Ballpark quest - 60 ballparks

  Watching AAA games, we’ve seen a lot of players who are a step away from the majors in either direction, either waiting their chance for big league stardom, or trying to hang on for one more shot. Tonight, we saw another category of player, the major leaguer trying to get in shape, either after an injury or, in this case, after signing a free agent contract too late in Spring Training to be ready for the season. In the late 1800s, the baseball major leagues (by far the biggest professional sports leagues of the time, at least in the U.S.), established a “ reserve clause ,” which gave teams the “rights” to players, and forbade them from negotiating with any other team. Although that was challenged a couple of times early on, MLB was granted an anti-trust exemption from Congress in 1920, and the reserve clause persisted until the 1970s. As other professional sports grew, they adopted similar systems. In 1969, the St. Louis Cardinals attempted to trade Curt Flood , who   ha...

  When the Sun is obscured by the Moon, as happened yesterday, it’s a total eclipse of the Sun. If it’s in the U.S., it’s a national event, although what kind of event depends on the part of the country you’re in. Most places celebrate it, but in Texas, several local goverenments declared an emergency (they couldn’t have known it was coming yesterday more than 100 years in advance), and some schools were canceled. When the Sun is obscured by clouds, it’s a typical Pacific Northwest day, a reprieve (for people who have lived in Arizona for decades), or a frustration for people who have traveled hundreds or thousands of miles to see a total eclipse of the Sun. When those clouds drop rain, it refills the dwindling reservoirs, but it’s a problem if you want to watch a baseball game outdoors. We knew going into this endeavor that rain could be an issue for our baseball watching, and tonight was the third time in two years that it has been. Last year, the start of the very first ...

  Tonight was our first AAA game of the year, and it was a beautiful night at a nice, if somewhat empty, minor league park. It was an enjoyable evening – it was baseball, outdoors in pleasant weather, after all – but we ended up spending a chunk of the evening discussing, and researching on the Web, the most interesting non-game-related story of the baseball season, the impending move of the Oakland Athletics to Las Vegas. That’s because the Sugar Land Space Cowboys, the Astros’ AAA team, was hosting the Las Vegas Aviators, the A’s top farm team, and the leadoff hitter for the game was Esteury Ruiz, a player at the center of “wristbandgate.” We’ll get to Las Vegas and Oakland this year. In fact, one of the factors determining which stadiums we would visit was a desire to see an MLB game in Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, where the A’s have played since 1968, before they leave. They’re moving to Las Vegas, so there will no longer be minor league baseball there, so another ...

  Stealing signs has been a part of baseball as long as teams have been trying to send signals to their players that they didn’t want the other team to know about. What pitch is the pitcher going to throw? Are you going to have the batter bunt? Is the manager going to order the batter to take a pitch? And there are many others. However, while decoding signs is a long and honored tradition, using technology to steal signs (for instance, using a telescope or television camera in the outfield to see what pitch the catcher wants the pitcher to throw, then somehow signaling the batter about what is coming) has long been considered to be stepping over the line. That’s not to say that teams haven’t done it – stories abound dating back decades. But the Houston Astros stepped so far over the line in stealing signs during the 2017 season, in which they won the World Series, and the early part of the 2018 season, that the ripples are still being felt. Rumors about the Astros were rampa...