Ybor Exhibit Chronicles Tampa's Passion for Baseball

                                                         [Joseph Brown III/Staff]

Among the exhibits will be this glove
and signed baseball from Al Lopez.

October 16, 2012
www.tbo.com

YBOR CITY -- Tampa's love of baseball began more than 100 years before the Tampa Bay Rays came to the area. It began before Ybor City was founded.

"Tampa itself had a baseball team they fielded in the early 1880s, when Tampa was a fishing village of about 1,000," said Elizabeth McCoy, curator of a new baseball exhibit at the Ybor City Museum State Park.

It grew from there and "sort of exploded" when the first flock of Cuban immigrants migrated to the Tampa area to work in Ybor City's cigar factories, McCoy said. It grew not just because of the Cubans' passion for baseball but also in conjunction with the population boom.

The growing, diverse Tampa community – which included Cubans, Italians, Spaniards and the Anglo population – used baseball to find common ground, McCoy said.

"The immigrant communities came together, using baseball as a common language to have fun with each other," McCoy said.

Through the years many great players and coaches have come from the area, including Hall of Famer Al Lopez, Tony LaRussa, Lou Piniella, Tino Martinez, Dwight Gooden, Wade Boggs and Gary Sheffield.

The exhibit at the Ybor museum – Béisbol: Tampa's Love of the Game – explores Tampa's longtime passion for the sport. Much of the focus is on Ybor City and West Tampa; that's where, in the beginning, everyone played.

The exhibit addresses everything from the area's early inter-social leagues to the West Tampa Little League to the Rays.

"It shows the progression of baseball through the years," said Chantal Hevia, president and CEO of the Ybor City Museum Society. "But our real focus is showing this is how we started and this is how we got here."

The exhibit includes 30 to 40 pieces of memorabilia in two large cases, McCoy said.

Among the items: a catcher's mitt worn and signed by Lopez and a 1988 Team USA baseball hat worn by Martinez.

There also is a digital copy of an 1885 letter from a Tampa baseball organization that just was getting off the ground, McCoy said.

Hevia said the exhibit is a great learning experience. She said she learned the role baseball played in Tampa's early days and how it ultimately helped lead to the successes of many great players.

"We want the exhibit to serve as an inspiration for the younger players," Hevia said. "Here are the everyday people who became heroes and stars and prominent people in the field of baseball."

The yearlong exhibit opens Thursday and is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily through September.

Why You Should Root, Root, Root For The Home Team

                                                                          Nick Wass/AP
Baltimore Orioles Nate McLouth (from left), J.J. Hardy,
Robert Andino and Manny Machado high-five teammates after
Game 2 of Major League Baseball's American League Division
Series against the New York Yankees. Somewhere, commentator
and Orioles fan Frank Deford is also giving high-fives.

By Frank Deford
NPR - October 10, 2012

My first protocol on rooting in sports is that you should stick with the teams that you grew up with. I know we're a transient society, but that's just it: Continuing to cheer for your original hometown teams is one way of displaying the old-fashioned value of allegiance.

If you grew up in Cleveland, say, and moved somewhere Sun Belt-ish, I know how hard it is, but the measure of whether you are a good person is that you must remain loyal to the Browns and Indians and that team that LeBron James left behind.

That's what's left of roots in America. You must root where your roots were laid down.

Now don't worry. Sports love is a two-way street. There is a proviso in this lifetime contract that allows you the right to get mad at your team. The problem with you Cubs fans, for example, is that you are too tolerant. But no, you must never leave your precious Cubbies for a more seductive team. No! Be steadfast for another century or so.

But us hard-bitten sports journalists, we have a problem. We're supposed to look down at you sappy fans, getting all worked up about your silly teams, while we must be neutered, remain above the fray. "No cheering in the press box!" is our equivalent of "Don't mention bombs when you're in the airport security line."

But, on the QT here, entre nous, just between us chickens, pretending to make emotional sports eunuchs of sports journalists is a charade, reminiscent of Tallulah Bankhead's saying: "I'm as pure as the driven slush."

You see, despite what most athletes think, we sportswriters really are human beings (well, at least on the side). At the Ryder Cup a couple of weeks ago, the terrific story was the spectacular European comeback from virtual defeat, but, surely, every American golf journalist was rooting for our team instead of the story.
OK, everybody is coming out these days, so, now, yes, I am too.

I have known since I was a child that I loved the Baltimore Orioles. I loved them before they were the O's, as they are, regrettably, known today. They were called "the Birds" then, or even better, "the Flock." So, no, I don't care what it does for my reputation as a hardhearted sports scribe who has always kept his true feelings to himself in the press box. I have suffered with my beloved Flock losing for 14 years in a row, and now that they are actually in the playoffs, I must go public and reveal that, yes, I am an actual fan.

Also, I'm not crazy about the New York Yankees either.

But never fear. Next week I will once again refrain from being a giddy Bird lover and return to my ugly, bloodless, objective self. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

A Veteran Returns to the Mound: The Bullpen Car

Dodger Bullpen Car [Flickr.com]

October 11, 2012
By Dave Caldwell
New York Times

BULLPEN cars last roamed ballparks nearly 20 years ago, whisking relief pitchers to the mound during games. Christopher Hill never forgot them.

As vice president for business development of the Sugar Land Skeeters outside Houston, Mr. Hill works for a team keenly interested in putting fans in the seats; it just finished first in average attendance in its first season in the eight-team Atlantic League.

The Skeeters lured Roger Clemens, 50, the seven-time Cy Young Award winner, out of retirement to pitch twice for the team. To entertain the home crowds, Mr. Hill came up with not one but two furry mosquito mascots: Swatson and Moe. Then he went to work on finding a bullpen car.

"We had to design it," he said. "There is no product line for these, and it had been a long time since someone had done one."

According to a 2007 article for ESPN.com by Paul Lukas, the first bullpen car was believed to be a "little red auto" that the Cleveland Indians used in 1950 to transport relievers to the mound, saving time at their cavernous ballpark. The last bullpen car in the big leagues was actually a Harley-Davidson motorcycle with a sidecar that the Milwaukee Brewers used in 1995, the article said.

But once nearly every big league team had a bullpen car; it was typically a tricked-out golf cart with a gigantic replica of the host team's cap as the roof. The Yankees used a pinstriped Datsun in the 1970s before rats chewed the engine cables. (The Baltimore Orioles pitcher Mike Flanagan once said: "I could never play in New York. The first time I ever came into a game there, I got in the bullpen car and they told me to lock the doors.") 

Looking for someone who could build a bullpen car with all the bells and whistles, Mr. Hill called Alex Restrepo, whose business in southeast Houston focuses on custom audio units for cars, boats and motorcycles.

Mr. Hill knew enough to suggest that Mr. Restrepo start with the chassis of a golf cart. Mr. Restrepo was up for the challenge — "It's a tough economy, and you've got to be imaginative," he said. But he was just a boy when bullpen cars were popular. "So I went to Google, like everybody else," Mr. Restrepo said.

He found photos of old bullpen cars and photos of die-cast toy bullpen cars that were being sold on eBay. Mr. Restrepo, in his late 20s, said, "So I start looking at the years, and I'm saying to myself, 'Man, some of these things are 30 years old!' "

Mr. Restrepo said the project took four or five months, and he often had his employees pitching in when they were not busy with other jobs. Finally, he pieced it all together: a battery-run golf cart with a baseball-shaped body, made from fiberglass and wood, with a replica of a Skeeters cap on top held up by two bats. Mr. Restrepo did not forget bells and whistles like leather seats, neon blue lights, a sound system, a backup camera — and a bubble machine.

Mr. Hill found a corporate sponsor for the car: Texas Direct Auto, an online automobile dealership with a showroom in nearby Stafford. The company happily paid the Skeeters to slap its logo on the front.

The car was a bigger hit than Mr. Hill imagined. Fans actually applauded when it took pitchers into the game the first weekend it was used, he said. The Skeeters have tried to use the car as much as possible in the community, for things like store openings.

Mr. Hill said "five or six" ball clubs, both major league and minor league teams, called to find out more.

Another who called was Mark Sofia, 46, of Tampa, Fla., a retired police sergeant from Rochester who for a time ran youth hockey programs for the Tampa Bay Lightning, a National Hockey League team.

A fan of the minor league Rochester Red Wings as a youngster, Mr. Sofia said he grew up with the Red Wings' gimmicks for wooing fans — like women in hot pants and go-go boots who swept the bases to the "William Tell" Overture. When he stopped working for the Lightning, Mr. Sofia picked up the idea of making bullpen cars as a marketing tool for baseball teams.

He flew to Houston to see the Skeeters' car. He found a golf-cart fabricator near his home in Florida that could make bullpen cars.

He floated his idea past Dan Mason, the longtime general manager of the Red Wings, who agreed that bullpen cars would be a way to market any team. "Many of your partners are looking for ways to get their messages out," Mr. Mason said.

Texas Direct Auto plans, for example, to park the Skeeters' bullpen car in its showroom during the off-season. Mr. Mason said the car could be driven up and down the street on the day of a game to help sell tickets.

Pitchers have never seemed to enjoy being driven into a game in a bullpen car, but Mr. Mason said that was practically beside the point. "There are plenty of other uses for a bullpen car if the pitchers themselves decide they'd rather run or jog in," he said.

Mr. Sofia, who has a Web site, www.sportskartz.com, is optimistic that he will have a model to take in December to the Baseball Trade Show in Nashville, also the site of this year's winter meetings. He would not disclose his planned sticker price. (A new golf cart can be bought for around $7,000, so a customized bullpen car would most likely go for about twice that amount.) But teams, he said, should be able to afford one, especially if they can find a sponsor as the Skeeters did.

Jessica DeMarr, director of business development at Texas Direct Auto, said: "It's a real easy way to market, but it's not like, 'Hey, we're marketing this to you.' This was a real fun way to reach out to kids. They'll want to take pictures with the car."

Like the bobblehead doll, the bullpen car might make a comeback, becoming part of future baseball lore. When the Mets clinched the National League East division title in September 1986, a fan took over the bullpen car and drove around the outfield — before it conked out. Mr. Sofia is hoping for a much longer and prosperous run.

Longtime baseball manager never gave up, never gave in

From inquisitr.com

By Paul Freeman

For The Daily News &

San Jose Mercury News

October 2, 2012

 

Even in this age of ultra-rich celebrity athletes, sports still can inspire us with rare, truly heroic moments. In baseball, over the past several decades, many of those moments have come from teams managed by Tony La Russa.

Bay Area sports fans recall La Russa guiding the Oakland A's to a 1989 crown. But it was with the 2011 St. Louis Cardinals that La Russa achieved his most miraculous feat.

That injury-riddled team was down 10 1/2 games with a month to go. The postseason seemed like a distant dream. But La Russa led his club to one of the most amazing comebacks in baseball history. They made the playoffs in the very last game of the regular season and, after being down to their last strike, twice, they won the World Series.

La Russa, 68, chronicles that incredible, dramatic run in his new book, "One Last Strike: Fifty Years in Baseball, Ten and a Half Games Back, and One Final Championship Season."

The account of overcoming long odds and seemingly insurmountable obstacles can inspire readers from any walk of life.

La Russa tells The Daily News, "People who have read the manuscript say there are strong leadership lessons in it, applying that concept of never give in, never give up. There are stories in there that apply across the board."

After 33 years of managing, La Russa retired, having racked up four Manager of the Year awards, six pennants and three World Series rings. The 2011 season was the perfect way to cap an illustrious career.
"It was like a fairy tale. And it's now a book. If you couldn't actually hit the button to replay the truth, somebody would have said 'You made that up. It was fiction. Hollywood.' It was ridiculous how it all came together and we were living the dream, which is to play and win a world championship."

In the campaign, La Russa turned negatives into positives, embracing the role of underdog to build the team's character.

"Once we got into the playoffs, we thought, 'Hey, everybody's got some warts and we've got as many pluses as anybody. And we've been fighting for our life. As long as we don't back off, that's created a real good competitive toughness that we'll carry into this.'

"The dramatic Game 6 in the World Series, being down to the last strike, the reality is, we went through something very similar to that five times in the month of September and early in the playoffs. So, by the time we got to Game 6, we had built up a real healthy attitude that we were just not going to be denied. And anything was possible. We just got more and more determined, more and more confident every time we overcame one of those elimination times."

La Russa relished the pressure cooker nature of pro sports.

"It's tough. Believe me, it's easier to go out there, thinking, 'Whatever happens, happens.' But you never win anything that way. We talk about that in the book -- the way you deal with mistakes so that you can learn from them, the way that you deal with adversity, because it happens to everybody. It's important to develop this toughness. And it's there for any person, any group of players, if they're willing to dig deep."

Being a winner, La Russa doesn't take losing easily.

"One thing about baseball, you don't have undefeated seasons. Somebody's going to win. Somebody's going to lose. And what you want to do is take your best shot, so that you have a chance to go forward. If somebody beats you, when you took your best shot, you tip your cap. It's simple. But it's a constant struggle and challenge for teams to not give in.

"Baseball is a great equalizer. The famous example, if you're a great hitter, you fail seven out of 10 times. So baseball will teach you humbleness and it'll break your heart. That's how it tests you. And then it'll give you a handful of those magical moments to make it all worthwhile. You've just got to be tough enough. And that club was as tough as it had to be."

It can be tougher to fire up the players in the mega-salary era.

"With guaranteed money and security, it's not that, innately, the players changed. It's that human nature was messed with, because now you had people seeking that fame and fortune and being encouraged to by their family, friends and agents. 'And, oh, by the way, how'd the team do?' So it's how to break through that group of distractions players feel now and focus on being the best pro and the best teammate you can be. You don't pursue the fame and fortune ahead of the team and the professional excellence. It's a constant battle. Trust me. That's the key to leadership now, to understand that you're waging that war every day, to get players' attention and persuade them to go about it in the right priority."

The "Moneyball" concept is a pet peeve for La Russa, who has always balanced statistics with the human factor.

"The value of 'Moneyball' has been exaggerated to the point where people have lost jobs. The analytics is an important tool for preparation, for study. But to claim that you can predict, based on a lineup and all the different variables of our game strategy, how you do offense, how you handle your pitching staff, that's where it breaks down, because each game has its own totally human-nature kind of variables that are not available in that way. If you could only have one -- great analytics or a great sense of understanding humans -- understanding the human being would kick the ass of the analytical people every stinkin' season."
Team chemistry can be at least as important as talent.

"It's a critical piece. It's all about relationships and establishing that triangle of respect, trust and caring. Believe me, when you play 162 games, you're with your teammates more than you are with your family."
La Russa and wife Elaine, parents of Bianca and Devon, still reside in Northern California. They operate the Animal Rescue Foundation, a 38,000-square-foot facility in Walnut Creek.

"The players were on me for years about my working harder and being more passionate about ARF than anything else. I'd tell them, 'Well, the animals are more worthwhile than you are,'" he says, chuckling. "We're 22 years old and we're going strong. ARF is a wonderful and demanding mistress."

La Russa also keeps busy handling special assignments for Major League Baseball's commissioner.
"I'm fortunate to be staying close to the game. But when you've spent 50 years, waking up in the morning, your life revolving around the score of the next game, that winning and losing is part of your DNA. I do not miss the dugout at all. But I do miss being excited about the winning and being disappointed about the losing. That's an adjustment."
La Russa nurtures optimism and determination, within himself, as well as in others.

"I don't think you're born with that stuff. If you're fortunate, you're provided with opportunities. My folks worked really hard to provide opportunities. And then, if you continually are mentored throughout your life and you're open-minded and understand that you need to learn, then you learn. And those things become part of what you are."

Email Paul Freeman at paul@popcultureclassics.com.

Author book signing

Who: Tony La Russa
Where: Kepler's Books and Magazines, 1010 El Camino Real, Menlo Park
When: 7 p.m. Monday
Information: 650-324-4321; www.keplers.com

Farewell to a Mustache Forever Linked to the Mets

[Photographs by Joshua Bright for The New York Times]

Keith Hernandez had his mustache shaved for the first time
in 25 years on a small stage set up outside CitiField
on Thursday as 300 baseball fans looked on.

By Joseph Berger, NY Times

September 27, 2012

Without his mustache, would Clark Gable have been as silkily charming when he told Scarlett O'Hara he frankly did not give a damn? Would Groucho Marx have delivered his one-liners with the same zing?

And would Keith Hernandez have been as identifiable and beloved as a New York Met?

The latter question hung in the air Thursday, like a tightrope walker in a publicity stunt (which the event unashamedly was), as Mr. Hernandez had his now graying chevron-style mustache shaved off. A barber had been flown in for the occasion from Las Vegas, with 300 baseball fans ogling and recording Mr. Hernandez by iPhone in front of a small stage set up outside Citi Field.

The impetus for the public depilation was what Mr. Hernandez, now a Mets broadcaster, said "was a flippant remark on the air" raising the prospect of shaving his mustache for charity. The event raised $10,000 (contributed by the Schick razor company) for a Brooklynday care center for Alzheimer's patients named in honor of Mr. Hernandez's mother, Jacquelyn, who died of the disease in 1989.

Stunt notwithstanding, some fans on the way to the Mets game to watch R. A. Dickey and his mustache win his 20th game lamented Mr. Hernandez's decision.

"He should keep it," said Marsha Landar, 54, a retired real estate broker from Queens Village, Queens. "My second husband looked like Keith Hernandez. That's why I married him. I wouldn't let him shave his mustache. C'mon, it's sexy."

But Sol Passik, 61, a retired social worker from Holliswood, Queens, said Mr. Hernandez, despite revealing his upper lip for the first time in a quarter century, still has "a recognizable nose and profile."

"As a friend suggested, he'll grow it back and do it again next year and make more money," Mr. Passik said.

Mustaches are believed by advocates, if not always by their spouses, to add dash and a touch of virility to their owners' faces. Yet they have a checkered cultural history. Americans have not voted for a mustachioed president since William Howard Taft and his handlebar.Thomas E. Dewey, with his neat mustache, lost the 1944 and 1948 elections.

But Hollywood has loved mustachioed actors like Gable, Tom Selleck and Burt Reynolds, and sports at times has loved mustaches, too.

Facial hair has been a feature of most New York teams, sometimes in their proudest eras. Phil Jackson and Walt Frazier were memorably mustachioed members of the Knicks' only two championship teams, though Patrick Ewing sported a mustache when he helped them return to the finals decades later. In football, the Jets' most celebrated quarterback, Joe Namath, had a mustache that arced as parabolically as his forward passes.

But it was in baseball where the mustache achieved its greatest stature.

In the early days of baseball, handlebar mustaches were common in a game that was long attributed to Abner Doubleday. (Doubleday, who never claimed to have invented baseball, had a mustache not too different from Mr. Hernandez's.)

By 1900, the clean-shaven look had the upper hand (and upper lip); legends like Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb spurned facial ornament. Then in the early 1970s, when hair became associated with sexual freedom and hippie nonconformity, Charles Finley, the owner of the Oakland Athletics, offered players $300 each to grow mustaches, as some players had already done. Rollie Fingers sported a handlebar coiled at both ends, and Reggie Jackson and Catfish Hunter, chevrons straining toward Fu-Manchus.

Mr. Jackson and Mr. Hunter went on to play for the Yankees, whose owner George Steinbrenner periodically — usually when his team was losing — banned facial hair, though he permitted neatly trimmed mustaches like those worn by the first baseman Don Mattingly and the catcher Thurman Munson.

Mr. Hernandez became one of the mustache's more famous exhibitors. In an interview before his shearing, Mr. Hernandez, now 58, said that he grew a mustache as a young man because he was raised on mustachioed tough guys like Paladin, the lead character played by Richard Boone on the late 1950s and early 1960s television show "Have Gun Will Travel," and John Wayne in "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon."

He said he had shaved it off three or four times but not since 1988, when he was still a Met.

After the barber, Elliott Chester, took it off (using a battery-powered trimmer and only at the end picking up a Schick razor). Mr. Hernandez, groaning and chuckling at all the attention, said he "looked 20 years younger" but also pointed out portentously: "I can always grow it back."