Lee Lowenfish

The Orioles' magical 2023 ride hit a serious bump on Fri night Aug 25 when ace closer Felix "The Mountain" Bautista, one strike away from completing a save against the Colorado Rockies, stumbled off the mound after throwing a 102+ mph fastball.

 

Head trainer Brian Ebel and manager Brandon Hyde rushed to the mound and led Bautista away without him even throwing a practice pitch. Some kind of elbow injury was quickly diagnosed and Felix was put on the injured list. He will undoubtedly be lost for the season, and if he needs Tommy John surgery out for all of 2004 and maybe beyond. 

 

Danny Coulombe, a recently re-activated southpaw reliever also having a career year, completed the save on only one pitch.  In a cruel irony, Felix Bautista Bobblehead Day was celebrated the next night and over 42,000

packed Camden Yards to see another Oriole win. 

 

Bautista was present in the dugout to show solidarity with his teammates on a surprising Oriole team that continues to win despite the huge loss - both figuratively and metaphorically - at the back end of the bullpen. 

 

On the eve of their second West Coast trip in the last few weeks, the Orioles are 1 1/2 games ahead of the Tampa Bay Rays, winners of 10 of their 12 games after a disappointing July in which they let the Orioles overtake them. 

 

Tampa has endured its share of injuries, too.  They lost their Cy Young Award-candidate Ryan McClanahan to Tommy John surgery and their pitching roster as always is a merry-go-round of other pitchers going and coming back from surgery. 

 

Even more seriously in the longer run, star shortstop Wander Franco has been indefinitely suspended with pay He is being investigated for several relationships with under-age women in his homeland of the Dominican Republic.  Earlier in the season, he had been briefly suspended by the team for behavior not worthy of "a good teammate." 

 

One wonders what was in the minds of Rays management when they signed Franco a couple of years ago to a 11-year contract reportedly worth upwards of $200 million. I guess the red flags about his questionable behavior faded when they considered what other owners might pay one day on the open market for his transcendent on-field talents.  

 

In spite of these distractions, the Rays have regained the winning touch that saw them begin the year with 13 straight wins and a 30-11 record.  Not the Detroit Tigers 35-5 of 1984 on their way to a wire-to-wire World Series win but quite impressive. They are now 30 games over .500 and for me a MVP-candidate in corner infielder Yandy Diaz.  

 

Fortunately, the crazy-quilt so-called "balanced" schedule at least allows for a big head-to-head matchup of Rays at Orioles Th Sept 14-Su Sept 17.  The inconsistent Red Sox, recently swept at home by defending World Series champ Houston and only 4 games over .500, will have a large say in how the AL East turns out.  They play Tampa 5 times and the Birds 7, including the last 4 games of the season at Camden Yards. 

 

Winning the division will not just be a psychological prize, especially for the Orioles who haven't been in the playoffs since 2016.  It gives the victor almost a week's rest by avoiding the best-of-three wild card round.  There is an argument that a team can get rusty with too much time off, but for me the ability to heal minor injuries and to set up one's pitching rotation are the great positives. 

 

The drama in the AL West is even greater than in the AL East because barring a total collapse, the Rays and Orioles should make the playoffs.  Before games of F Sep 1, Seattle and Houston were virtually tied although Houston had one more win and one more loss. Texas was one full game behind Seattle. 

 

For the sake of drama, I'm hoping that Texas with formidable hitting but questionable pitching stays relevant into the last 10 days of the season because the Rangers and Mariners play each other 7 times in last 10 days of regular season, the final 4 in Seattle.  Houston might have the edge overall because they are the only team that still plays the 2 worst teams in baseball record-wise, the Royals and the Athletics.

 

In the AL Central, the Twins had a chance to bury the Guardians this past week, but they couldn't do it

Minnesota is only four games over .500 but Cleveland is still 6 games under.  The NL Central is not much better but at least the Brewers have been playing much better baseball.

 

They are 15 games over .500,  but did lose a chance on Wed Aug 30 to win a series in Chicago against the surprising Cubs. They couldn't do it and their divisional lead in only 3 games. 

 

In the other NL divisioins, the Braves and Dodgers are running away with their division titles. But the race for the 3 Wild Cards is appropriately wild. The Phillies with the same record as Milwaukee, 74-59, has a 3 game lead on the Cubs.  The third wild card at this juncture is being tightly contested among the Giants who are 1 lost game ahead of the Diamondbacks, 2 lost games ahead of the Reds, and 3 lost games ahead of the Marlins. 

 

A wise person once described the MLB season as really 4 seasons:  spring training, April through August, September, and the playoffs.  We are entering September now and as the late legendary Mets announcer Bob Murphy used to say, "Fasten your seat belts!" 

 

Before I conclude this post, here are some sports-related movies coming up on TCM Turner Classic Movie

cable channel:

Tu Sept 5 features these boxing classics:

1145A "The Champ" (1931) - King Vidor directs irrepressible Wallace Beery and young Jackie Cooper

6P "The Prizefighter & The Lady" (1933) - W.S. "Woody" Van Dyke directs Myrna Loy and heavyweight

    boxers Max Baer and Primo Carnera

 

Wed Sep 6 for night owls or more likely for those can record them: 

215A "Knute Rockne All American" (1940) with Pat O'Brien in title role and Ronald Reagan as the Gipper

400A "Jim Thorpe All American" (1952) with Burt Lancaster in title role, the underappreciated Charles Bickford as Pop Warner, and directed by Michael Curtiz

 

The next two have no real sports connection but wanted to list them: 

Th Sep 7 10p "It Happened In Brooklyn" (1947) with Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Durante, Kathryn Grayson and the introduction for first time of Sammy Cahn's classic "Time After Time" - not much on baseball except likely brief shots of Ebbets Field - also of interest to Noir fans:  Gloria Grahame as a nurse! 

 

F Sep 8 10A "The Petrified Forest" (1936) directed by Archie Mayo from Robert Sherwood's play, a real classic with Humphrey Bogart as the outlaw Duke Mantee, Bette Davis the poems of Villon-reading waitress, and Leslie Howard as the disconsolate writer with a vague desire to see the Pacific Ocean and drown in it

 

F Sep 8 11:15P  "Boys Town" (1938)  Norman Taurog directs Spencer Tracy as Father Flanagan and Mickey Rooney as one of his charges.  

 

And happily Eddie Muller's "Noir Alley" returns before Labor Day

Su Sep 3 12 M/repeated 10A  "The Secret Fury" (1950) Mel Ferrer directs Robert Ryan and Claudette Colbert and keep eyes open for Vivian Vance before she inhabited Ethel Mertz! 

Su Sep 10 Alfred Hitchcock's "The Wrong Man" (1956) with Henry Fonda in title role

 

That's all for now - always remember: Take it easy but take it, and stay positive test negative. 

 

 

 

During the first week of July I taught another class in the Special Studies program at the Chautauqua Institution. This year I called it: "Can Baseball Survive The 21st Century?"

 

I had a very receptive class of attentive adult listeners who asked good questions. I was glad that there was rewarding interest in my first book THE IMPERFECT DIAMOND: A History of Baseball's Labor Wars.

 

The topic of the endless player-owner conflicts in baseball seems especially relevant these days because the sport has always has been peopled by nay-sayers who think the game was always better in the past. 

 

As early as 1912, sportswriters were complaining that the games were too long!  Around the same time, John Montgomery Ward, the polymathic leader of the 1890 Players League which actually outdrew the established National League in its one season, gave up his brief job as president of the Boston Braves because he felt the players of HIS day were more serious about the game than contemporaries. 

 

I'm not a cockeyed optimist about the future of the sport in an expanding spectator sport market, but here is what I see as some positive signs: 

 

**The games in 2023 are shorter by a half-hour on average from last year's unacceptable average of over three hours a game. 

 

**The All-Star Game was more exciting than usual even if Felix "The Mountain" Bautista, closer for my Orioles, served up the game-winning 8th inning HR to Rockies catcher Elias Diaz. (Happily, Bautista suffered no hangover from his defeat because he successfully closed the Birds' first two post-ASG wins.) 

 

Diaz, a 32-year-old journeyman, is probably having a career year for one of the few teams that has no prayer of making the playoffs. The most obscure of the All-Stars, Diaz's heroics proved yet again that baseball remains the most delightfully unpredictable of all our sports.

 

As always I offer a fervent wish that the analytic hordes swarming around every MLB franchise don't try to take that unpredictability away from us in the name of "the next big thing." 

 

In addition to the disproportionate rise of the analytic crowd, there remains the unwholesome marriage of television and MLB. I realize younger fans like all the new bells and whistles, but personally I can do without the in-game interviews.

 

It reached a new low in the ASG when pitchers Nathan Eovaldi and Josh Hader were interviewed as they were pitching. Thank God a line drive didn't rocket towards them at the mound while they were chatting with the prattling Fox Sports broadcasters Joe Davis and John Smoltz.  It also looked like Padres outfielder Juan Soto might have caught a foul ball in the right field corner if he hadn't been distracted by an interviewer.   

 

Since I prefer to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative, let me add some more comments on my Chautauqua experience.  Located in southwestern New York State about 50 miles from Erie, Pennsylvania, the Institution was founded in 1874 as a retreat for Methodist Sunday school teachers.  (Somewhat remarkably, there is no evidence that [Wesley] Branch Rickey ever spoke there - I guess his baseball work in St. Louis, Brookly, and Pittsburgh and devotion to his southern Ohio roots kept him from coming.)   

 

There is important political as well as religious history at Chautauqua.  William Jennings Bryan gave his "Cross of Gold" speech there during the 1896 campaign against eventual winner William McKinley.  Franklin D. Roosevelt gave his "I Hate War" speech during the 1936 campaign.

 

Today's Chautauqua has become more secular and it brims and overflows with inspiring music, art, and dance as well as stimulating lectures every weekday morning at 1045.

 

On the Fourth of July I heard an especially memorable talk by Scott Simon, the longtime host of NPR's Saturday morning news and features show.  I knew he was a big Chicago Cubs fan but I didn't realize his father's best friend was Cubs broadcaster Jack Brickhouse and his aunt married Charley Grimm, legendary Cubs first baseman and manager.

 

An author and journalist who has traveled the world, Simon told a moving story of attending a soccer game in Kabul between the Afghani national team and a British team that took place during the brief interval when the Taliban had been routed by Allied forces. 

 

When the Afghanis scored the first goal of the match, a British woman paratrooper showed her support by

taking off her burqa letting her hair become visible.  It was the first time in six years that Afghanis could revel in the beauty of flowing female hair and the crowd went wild. Soon women all over the stadium took off their

burqas too. 

 

Simon could not hold back tears telling this story of a moment that did not, alas, lead to freedom and self-expression in a country now ruled again by the Taliban.  It did show the transcendant qualities of sport at its best. 

 

Chautauqua's summer programs last nine weeks through the end of August.  It is a gated community so everyone there must carry a gate pass although Sundays the grounds are open without charge to the larger community.  For information on programming this year and the themes for 2024, the sesquecentennial anniversary of Chautauqua, check out chq.org

 

As readers of this blog surely know, I had to see live baseball not just talk about it.  I attended the Fourth of July day game of the high-flying Jamestown Tarp Skunks against the Elmira Pioneers, two teams in the Perfect Game Wooden Bat Summer League. 

 

The Tarp Skunk nickname is a homage not only to the spunky animal in the area but also to Howard Ehmke, Connie Mack's surprise choice to start the 1929 World Series against the Cubs. Ehmke hailed from Chautauqua County and later became an inventor of a tarpulin used in many ballparks. 

 

In this age of inventive logos, there is now a skunk tail featured through the last number on the back of every Tarp Skunk uniform.  I'm not sure I like it, but it certainly is different.

 

There are only three regular season home games left for the Tarp Skunks, the last one on Fri July 28. They play at classic Diethrick Park built in 1939 and located 20 minutes from Chautauqua. Brief playoff series will follow.  For more info, check out tarpskunks.com

 

That's all for now - heading to Baltimore to talk about my new book on scouting BASEBALL'S ENDANGERED SPECIES at the Babe Ruth Museum Tues July 18 at 4p. Missed the Orioles split of the four game series at Yankee Stadium because I was at Chautauqua. 

 

Looking forward to seeing live the last two games of the Orioles' three-game series against the Dodgers. I'm not ready to call it a preview of a sequel to the 1966 World Series, but I can dream, can't I?  More on this

adventure in the next post.

 

In the meantime - Always remember:  Take it easy but take it, and stay positive test negative.