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Yesterday we went to Fenway Park (the Sox lost) but it was a special day for two reasons.

All the players were wearing 42 because it was Jackie Robinson day - April 15, 1947 was his first day on the Dodgers. The first black player in the major leagues since 1880. This was a huge step for Baseball and for this country because it set a very visible example. He was a great and exciting-to-watch player; he endured lots of hate for a while and handled it well.

And at 2:49 there was a minute of silence to remember the Marathon bombing of two years ago.

I had been at a board meeting of Voice of the Turtle, a sephardic musical group, and when I got home (I'd walked so no c car radio and there weren't smart phones in this days) I asked rsc "What''s happening?"

He replied "They don't know."

This was clearly an impossible answer to my question. This was the 3rd game of the World Series and I was just trying to find out the baseball score.

Little did I know that the game wasn't being played because there had been a serious earthquake just before the game started. It was 25 years ago today.

Last night we went to our next-to-last Red Sox game for the season.

We saw several "impossible" things.

I'm not counting as impossible the fact that the RedSox bats were lively and they scored 11 runs for an easy win. The game took 3 hours and 40 minutes (the Mariners-Jays game took one hour and 59 minutes). Our game could have taken longer. The first two innings were 55 minutes, and the second two were an hour and 5 minutes. At that rate it would have been 4 1/2 hours.

Impossible thing 1:
The Score Board said the Angels/Athletic score was 4 - 4 and the game was over. Baseball games can't end in a tie (well one All-Star game did). Once we went to a gamed that took 19 inning to break the tie - we had to walk home since the T had already stopped. Fortunately the Sox won so the long wait and the walk home was much pleasant than it could have been. Eventually the score on the board was corrected to 5 - 4; you'd think that someone would check things like this.

Impossible thing 2:
There was a wave and it went counter-clockwise. Waves in Fenway Park are always clockwise. They start in the Center Field Bleachers and go around clockwise - eventually crossing the Green Monster and back through the Bleachers. They often last about 3 rounds - usually stopped when some baseball event actually happens.

Last night's started in the left grandstand and went around 3 times. In the several hundred games I've attended I've seen attempts to start a counter clockwise wave from that spot; more frequently there are attempts to start waves in other portions of the ballpark but they never take. This was a first.

Today we went to the Open House at Fenway Park - it is the 100th Anniversary. It was extremely crowded so we didn't see everything we wanted to see. We walked around the field and sat in the Visitor's dugout, looked in the garage in left field where they had samples of how they grow the grass, touched the wall - which has many imprints of baseballs, looked in the space behind the scoreboard, and went up to the Green Monster.

Click below for pictures


(The Canterbury RedSox are a New Zealand softball team.)

A while ago I read a great book by Jared Diamond: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. In this he describes his theory of reasons why this happens: climate change, hostile neighbors, collapse of trading partners, environmental problems, and failure to adapt to environmental issues. He gives an analysis to many occurrences in history.

We have just seen the collapse of another nation - RedSox Nation.

Last night the floundering tribe lost a battle for a number of reasons but one of the important hurling-warriors floundered at a critical moment and gave up a fatal blow. At the same time two other warring tribes were battling and the one most known for its empire was not using its best hurling-warriors and gave up its dominant lead to the current RedSox Nation enemy in an earlier-that-evening battle and then moments after the RedSox failure that tribe suckomed.

Now what were the causes of this? Many people believed at the beginning of the year that RedSox Nation was destined for World Domination by the end of the year. The General-Chief had acquired several club-wielding warriors at great expense and the battery of hurling-warriors looked quite formidable. Several other warriors had recovered from serious injuries incurred in last year's battles.

Many onlookers and scribes think that the chiefs did not properly respond to anticipated climate changes in their choice of the correct warriors and then as the climate changed during the year as a result of the many battles between warring tribes they didn't do a good job of choice of warriors in critical situations.

Several of the hostile neighbors turned out to be stronger than originally anticipated. Proper steps were not taken to deal with the changing situation. In the battles in the last month there were significant failures at every level.

There was definitely a problem with trading partners because as some of the warriors got injured in the many battles during the year good trades were not able to be made.

The environment is tough for these warriors - they fight a battle almost every day, sometimes in poor weather or timing conditions and have to travel during the middle of the night to seek out other tribes. Earlier this month the tribe was in a good position relative to other tribes but then many battles were lost and the environment was completely different. Some think that the training and conditioning earlier in the year was not good enough and made some of the warriors more vulnerable to injuries or just tiring - and there were several critical and a number of minor ones. Appropriate replacements were not found or used properly.

What the next steps will be is unknown.

- Some of the current warriors may defect to other tribes.

- There will be negotiation with other tribes.

- The highest level chiefs may decide to replace the operational chiefs.

- New medicine men with various skill sets might be found to deal rehabilitation and conditioning.

- And a long shot: maybe the root cause is the water supply and a new vendor will be found.

I heard it said that one shot of cocaine and you are addicted. Who is to believe that? OK, two shots maybe.

When I was a kid, living in NYC - I was a fan - Yankees no less. My father was a Giants fan (they were in NYC then). I listened to some games on the radio - Mel Allen was the broadcaster and I followed the team. I went to a few games at Yankee Stadium, Ebbetts Field, and the Polo Grounds. Some of my classmates were more serious and some knew many stats up-to-the day; I wasn't that interested. Then my interest dwindled. I was a lukewarm Milwaukee Braves fan for a couple of years in high school.

And then baseball disappeared from my life. I didn't read the sports pages at all. I didn't even connect with the fact that the Red Sox were in the World Series in 1967 and 1975. I don't remember people at work talking about baseball. Once some of us from work went to a game at Fenway Park and it seemed to be a foreign entity to me although we had a good time.

Just one game.

Fast Forward to 1986. I was aware that the Red Sox were in the World Series. And during the first or second game I said to rsc, "oh let's look at the game". And we watched the rest of the series. I was slightly rooting for the Mets - remember the RedSox were the enemy in my youth. After this we'd occasionally look at the results in the paper. In 1988 they fired the manager and hired a new one - Joe Morgan. The Sox won 19 out of 20 games and suddenly we started noticing baseball, reading the results and occasionally watching a game. Games that were late didn't make the newspaper so sometimes it was hard to find the results. A year or so later we went to a game; and then several more. And the next thing you know we bought seasons tickets - ~50 weekday games. We split them with 3 other sets of people so we go to 12-15 games a year. Unless we are at some social or dance event we watch the game on TV - so that's 3 hours down the drain every day. Plus checking the Net and reading the newspaper. Now with my Droid I can check where-ever I am.

I've gone to games in Philadelphia, Detroit, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Oakland, Minneapolis, NYC (both Mets and Yankees), and Chicago (Cubs). Still want to go to Pittsburgh and Baltimore to see those ballparks.

Tonight is a free evening - the RedSox aren't playing.

Last night we watched the last game to be played in Yankee Stadium. Next year they play in a brand new ballpark across the street that is full of luxurious luxury boxes but whose dimensions are similar to the current one. There was a tremendous amount of talking about the history and many of the past players were there.

In addition to the Yankees who played there starting in 1923 (when Fenway Park had already been used for 9 seasons), there were many other uses. The New York "football" Giants played there from 1956 to 1973, Notre Dame football was played there a few times, three Popes gave speeches, it was the site of many famous boxing matches including the one when Joe Louis knocked out Max Schmeling in 1938, and there've been many concerts.

I've been to games there a few times - as a kid when I was mistakenly a Yankees fan and since then to see the Red Sox play them where I boldly wore my Red Sox cap and didn't get beat up or anything.

There are some people including a certain husband who think that this Yankee Stadium isn't really the original one (with the Babe Ruth design) because of the major reconstruction done in the 70's that among other things radically changed the dimensions. But both incarnations were the site of all these events. The announcers were trying to say the the new place will have the same Karma because of the fans, but it won't since it doesn't have the history.

The most remarkable speech ever was the one by Lou Gehrig who was retiring because of the onset of ALS, the disease that forever bears his name. "For the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans." Gehrig began. I've heard recordings of this many times. Gehrig who was a fantastic player was called the Iron Horse because he always played even when injured and held the record of 2,130 consecutive games played until it was bested by Cal Ripkin. He died two years after this speech.

As the last post-motss-con event, 12 of us went to AT&T Park to see the Giants Cubs game. You get a great view of the bay past the outfield. A group of kids sang the national anthem and a bunch more were in the outfield before the game along with the seal (I thought at first it might be a Panda) mascot. Our seats were way up in the nosebleed section behind 3rd base; it's fun seeing high pop flies from above. I was wearing my 1914 Cubs hat that I got at Cooperstown a few years ago.

The game was fast and close with the Giants ahead 1-0 until the top of the 9th when the Cubs scored 5 runs and won the game.



( The entire back of the field )
This boat was seen rowing in and out several times. We could see no kayaks looking for home run balls, and perhaps there were none.