Ballpark quest - 60 ballparks

  It's never a good sign when the day's picture has a tarp covering the infield.  Last night, we went to a game in Toronto where the roof was closed because of storms in the area. Although I definitely prefer the ambience of Rogers Centre when it the roof is open, with a clear sky and the CN Tower gracefully soaring overhead, I much prefer an indoor game to a rainout, which is why I think retractable roofs are so civilized, if expensive. No minor league stadium has a retractable roof.  Those showers in Toronto yesterday? They were moving east. We drove through them on the way to Syracuse this morning, and we didn't buy tickets for the game until the last minute, not wanting to be stuck with a rain check.  When we got to Syracuse, the sky was clear, and there was a nice crowd heading to the stadium, so we bought our ticket, but bought it in the upper row of the lower deck, on the side the wind was coming from, figuring that there might be some rain. As it turns out, t...

  The Toronto Blue Jays have had some great players in their 48-year history. Eight players are in the Hall of Fame who played for the Blue Jays (along with two managers), most notably pitcher Roy Halladay. Then there’s Joe Carter, who hit a walk-off home run to close out the 1993 World Series. And Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is exciting to watch (though not as exciting as his father was, in my opinion). On the façade of the upper deck, they have many of their greats listed (the picture shows about half of them). But my favorite is Brad Glenn . If you look up the link, you’ll find that his MLB career was less than two weeks long, and included a grand total of one base hit. But I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for him, because I knew he had dreams of making it to the majors years before he actually got there. For many years, I taught a “general education” science course at the University of Arizona entitled “Humanity and the Universe: Origin and Destiny.” I always liked the ...

  We’re in Toronto, so I have anthem envy. O Canada is so much better as an anthem than the Star-Spangled Banner . One of the things that Kerry and I keep in the scorebook is information on the national anthem. It started when we were taking our two boys to baseball games (that experiment didn’t take – they didn’t become fans), and the four of us would each rate the national anthem, on a scale of 1 (worst) to 10 (best). Anyone who has been to even a few sporting events in the U.S. knows that the national anthem is a standard, and that the length and quality of the performance are highly variable. Lengths of performances of The Star-Spangled Banner vary from about a minute to somewhere north of two minutes. Shorter is almost always better, although the version at the 2025 Kentucky Derby, which clocked in at over 3 minutes, got a five or better from both Kerry and me. The variation in quality is mostly because the range is large enough, more than an octave and a half, that m...