The grass is always greener

The field of the Twins’ new stadium in Mpls. is now being covered with Colorado-grown Kentucky blue grass. Although they expect this imported grass to grow in Minnesota, Minnesota grass wouldn’t work there. Local grass growers are up in arms.

While it would make good PR sense for the team to look for local or regional products to fill its needs, nobody has ever suggested that only Minnesota-grown players should be on the team. And they do use Hormel hot dogs even though many, if not most, people in the state who remember 1986 would prefer not to do business with those folks.

Saints to play in cold; Diablos will stay in hot place

It is a mystery to me why we celebrate winter in our city.  There are many diverse and sundry undesired things to be endured in life and winter is just one.  If we have a Winter Carnival there must be those who wonder shy we don’t have a Hemorrhoid Festival or an Ingrown toenail Carnival or Mother-in-Law Days.

 

Well, it will be too late to be caught up in the Winter Carnival but the Saints seem to be getting into the adoration of winter sentiment too.  Set aside Saturday, February 28 for an outdoor ball game at Midway Stadium.  [At least it will be a day game.]

 

Devils and demons are traditionally, culturally thought of as being associated with heat and Saints as being the opposite, so I guess that perhaps this game is not as strange as it sounds like at first.

 

The opponent will NOT be the El Paso Diablos.  They will stay in the warm places.

 

More information.

Strawberry returns

It did not get really large coverage, but what it did get was pretty much friendly coverage when Darryl Strawberry came back to town for Tuesday’s American Association All-Star Game.

The former Saint [as in baseball player Saint, not in the religious sense although I guess that is still possible] was a guest as his contributions to the team’s 1996 championship of another league was recognized. He was here as a part of an effort to play himself back into respectability after multiple episodes stemming from chemical dependency.

Recovery is tricky. I am not an expert, but that seems to be a consensus. A few only seem to need it once. Many need several tries and some never make it at all. Many people have put in a huge toll both emotionally and financially trying to help people facing these problems.

And while most of the people of good will that I have known generally wish people well in recovery [at least the first time or two] it is the uncertainty of whether any specific time trying for recovery will be successful is part of what has led to neighborhood concerns about “sober houses.”

There seem to be many ways to connect these things. I’ll leave them to you.

I should note that the recovery Mr. Strawberry was in in 1996 was not his last one. He has been clean for a few years, I guess, and I am sure that all wish him well.

And I am grateful that I got a chance to watch him swing a bat and hit some home runs. He made it look so easy with perhaps the smoothest swing I have ever seen.

Minnpress.com and Saints

Most of what appears here is about political and social matters and the things which affect them, such as the media which tell us about these things.

I decided to check up on the newest professional internet news concept [minnpost.com which has received a fair amount of hype in non-print media] which debuted this week.

I will probably say more about minnpress.com later. There is more I want to check out. But I found an article about the 1920’s New York Yankees, one of the most famous dynasties in the sport’s history.

While I have noted, although not here, that perhaps the Red Sox are becoming a new dynasty [although they have a long way to go before reaching that level] that they have not won a World Series without having a former Saint on the team [Millar in ’04, Drew in ‘07], Pat Borzoi has written about those Yankees and notes the presence of a former Saint [Mark Koenig] on those teams, and of his role in winning the 1924 Junior World Series for the Saints.

It is an interesting article which reminds us of independent minor league teams, of the Junior World Series, of Lexington Park – of a different era.

The era was not perfect and I wouldn’t want to minimize the problems. Most of them were reflections of the society from which that era of baseball derived. Labor relations were poor, health and training attitudes of both management and players left a lot to be desired in both majors and minors, and playing was limited to white men.

But the article is interesting and worthy of reading. And you can follow links off of it to learn more about minnpost.com.

Did anybody note that we just had something called a World Series?

Did anybody note that we just had something called a World Series?

The DPP showed the importance it gave the event when they put the story of the third game on page 17C of Sunday’s city edition.

I guess that maybe I am nostalgic for the way they used to do it, play games during the daytime at whatever would be noon or one o’clock at the home team’s ball park, taking days off for travel only when geography seemed to require it, being aired on network radio and shown on major network television, heard by people who could, with or without permission, sneak a radio onto their work or school premises and seen by people who could go home for lunch and sneak a peek or two of smuggle a television into a break room.

Those World Series were noticed by people from all across the country and even people who were not baseball fans seemed to have an interest, even if the local team was not involved or there was no local team. Wherever you went, you could ask, “What’s the score?” and the person you were asking would understand what you were asking about. It might turn out that he/she did not have any more current information than you did, but you both were thinking of the same topic. Other differences [political, religious, class] were put aside for a few days and replaced by temporary new divisions [Giants-Indians, Cardinals-Yankees, Dodgers-Yankees, Mets-Orioles, etc.] took their places in areas where there were no teams and in areas where the locals were playing there was a new us-vs.-them which replaced the Cold War in people’s minds for a few days.

Those days are not coming back, but maybe each October we should at least reflect on then.