Baseball

Take Me Out of Town to the Ballgame

Hank Garfield

 

PetCo1

Because of interleague play, the Boston Red Sox and the Atlanta Braves (formerly the Milwaukee and the Boston Braves) have become rivals. Last week, the Red Sox played their last two games at Turner Field, the 20-year-old downtown ballpark the Braves are vacating after this season for a taxpayer-funded spread in the suburbs.

I was in the kitchen when the Red Sox TV announcers started in on the topic of traffic. The new ballpark will be out of the reach of public transportation. Everyone will have to drive. They commented that Atlanta already suffers some of the worst traffic in the nation. But the bulk of the fan base is in the suburbs, they said, and that’s where the ballpark will be.

I’ve never been within a hundred miles of Atlanta. But I’ve seen a lot of games at Turner Field. When I moved from Maine to San Diego in 1983, cable TV was young and channels were few. Ted Turner launched TBS in 1979 and CNN in 1980. Turner, the former America’s Cup skipper known as Captain Outrageous, also owned the Braves, who were perennially terrible. But the nascent field of cable TV gave the team a national audience, years before ESPN and the saturation sports coverage of today.

Because I liked baseball, I watched, and became familiar with the players as they stumbled their way through one losing season after another. I also watched the Padres, Dodgers, and Angels on local channels. This was multi-market Southern California, and the Red Sox were many miles away, where they could no longer hurt me. (Or so I thought, until Game Six of the 1986 World Series.)

I bring up all this history, because by the time the Braves got good, I’d come to sort of like them. Throughout the 1990s, the Braves were the team to beat. And in 1998, the San Diego Padres did just that, besting them in six games to win the National League pennant.

It took me longer to warm up to the Padres. The credit goes mostly to Tony Gwynn, whose Hall of Fame career overlapped my sixteen years in San Diego. They played at Jack Murphy Stadium, later renamed Qualcomm Stadium, at the confluence of three freeways in Mission Valley. It was built for football, and had all the soul of a barracks. You could take a bus there, and later the trolley (when it was extended to the stadium for a Super Bowl), but there was no way to walk, and it was surrounded by an oceanic parking lot. Atlanta, in contrast, had a downtown ballpark.

The two cities have since gone in opposite directions. San Diego has built a beautiful, pedestrian-friendly ballpark down by the harbor. Atlanta has built a driving-only ballpark out in the suburbs, to which the Braves will move next year, dragging their fans in their cars behind them.

I’m not keen on public financing of sports facilities for big-league franchises, but I voted for the San Diego ballpark initiative, because I thought the plan was visionary, especially for car-obsessed Southern California. The ballpark is right on the trolley line, walking distance from the waterfront and downtown hotels. New pubs and restaurants have sprung up around it. There’s a neighborhood feel now, similar to the vibe around Fenway Park.
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I moved before I could see a game there, and the Padres have had mostly bad teams since 1998. Gwynn retired after the 2001 season, and died of mouth cancer in 2014. A statue of him, frozen in the left-handed swing that produced 3,141 career hits (pi times a thousand) stands outside the new ballpark. On warm summer evenings, fans begin to gather outside the park several hours before the game; in the offseason, people come just to hang out on the grass near Gwynn’s feet.

But what of summer nights in Atlanta, when the Braves are home? The team is terrible again; the tomahawk chop chant has (thankfully) fallen silent. Ted Turner no longer owns the team; he has not been majority owner since 2001, coincidentally when the Braves stopped winning pennants. The 77-year-old mogul broke his silence recently to say that he wouldn’t have moved the Braves to the suburbs, citing the tradition of live baseball in downtown ballparks on summer nights.

The Braves are now owned by Liberty Media, the corporation that purchased them from Time-Warner in 2007. And like so many corporations that helped pave the way for the automobile’s takeover of America, they’ve moved to the suburbs. It’s a regressive move, and a regrettable one.

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Cheap, Excessive Parking Causes Costly, Congestive Driving

Hank Garfield

BlueBlack1

The bus back from Orono was standing room only Wednesday afternoon, a sure sign that public transportation in the Bangor area is working and ought to be expanded. The route could easily support more frequent buses that run later into the evening.

The bus was full because the University of Maine charges for a limited number of parking spaces. In addition, the University provides free bus transportation for its students, faculty and staff. This makes sense, because not only are parking spaces more expensive than bus passes, but the availability of easy parking actually causes traffic congestion.

One of the pleasures of writing a blog is that readers send you links to interesting items related to your topic. This latest bit comes from my friend Tim Morris, of the University of Texas at Arlington: statistical proof that the widespread availability of cheap or free parking encourages people to drive. According to a comprehensive study by a trio of University Connecticut scholars, as reported by urban planning reporter Eric Jaffe, the link between parking availability and increased traffic is as conclusive as the link between smoking and lung cancer.

Tim is a baseball geek, like me – long before we met through our membership in the Sport Literature Association, he wrote a nice review of my novel, Tartabull’s Throw, which is set during the 1967 baseball season. Baseball geeks like numbers, and the UConn study provides plenty of numbers to show the correlation between parking availability and traffic congestion.

The piece is full of graphs and analyses that may seem esoteric to the general reader, but the mathematical inference is clear. For those fond of statistics and statistical analysis, I’ve provided a link to the entire article.

Tim tells me that Arlington, where the Texas Rangers play their home games, has the distinction of being the largest city in the United States without a bus system. There are bare-bones transportation services for disabled people, and an infrequent bus to the Dallas-Forth Worth airport. But the city has no transit authority and no intracity public lines of any kind – for 380,000 people, more than ten times the population of Bangor.

Not surprisingly, Arlington also has some of the nation’s worst traffic. The simple truth that public transportation benefits everyone seems to have been lost on Texan city planners.

I’ll never run out of things to write about in this blog as long as my faithful readers keep calling my attention to this kind of stuff.

Here’s another piece, from Vancouver writer Chris Bruntlett in HUSH magazine, titled “Driving is the New Smoking,” from 2013. In the article, Bruntlett, only partially tongue-in-cheek, calls for printed warnings on the sides of cars, similar to those on cigarette packages, alerting consumers to the health hazards of driving.
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“As with smoking in the late 20th century,” he writes, “our society’s challenge for the early 21st century is to address the cancerous act of driving, and stigmatize it into obscurity.”

Few car owners are aware of the true cost of their driving, and the automobile industry wants to keep it that way. From hidden government subsidies, to all-time low gas taxes, to zoning and parking regulations that favor the car over every other form of transportation, the automobile industry assures itself a continuing stream of customers by creating more car addicts.

But things are, slowly, changing.

“Millennials,” Bruntlett notes, “are already opting out of car ownership in droves, realizing it no longer represents the status and freedom it once did.”

On the same day that I stood on the bus most of the way back to Bangor, an above-the-fold headline on the front page of USA Today shouted a similar message: “No drive to drive: Millennials spurn licenses.”

You can’t get away from the subject. The very next day, a Bangor Daily News editorial admonished downtown business owners and their employees about using parking spaces that might otherwise be available for customers. “The solution to this conundrum is simple,” the unsigned editorial pleaded. “Business owners should leave the prime spots for their customers and ensure their employees do the same.”

Well, a better solution might be to expand bus routes and schedules. If a significant number of those owners and employees can get to and from work without a car, the problem becomes a whole lot less severe. A downtown shuttle, similar to the Black Bear Express in Orono, would alleviate the need for additional parking even more.

Public transportation is the future, and smart cities are investing in it.

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Football May Sell More Cars, but Baseball Delivers the Goods

Hank Garfield

NewYork

Salvador Perez, the indestructible Kansas City Royals catcher, was named most valuable player of the recent World Series, and was rewarded with a new Chevy Camaro. I believe the MVP of the Super Bowl gets a car, too. The car remains a powerful symbol in the American psyche.

But putting the subject of cars aside for the moment – were the Royals not magnificent? A team without sluggers or superstars, they singled and sacrificed their opponents to death. They stole bases. They took advantage of every error. They were relentless. Though they dispatched the New York Mets in five games, each victory was filled with drama.

The most dramatic moment, and the most controversial, was when Mets manager Terry Collins let his headstrong pitcher, Matt Harvey, change his mind about taking him out after eight shutout innings. The rest is history. Walk, double, relief pitcher, weak ground ball, error – two runs, tie game. The Royals went on to win, and clinch the Series, in extra innings.

My girlfriend thinks it’s a morality play on hubris. Harvey was striking out a lot of Royals, and doing gorilla yells as he came off the mound each inning. The crowd was eating it up. Collins had already decided that his closer, Jeurys Familia, would pitch the ninth. Harvey talked him out of it. By the time Familia got into the game, two batters later, the Royals had scored and put the tying run on second with nobody out. Harvey, my girlfriend says, should have let manager and reliever do their jobs, instead of taking it all upon himself.

No pitcher ever wants to come out of a game. And good pitchers are praised and valued for that tenacity. Jack Morris won game seven of the 1991 World Series for the Minnesota Twins with a 10-inning shutout. He argued with his manager to stay in that game. People forget that Morris got lucky when a base runner fell down on what would otherwise have been a run-scoring double in the eighth or ninth inning. Had that run scored, the Twins would have lost, 1-0, to the Atlanta Braves.

And then that manager would have been criticized, just as Collins is, for leaving his pitcher in too long. There’s no guaranteed outcome. That’s the beauty of baseball.

In the final game of the 1995 World Series, Tom Glavine was pitching a one-hit shutout, and the Braves were up 1-0 on the Cleveland Indians going into the ninth. On TV, the announcers debated whether manager Bobby Cox should bring in closer Mark Wohlers to get the last three outs. Glavine was dealing. But that’s why you have a relief specialist, one broadcaster said. That’s what you pay him for: to nail down close games.

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I’m a fan of complete games. But it’s a call the manager is paid to make. Johnny Cueto went the distance in the second game of this World Series, only because the Royals had built a safe 7-1 lead. Orel Hershiser nailed down the 1988 Series for the Dodgers with two complete games, and Morris, pitching for the Tigers, went the distance twice against the Padres in 1984.

I fell asleep before the end of Cueto’s masterpiece. But I remember the Morris, Glavine and Hershiser games well, because I watched them all from the West Coast, where the games start, and mostly end, at reasonable hours.

Television is doing its best to kill baseball. Is it too much to ask to watch a World Series game during the day, at least on the weekend? I know that football sells more cars (see how I worked back around to that?), but come on. Football’s popularity is no excuse to bury postseason baseball. Playing the World Series entirely at night has already alienated a generation of kids. It’s now beginning to discourage even longtime fans like me.

The Royals, though, were worth lost sleep. They won with small ball, and late inning rallies. Salvador Perez, who popped up to end last year’s World Series, was the hero of this one. His team staged two hugely entertaining postseason runs, culminating in a championship.

It’s just a shame so much of it happened while much of America slept.

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