.  The Mets scored a run on a single and three walks.  The Dodgers responded in the second with a two-run single by Chris Taylor.  After the bad first inning, Kershaw was excellent.  He didn’t allow a baserunner the next four innings.  Since it was his first game back, he was done for the day at 74 pitches.  He pitched really well and left in position to win.  As he walked off the mound after five, I figured he was done.  I also thought about the possibility that this could be the last time I ever see him pitch and I was sad.  I hope not, but there’s at least a chance.  If the Dodgers win the World Series this year and he decides to retire, the only better way for him to go out would be to retire after winning his third or fourth World Series a few years down the road.  There’s also the possibility that he’ll sign with the Rangers (the only team I could imagine him leaving the Dodgers for).  If he does that, I will still root for him and I would still try to go see him pitch when he’s in town to play the Yankees or Mets, but I hope he won’t pitch for another team.  And then there’s always the possibility that Clayton Kershaw keeps pitching for the Dodgers and things just don’t work out for me to see him in person.  This game was the first time I had seen him since September 2019.  I’ve been to 12 games at Dodger Stadium (all during Kershaw’s career) and Kershaw has only pitched in one of them.  So I hope I get to see him again, but we’ll see what happens.

I didn’t want to miss a chance to see the greatest Dodger since Sandy Koufax.

Unfortunately, the bullpen could not hold the lead.  The Mets scored two in the sixth and two in the seventh.  The Dodgers got a run in the eighth, but it was not enough and the Mets won 5-3.  Attendance was 36,908.  Pete texted me saying he was sorry that the Dodgers lost the two games I went to.  They were pretty much the least disappointing losses I could imagine going to.  They were 90-40 after losing those two games.  They hadn’t lost a series since July.  Kershaw was really good after a bad first inning.  And as I said to Pete, “Oh no, the Dodgers are only going to win 108 regular season games instead of 109.”  As I write this a month later, the Dodgers have 110 wins with four games to go. The last time I didn’t get to see the Dodgers win a game in person, they won the World Series. So hopefully this year will be a repeat of that.  It was the first time I was in attendance to see the Dodgers lose a game started by Kershaw.  Here are his numbers with me in attendance:

11 starts, two pinch hit appearances (0-1 with a sacrifice bunt)

Dodgers:  11-2 (the other loss was when he unsuccessfully pinch hit)

Kershaw’s Win-Loss:  5-0

70 innings

1.29 ERA

74 strikeouts

39 hits

17 walks

0.80 WHIP

2 complete game shutouts

Some other notes on the two games at Citi Field before I move on:  Late summer sounds like a great time to go see some baseball.  It’s usually not too hot and it’s a great way to pass some time while you’re waiting for football to start.  The second game we went to was a 4:00 start, which is nice because it’s day baseball and the sun is going down so it’s not too much of a factor.  Also it was the same day as the first Thursday of college football so we could go to the game and be home to watch some football at night.  The problem with all of that was it was also when the US Open was going on in Flushing.  Traffic was bad.  We made it to our seats just in time for the first pitch on Wednesday night.  It wasn’t as bad getting there on Thursday, but getting home after both games was rough.  Food and beverage could be improved at Citi Field.  I had buffalo chicken mac and cheese on Wednesday night, which was pretty good, but also expensive.  The craft beer selection could definitely be improved.  There was one little stand on the upper level with craft beer cans.  The good news was that it didn’t take too long to get a beer.  But I would definitely like to see a better selection of craft beer on tap.  I had a Montauk Summer Ale on Wednesday night.  I had a Brooklyn Lager on Thursday afternoon.  It’s not my favorite beer, but it’s pretty good.  If the Dodgers win the World Series, that will be one of the beers I drink to celebrate since I don’t know of any Los Angeles beer that I could get around here (I could find Northern California beer or San Diego beer pretty easily and maybe some Orange County beer, but I don’t know about any Los Angeles beer that’s available on Long Island).  I wanted to do Brooklyn Lager and a hot dog with Kershaw pitching.  I’ve had some really good hot dogs at Citi Field and some not so good ones.  Unfortunately this was a not so good one.  Citi Field also brought back the edible cookie dough.  They used to have a couple of stands where they would scoop it and it was nice and fresh and delicious.  Now they have it pre-scooped in a refrigerator at a lot of the stands.  I get why they did that because it’s much easier, but it wasn’t as good.  It was really hard and I broke the plastic spoon.  My dad and I also shared a pretzel.  I got it at the same stand I got the hot dog.  It was like an artisanal pretzel.  There were regular pretzels available at other stands, but I got the one that was available where I was getting a hot dog.  The regular pretzels probably would have been better.  So overall, the food and beverage experience left something to be desired.

Vin Scully

Today is six years since Vin Scully’s last game.  It's been two months since he died.  I did a running diary of a random August game in 2016 and got a great Vin Scully story about Pearl Harbor. I hope that the Dodgers win the World Series this year and that Vin Scully is doing the play-by-play in heaven.  I watched a whole bunch of Vin Scully games on YouTube in August.  Here are my top 11:

11. 1989 All Star Game- “Bo Jackson says hello!”  Bo Jackson led off the bottom of the first with a home run as Vin calls the game with an uncomfortable Ronald Reagan.  Reagan was in the booth for the first inning and it wasn’t like he was a guest being interviewed.  He was calling the game with Vin for an inning.  He admits to being uncomfortable.  Tom Seaver called the rest of the game with Vin.

9. (Tie) 1965 World Series Games 5 and 7- They’re both Sandy Koufax pitching a complete game shutout (four hits, one walk, and 10 strikeouts in Game 5 and three hits, three walks, and 10 strikeouts in Game 7).  So why don’t these rank higher?  It’s baseball from another century and it feels like it.  Vin splits the games with Ray Scott, the Twins’ play by play guy.  Vin had the second half of both of these games.  That means that you only got four innings of Vin calling Koufax pitching in Game 5.  He took over in the bottom of the fifth with the Dodgers hitting.  Vin also took over in the bottom of the fifth with the Twins hitting in Game 7 so you would have gotten five innings of him calling Koufax in Game 7, except they went back to Ray Scott for the bottom of the ninth because Vin was sent down to the Dodgers’ clubhouse to interview people once the game ended.  And the quality of the broadcast is obviously not great since it was 1965.  They say several times how they’re in color, but I guess only black and white versions were preserved because that’s what’s on YouTube.

8. The Catch (Montana to Clark)- The 49ers beat the Cowboys to advance to the Super Bowl.  Vin will always be remembered for baseball, but it’s cool that he was on the call for one of the great moments in Joe Montana’s career.

7. 2013 Opening Day- The only bad part of being at this game was not being able to listen to Vin call Kershaw’s shutout and go ahead home run against the Giants.

6. Vin’s last game at Dodger Stadium- This was one of those late season games where Vin would be calling two games at once.  The Dodgers could clinch the division with a win or a Giants’ loss.  The Dodgers were losing with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, but Corey Seager tied it with a home run.  Then it was a race to see if the Dodgers could win before the Giants lost.  Charlie Culberson hit a home run in the tenth to win it before the Giants lost.

5. 1986 World Series Game 6- This is the greatest win in the history of the Mets and probably the second best call ever for Vin.  We’ll get to number one.  Other contenders for his second best call would be Sandy Koufax’s perfect game and Hank Aaron’s 715th home run.

4. 1988 World Series Game 2- It’s Vin calling Orel Hershiser at his best.  He pitched a complete game shutout (three hits and two walks).  And Hershiser was 3-3 with two doubles and an RBI.  As always, the DH is stupid.

3. 1988 World Series Game 5- Along with Game 7 from 1965, it’s the other game when the Dodgers won the World Series with Vin on the call on TV that was preserved.  Game 7 in 1965 is better than this one, but this has Vin doing play-by-play for the whole game and the quality of the broadcast is much better.  And it’s Orel Hershiser on the mound again.

2. Clayton Kershaw’s no-hitter- Vin was on to the possibility of a no-hitter early in this one.  Seeing Kershaw pitch a no-hitter was going to be great no matter what, but having Vin call it made it even better.

1. 1988 World Series Game 1- Kirk Gibson’s home run.  It’s an amazing game and Vin’s greatest call.

I limited this to full games that are available on YouTube.  You can find his radio call of the last inning of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game, but not the whole game.  You can easily find his call of Hank Aaron’s 715th home run, but I don’t think the whole game is available.  The one game that I wish I could hear Vin call is Game 7 of the 1955 World Series.  He did the game on TV.  The radio call of that game was preserved, but the TV call was not.  I limited this to games that I watched in August.  Hideo Nomo’s no-hitter at Coors Field should probably be on the list.  And there are a bunch of other great Clayton Kershaw games that Vin called that you can find, but I didn’t watch those in August (I think I watched Nomo’s no-hitter and I definitely watched a bunch of other Kershaw games in 2020 when there were no sports).  I probably missed some other great Vin games.  He was the best.  I miss him.

Maris, Judge, and Ruth

I have some thoughts on Aaron Judge and Babe Ruth.  I’ve been trying to watch all of Judge’s at bats since he got to 59 home runs.  I wish he would hit 62 so that I can get some more sleep before the playoffs start.  I think I’ve only missed two at bats since he got to 59.  He’s tied Roger Maris and that is the real record.  I’m a teacher.  I wouldn’t give a student credit for cheating and I don’t give Barroid, McGwire, and Sosa credit for cheating.  They ruined the greatest record in American sports.  Hopefully somebody will break Bonds’s career “record,” but nobody is hitting 74 in a season without cheating.  I’ve really enjoyed watching Judge chase the real record, but it would have been so much cooler if the cheaters hadn’t “broken” the record first.

Judge has been awesome, but we don’t need to exaggerate how awesome he’s been.  I saw Buster Olney refer to Judge’s season as “the greatest single-season performance by any hitter in the history of baseball.”  In the words of Mr. Burns, whoa, whoa, slow down there, maestro.  In 1920, Babe Ruth hit 54 home runs (the all time record at the time) with 135 RBIs and his slash line was .376/.532/.847.  The second highest home run total was 19. The second highest slugging percentage was .632.  The Phillies hit 64 home runs.  The rest of the Yankees hit 61 home runs.  The other 14 teams hit 50 home runs or less.  Much like I had to unslander Bill Russell (another legend who died this summer), I have to unslander Babe Ruth.  I get so annoyed any time I hear that anybody was better than Babe Ruth.  Even if Barry Bonds wasn’t cheating, he’s still not better than Babe Ruth.  Mike Trout is not better than Babe Ruth.  This Judge season is not better than several Babe Ruth seasons.  The one player that we can compare is Shohei Ohtani.  I hear people saying that Ohtani is doing something that’s never been done before.  Yes and no on that.  No in that Ruth was both a great pitcher and a great hitter.  But yes in that he didn’t really do it at the same time.  Ruth was a great pitcher from 1915-1917.  He hit a total of nine home runs in those years.  In 1918, he was kind of half pitcher and half hitter.  He was 13-7 with a 2.22 ERA.  He hit 11 home runs in 382 plate appearances (but that was enough to lead the league).  In 1919, he was 9-5 with a 2.97 ERA.  He hit 29 home runs in 543 plate appearances (again he led the league).  And then he was traded to the Yankees in 1920 and he only pitched 31 more innings for the rest of his career (he was 5-0 with the Yankees with a 5.52 ERA).

People who put anybody ahead of Ruth use the same logic as the “plumbers and firemen” logic of people who don’t give Russell enough credit.  Yes, there were no black players in the Majors when Ruth was playing.  And great Negro League players deserve a lot of credit for what they did (Josh Gibson might be the most underrated player of all time).  But it wasn’t Babe Ruth’s fault that he didn’t play with them.  And if it was so easy for the white players back then, why didn’t anybody else do what Ruth did?  The only Ruth contemporary who was anywhere close to him as a player were Lou Gehrig.  He was the only other player with more than 302 home runs when Ruth retired (he had 378 at that point and ended up with 493).  If we want to stretch the definition of Ruth contemporaries, we can include Jimmie Foxx and Mel Ott.  I’ll listen to a case for Ted Williams being close to Ruth.  He had a slightly higher batting average and on base percentage, but Ruth has him beat by a pretty good margin in slugging.  He probably would have hit around 675 home runs if not for World War II and the Korean War.  But besides being the greatest hitter of all time, Ruth was also 94-46 with a 2.28 ERA and 1.16 WHIP as a pitcher.  So get out of here telling me that anybody was as good as Babe Ruth.

Updated Sports Villain Power Rankings

I’ll finish this off with my updated Sports Villain Power Rankings.  I have some changes because it’s seasonal (Kyrie Irving had to be number 1 at the start of the NBA Playoffs, but not in October), one new person earned a spot, and because I just forgot some people the first time.  Here we go:

30.  Max Scherzer- I had 29 people and I wanted to get to 30.  He’s on here in anticipation of a possible matchup with the Mets in the playoffs.  If that happens, he would probably move up several spots.  He’s easy to dislike if he’s not on your team.  Also, he couldn’t pitch for the Dodgers against the Braves in the NLCS because of “body fatigue” (or because he was a free agent once the season was over).

29. David Shaw

28. James Harden

27. Anthony Davis- He would have been on the original rankings if not for how bad the Lakers were last year.

26. Sidney Crosby

25. Gabe Kapler- I had Brandon Crawford and Logan Webb on my original list.  But Gabe Kapler is much more dislikeable than either of them.  If the Giants were good this year, he’d be higher on the list.

24. Lane Kiffin

23. John Calipari

22. Geno Auriema

21. Dabo Swinney

20. Madison Bumgarner- He was a glaring omission on my original rankings.

19. Lincoln Riley- He’s moved ahead of a few people, but he could move up a lot more in the next couple of months.

18. Jim Boeheim

17. Manny Machado- He was another glaring omission.

16. Carlos Correa- He’ll be much higher once next baseball season starts, but he’s not going to the playoffs this year.

15. Bill Belichick

14. Jim Harbaugh

13. Trevor Bauer- He deserves a spot on this list, but you could make the case that he shouldn’t be on the list since I’m limiting it to active players/managers/coaches and his career is hopefully over.

12. LeBron James

11. Kevin Durant

10. Kyrie Irving

9. Fernando Tatis Jr.- It took another cheater to keep Manny Machado from being the highest baseball player that isn’t Trevor Bauer/wasn’t part of the 2017 Astros on this list.

8. Tom Brady

7. Rob Manfred

6. Brian Kelly- Watching him lose to Florida State to start the season was awesome.  Every time Notre Dame’s wide receivers finish a game with a total of 4 catches for 26 yards, I’m reminded of his lazy recruiting and bad decisions in hiring assistant coaches.  I need some SEC teams to start beating him by multiple touchdowns.

1. (Tie) Jose Altuve, Alex Bregman, Yuli Gurriel, George Springer, Marwin Gonzalez- They’re the 2017 Astros who will be in the playoffs this year.

Slipping in the Later Seasons?

Since I’m not going to make it out to Los Angeles this year, it was fitting that my first baseball game after the death of Vin Scully was in Brooklyn.  Adam and I went to the Brooklyn Cyclones’ Seinfeld Night back in 2016 and we did it again this year.  We had been making a yearly minor league game a tradition, but the pandemic got in the way of that.  It canceled the 2020 minor league season and it canceled our plans to go to Dodgers-Phillies in Philadelphia and then some Office stuff and a minor league game in Scranton last year (the Dodger game we had planned to go to was an afternoon game with temperatures in the 90s and the Dodgers lost so I guess I didn’t miss much with that half of the trip).  I’m pretty sure the last time I had seen Adam was for a Long Island Ducks game back in 2019.  The last time I was in Brooklyn was for Celtics-Nets in 2019 when Kyrie Irving was murdering the Celtics’ season.

I got to Coney Island before Adam so I stopped at Nathan’s for a hot dog (it’s right there when you get off of the subway).  It was delicious.  After that, I was just walking by the stadium and ran into Adam.  We walked around for a little bit and then went into the stadium.  We wanted to make sure we got there early because we wanted to make sure we were among the first 2000 so that we could get our marble rye figurine.  There were supposed to be appearances by the actors who played the Wiz and Dolores.  Neither one was there.  Instead they had Donna Chang.  Back in 2016, it was J. Peterman.  I think they’ve had Jackie Chiles and Kenny Bania before.  So it seems like they’re digging deeper for Seinfeld people to show up. I was thinking about other characters who I’d want to see at Seinfeld Night. David Puddy would probably be at the top of the list. Mickey Abbott, Bob Cobb, Jake Jardel, Jiffy Park/Jiffy Dump Guy, Lloyd Braun (either one or both), Yev Kassem would all be good options (some of those people might have done it already). Tim Whatley would be another good one, but he’s way too famous now for the Cyclones to be able to get him.

So was Seinfeld Night slipping?  Much like the show in the later seasons, saying that it was slipping would be an overstatement.  There were a lot of Seinfeld themed games before the game, between innings, and after the game (more than I remember from six years ago).  There was a George ice cream eating contest, a candy bar lineup (but for some reason, it was four different candy bars when it should have been all Twix), a Seinfeld movie reference game, and an Elaine dancing contest.  There were definitely a few other ones that I’m not remembering.  So it was a good job with the Seinfeld themed stuff, but it would have been nice to have somebody more exciting than Donna Chang.  As for the show, a lot of people would say that it slipped after Larry David left after the seventh season.  I would disagree.  I think the show was at its best when George was working for the Yankees, which was the very end of season 5 through season 8 (Larry David was still the voice of Steinbrenner in season 8, but he wasn’t in charge of the show anymore).  Season 8 has the Bizarro Jerry, the Van Buren Boys, the Nap, the Muffin Tops, and the Summer of George.  I would agree that season 9 isn’t as good, but it has the Merv Griffin Show, the Strike (Festivus), and the Frogger.  A couple of years ago I looked at the IMDB user ratings of each episode and figured out the average rating for each season.  Here is the rank of each season based on that:  8, 7, 4, 5, 9, 6, 3, 2, 1.  I would have to go through each season and look at the episodes to rank them, but I would agree that the first two seasons are the worst.

There are plenty of examples of shows slipping in later seasons, but Seinfeld is not one of them.  The Simpsons might have been the greatest show in the history of TV and then they decided in season 9 that Principal Skinner wasn’t Principal Skinner (just the first of many problems starting in season 9 and continuing until I finally gave up on the show a few years later).  The Office is probably the best show of this century, but it definitely slipped after Steve Carrell left.  Season 8 is mostly unwatchable.  It has way too much of the three worst characters:  Robert California, Gabe, and season 8 Nellie.  The only good parts are Nate and the Jim/Dwight stuff.  Season 9 is mostly bad, but it finishes strong.  South Park held on for a long time, but it had been declining and I gave up on it with the season that was all about trolls from Denmark or something (I don’t remember exactly, but it was bad and I had no interest in watching it again).

As for the game, it was the Winston-Salem Dash (a horrendous name for a team) against the Cyclones.  Both teams scored in the first inning.  Gregory Guerrero hit a two-run homer for the Cyclones in the bottom of the second and that was all the scoring in the game.  With the low scoring game and the pitch clock being enforced this year (14 seconds with nobody on and 18 seconds with runners on), it was a quick game (two hours and nine minutes).  And that caused a couple of problems.  Adam and I tried to get food after the top of the third.  I figured we would watch a little bit and hopefully let the lines die down.  That didn’t work.  The lines were really long so we decided we would try again later in the game.  We tried again after the sixth and the lines were still really long.  I got a Brooklyn Summer Ale, but I was not able to get food.  And then after the game, they had the Elaine dancing contest and they had to wait for it to get dark enough for the fireworks (besides being a quick game, it was a 6:00 start).  I missed out on food at the game, but it didn’t seem like there was anything all that exciting anyway.  I found an article from last year saying that a Thanksgiving dinner turkey burger was a new item.  If they had that anywhere, I didn’t see it.  I like Maimonides Park (it used to be MCU Park), but the slow moving lines and lack of interesting food options are things that they could improve on.  Also they should have grass because baseball should be played on grass.  Anyway, after the fireworks we stopped at Nathan’s and I had my second hot dog of the day since I didn’t eat anything at the game.  So it was a fun night.  Hopefully it won’t be three years until I get to see Adam again.

This was our view for the game.  You can see a guy in front of us wearing a Koko the Monkey shirt.  Lots of fans had good Seinfeld shirts.  Adam wore his #1 Dad shirt.  I don’t have any Seinfeld shirts so I wore my Brooklyn Dodgers 1955 World Series Champions shirt.

I like Sam Adams Summer Ale better of course, but Brooklyn Summer Ale is appropriate for a game in Brooklyn.

Fireworks after a baseball game are always good.

Joey Chestnut has won many Mustard Belts.  They don’t give out Ketchup Belts for winning the hot dog eating contest because ketchup has no business being put on hot dogs.  You can check my post on Seinfeld Night in 2016 for my ideas about how to fix the hot dog eating contest.

Since the pitch clock is most likely coming to the Majors next year, I’ll give some quick thoughts on it. I’m fine with it as long as it’s enforced. It’s been in the minors for several years and it always seemed like it wasn’t enforced whenever I went to a game before this year. Apparently this year it is being enforced and it has shortened games. I wouldn’t be surprised if they give the pitchers more time when they bring it to the Majors next year. Like maybe it will start at 18 seconds with nobody on base and 22 seconds with runners on or something. And then maybe they’ll take a second off each year until it gets down to what it is in the minors now. But the bigger issues that are not being addressed at all are starters not going deep into games and the number of pitching changes. Every team has 13 pitchers and they use them. That’s an absurd amount of pitchers. This also goes along with another problem in baseball these days: not having enough balls in play. Every pitcher goes all out to strike guys out because they know they aren’t going to be in the game very long. If starters were expected to go deep into games and relief pitchers might have to go more than three batters, they wouldn’t be trying to strike everybody out all the time. I’m definitely in favor of abolishing the DH forever, but if you’re going to have it, you could at least use it to help the game in one way. If you implement the double hook rule correctly, there would be an incentive to have starters go deeper into games. If you did that, you wouldn’t need eight relief pitchers and the game would be much better.

I always enjoy minor league baseball.  I wish I could go to more AA or AAA games where I would know a lot more of the players.  You’d have guys with experience in the Majors and bigger name prospects.  I was curious to see if we saw anybody noteworthy at Seinfeld Night back in 2016.  I found the box score, but it was not easy.  It was much easier to find the Dodgers’ box score from the day my father was born (they beat the Pirates 4-3) than it was to find a minor league box score from six years ago.  Pete Alonso’s first professional team was the 2016 Brooklyn Cyclones, but he didn’t play in that game.  He had just been drafted so he might not have even signed with the Mets yet.  Nobody really stands out from this game.  But maybe Seinfeld Night in 2022 had a future Mets star.

Anyway, I’m probably only going to get to one more baseball game this year.  I tried to get to as many as I could this year without traveling (including college and summer collegiate league games).  Hopefully I’ll get to go to more games next year in various places.