My favorite stadiums Preamble-26

 Preamble:

Welcome to this year's countdown to The Real National Hot Dog Day. I hope you've been doing your exercises over the last month to stretch out those bellies because game time is almost here.

In counting down to the big day, one of the fun things I like to do get people hyped (do the kids still say "hyped"? I like to think they do) is to rank things from 30-1. Last year it was my favorite baseball teams, the year before it was Red Sox players. This year it's going to be stadiums (stadia?).

 

I've been to 29 different parks and I have thoughts on all of them, but there are 30 days until April 8. So what to do for today? I'm going to use this as a catch-all for the seven parks that I haven't seen and rank them from 7-1 in terms of ones that I want to see next. 

 

7. Tropicana Field. Florida sucks. Tampa sucks. And this stadium looks awful. Plus as we found out last year, the Rays are my least favorite team in MLB. If I wasn't such an OCD completest, I'd skip this one. But since I'm not, I'm going to go and sit with my arms crossed the entire time. That'll show 'em. Fun fact: do you know that NHL Lightning used to play their home games in this mausoleum? It's the house that (Brent) Gretzky built!

 

6. LoanDept Park. Up until 30 seconds ago, I had no idea of the name of the park that the Marlins play in. Now I do and it's as low-rent as the franchise. The two interesting things about the place: the psychedelic statue in center field and the aquariums behind home plate have been ripped out (by former CEO Derek "FUN!" Jeter) and now it's just a boring ass place to watch a game. Great job Jetes, you should be the next commissioner. 

 

5. Guaranteed Rate Field. Or Comiskey II in Chicago. Fun fact, I'm going to this field this year so I'll be able to give a better synopsis of the place. Know this, it opened a year before Camden and the White Sox are trying their damnedest to get out of the place; even threatening to move to Nashville. Do I think that will happen? No. Owner Jerry Reinsdorf tried this bullshit back in the late 80s when he told the world that the Sox were going to play at Tropicana Field (then called the TropicanaDome) only to get the money to build this legacy to boringness. 

 

4. Globe Life Field. It's hot in Texas. Really hot. Especially in July and August, so it finally dawned on the Rangers that the should play in doors after 45 years of playing outside and sweating their mustaches off. I think that this place looks, I don't know, fine? At least there won't be any rainouts or no one will die of heat stroke. Fun fact: the first teams to play in this place weren't the Rangers! When we were in the depths of Covid four years ago, this was one of the spots where MLB held the playoffs. The Ray and Dodgers took the field before the Rangers did. The only other park I can think of where that happened is Wrigley Field, which was built for the Federal League Chicago Whales. When the FL when belly up, the Cubs moved in. 

 

3. Target Field. This looks like a lovely park to spend a Friday or Saturday summer evening. I'm kinda obsessed with the Twin Cities in a weird sort of way, all tucked up in the northern part of the US. It seems quaint. I've never been to Minnesota--I heard the mosquitos are murder--but I'd like to go and where the Twins play is a TARGET destination. Ho, ho! Get ready Minnesotans for that kind of wit when Byron Magrane comes to town(s)!

 

2. Kauffman Stadium. When I was a kid, this was an absolute house of horrors for the Red Sox (sort of like old Arlington Stadium in Texas, though for other reasons). The Royals were the bizarro Red Sox, they were super athletic, barely hit dingers (Medford, MA native Steve Balboni held the club's season record of 35 for many years) and were fast as hell. Kauffman (nee Royal) Stadium was huge and it was covered in astroturf and guys like Willie Wilson or Lonnie Smith or Frank White would slap the ball around and the next thing you know they're standing on third base waiting for George Brett to drive them in and Red Sox fielders are trying to catch their breath. But then the Royals got rid of the turf, tightened the place up a little and it doesn't have quite the same amount of advantages as it used to. They still have the waterfalls though and the team wants to move to a park in down town KC. So I better get my ass to Missouri if I want to see it. 

 

1. Dodger Stadium. God damn, this is the quintessential ball park. I want to go here so much, my feet hurt. Look at the picture attached to this post, it's so perfect. I mean if that doesn't scream baseball, I don't know what does. I have to go to LA really soon and check out a game here, I don't care how much it's going to cost; this is like a pilgrimage to Mecca (not the place the Bucks used to play at). 

 

29.

 

We are 29 days away from The Real National Hot Dog Day and we're counting down the stadiums I've been to in order from worst to best. 

 

Today's park is Olympic Stadium in Montreal, Quebec; home of the Montreal Expos.

 

This was the first park I've ever been to, outside of Fenway Park. The way that I got there was kinda dumb, kinda Amesbury but it worked out. When I was in eighth grade our Spanish class took a four day field trip to Montreal during spring break. Why Spanish speaking kids would go to a French speaking city is beyond me, maybe they wanted to expose (no pun) us to people who spoke something other than a butchered version of the King's English.

 

Anyway, we were supposed to go to a planetarium that night, but I think that the weather was lousy so the surprised us with tickets to the baseball game instead. And I was ecstatic when I heard the news. National League! Expos versus Phillies! A new, modern stadium! Holy shit this was going to be so good.

It was and it wasn't. I mean it was cool as hell going to the game with 40 other kids. There were only like five chaperones, so it was like we were at the game by ourselves; we ran around the stadium, bought souvenirs, ate like assholes ... it was awesome.

 

But the park itself? Ugh. I wasn't impressed. And I was 14-years-old at the time, I was pretty much impressed by everything that wasn't mundane. The place was dirty, cheap looking, not well lit. The turf looked old, the place was cavernous without a lot of people there. It just seemed, I don't know, sad.

Olympic Stadium was built to hold the 1976 Olympics and then was retrofitted for Expos games. Even when I went back in 1988, you could tell that this wasn't a baseball stadium. It no longer had the track running along the field like it once did, but it just was depressing. It was just run down and didn't feel like a major league team should call this place its home.

 

We were told that the roof was able to open and close, but it broke some years prior to when we got to see our game there, so it had to stay closed. I think that the fixed it some years later, but the system they used to bring in the natural daylight didn't work all that great.

 

In 1991-ish, a huge chunk of cement fell off the roof during a time when no one was in the stadium and crashed on one of the concourses. Had there been a game at this time, more than one person would have gotten crushed. The Expos had to go on a 30-day road trip so that architectural engineers could make certain that that wouldn't happen again.

 

Even though the stadium was a drag, for a long time this was my most interesting fact about myself: I saw an Expos game in far-away Montreal. That doesn't say much for me, but I thought that it was cool as hell.

The Expos ended up leaving Montreal in 2004 and relocated to DC the following season. As for the Amesbury Middle School Montreal trip, it ended up going pretty great. We had a lot of fun, I was introduced to a new rock group: Guns N' Roses that everyone seemed to listen to. I went to my first sports bar, which was cool, even though no one drank. We saw anti-English rallies, which made us want to shout things in English (we were assholes!) and kinda terrified us too.

 

I guess sending a bunch of barely Spanish speaking kids to Montreal was a success. Consider our horizons broadened.

 

As for the game, the Expos beat the Phillies 2-1 in extra innings. I'm pretty sure it was Tim Raines (or maybe Graig Nettles) who hit the game winning home run right into the rightfield section we were sitting in. Only we weren't there. Some of the kids were getting bored and wanted to leave, so we took off in the eighth.

 

Knowing my eighth grade self, I was absolutely furious. But que sera sera.

 

Actually it turns out Nettles hit a dinger in the eighth (where we were sitting) to tie the game and the Expos scratched out a run in the tenth. Here is the boxscore: https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1988/B04160MON1988.htm Two Hall of Famers: Michael Jack Schmidt for the Phillies and Tim Raines for Montreal.

28. 

We are 28 days away from The Real National Hot Dog Day and we're counting down the stadiums I've been to in order from worst to best.

 

Today's stadium is RFK in Washington, DC, home (for a short time) to the Washington Nationals. When last we left the Expos (yesterday), they were wards of the League and were playing in a shitty stadium in Montreal and a stadium in Puerto Rico. The team was sold and moved to Washington, where the national game was given its third chance to take root in the nation's capital.

 

RFK was an old, beat up stadium that was never meant to house the Nats for very long. It began its life as one of the multipurpose stadia that dotted the landscape in the 1960s and 70s. Basically the idea was why have two stadiums in the city for baseball and football, when you can spend less money and have two for the price of one?

 

People in New York (Shea), Pittsburgh (Three Rivers), Philadelphia (Veterans), Cincinnati (Riverfront), Miami (The Orange Bowl), Denver (Mile High), Los Angeles (The Coliseum), Houston (Astrodome) and Washington--and there were other--all agreed. A bunch of these multipurpose stadia didn't have grass, they had astroturf, which was basically green painted concrete. Not RFK though, it was a Cheech and Chong special: pure grass. (Good timely reference? Sure, the kids love the dopey hippie antics of Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong.)

 

While these venues weren't great for the athletes that played there, the folks who ran the city loved them because every one loves a two-for-one deal. After awhile owners started to get pissy because if you didn't own both teams that played in the stadium, there was a good chance that you were a tenant to the guy who did own the stadium. Rich people hate answering to other people so much, so in the 80s and 90s they began vacating these dual purpose places for palaces of their own.

 

Don't worry folks! Those rich people never had to pay for their stadiums and parks, they got us to do it for them. How? Ginned up "research" papers saying that new stadiums bring huge financial windfalls to the areas (they don't). If that didn't work they'd fall back on good old extortion -- "Build my stadium or we're moving to Louisville or Tampa or some other God foresaken burgh filled with rubes who'd kill to build a stadium for me."

 

Anyway, the second iteration of the Senators called RFK their home and when they left for Texas after 12 seasons in DC, the Washington Football Team had the place all to themselves. And RFK was a legendary football field as the WFT was really good in the 80s and 90s (three Super Bowl Champs!) and their fans (the Hawgs) became something of a media sensation too.

 

But as the millennium changed the WFT moved to Maryland into a new (tax payer supported) stadium and RFK was pretty much only home to the MLS DC United. So the Nats were able to move in and play there.

Was it a good stadium? No. It was run down, beat up and seen better days. There was a charm to it, like there is in all those old stadiums, where you know some cool stuff (at least football wise) happened on the same grass that you were looking at.

 

My wife Aly and I went with her friend Amy and sat in seats in the second tier of stands. It was a warm April day and it was just a lovely day. We didn't have any kids to worry about, we just watched a game between two teams we didn't care about (Nats and DBacks), drank some beers and enjoyed ourselves.

Incidentally this was the second or third week that the Nats were new to town and we got seats no problem. I'm not sure what that means/meant but I remember at the time being worried that we wouldn't get seats.

 

The folks at RFK tried really hard to make their stadium presentable and they did fine. It wasn't as depressing as Olympic Stadium or tomorrow's place, but it was an old shithole. And there's only so much paint and elbow grease you can use to spiffy a place like that up.

 

Here is the boxscore of the game we saw: https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/2005/B04170WAS2005.htm No Hall of Famers. Woof of a game.

27. 

We are 27 days away from The Real National Hot Dog Day and we're counting down the stadiums I've been to in order from worst to best.

 

Today's stadium is Oakland Coliseum in Oakland, CA home (for maybe just this last year?) to the Oakland Athletics.

 

This is not a brag or anything, but it's needed to make a larger point: I don't mind going out and doing things by myself. For a lot of people, that's difficult and they don't like it. Not me. I've gone to concerts, comedy shows, movies, dinners and baseball games alone. I would prefer company, but if people can't go, they can't go. It's fine.

 

Most of the things I go to, it's hard to talk to someone while you're doing/watching the thing. Baseball games (and dinners) are different. Live sporting events are designed to be communal and sometimes when you're by yourself, they can kinda drag a bit. It's a good time to meet people and talk to them, which is what I do.

 

All of that being said, the one time that I went to the Oakland Coliseum was one of the most depressing times I've ever spent at any ballpark. I was on a business trip in 2008 and the A's were bad. They were playing the Orioles who were also really bad. I took the BART to the Coliseum (it's gone through so many names, that I'm not sure what it was called) and got out of the train.

 

I walked to the park in this completely chain link fenced-enclosed walkway over the parking lot that seemed like a little bit of overkill. It was ominous, like I was going into a battle. Or a war zone. I bought my ticket from the ticket window and the person there seemed bored and completely uninterested--to be fair, she could have been having a bad day.

 

And then I went into the park. I have always been a big Oakland A's supporter, they're my second favorite AL team. I've always romanticized Oakland as this hip, cool place to live. The little brother of nearby San Francisco. The city with the can-do attitude. I wanted to love the Coliseum.

 

But friends, I did not love the Coliseum. I found my seat and for the entirety of the game, my entire section, not row, was completely empty. I wasn't in the upper bowl either, I was in the second bowl and there was no one remotely close to me.

 

So I got a beer and a dog and watched the A's play seven or eight uninspired innings again the Orioles who did the same thing. After about two innings, I began getting restless and started texting my friends. But it was a 7:00 pm start and most of my friends (except Stephen Brown! Good old Brownie!) were asleep. I stretched my legs, walked around the park a bit. Sat in some other seats.

 

Then I decided to go home. As I walked back on the walkway to the BART and under the enclosed chainlink fence I heard something. It was a white guy (this is an important detail) walking in the middle of the street, next to the BART tracks, screaming at the top of his lungs, "HEY (racial epithet) COME GET ME! COME GET ME!"

 

I jumped on the BART and got the hell out of there, though I often wonder what happened to that guy.

Drunk bigots aside, the Oakland Alameda County Coliseum was once one of the most beautiful stadia in the game. Yes, it was a multipurpose bowl like we talked about yesterday but there were some breath taking views of the surrounding areas. Until Al Davis moved the Raiders back from Los Angeles and demanded that they build more seats.

 

The city of Oakland agreed, built them in center field, destroyed the view, made the place look like shit and the Raiders eventually high tailed it for Las Vegas. This is a city where the Athletics want to go too. Owner Jack Fisher is a real asshole and has salted the grounds in Oakland and is doing a terrible, terrible job of selling the A's to the Vegas community, who wants nothing to do with them.

 

But I guess that's where they're going and it's a shame because Oakland can support the A's. They just took a stand in not supporting a fuckhead like Fisher and now they're getting the shaft.

 

Professional sports kinda sucks, you guys.

 

New thing I'm doing here: if I've seen only one game at the park I'm writing about, I'll link the retrosheet summary here: https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/2008/B05050OAK2008.htm

 

Huh. Looks like Frank Thomas played for the A's. Wild. Aside from the Big Hurt, no one from this game is going to Cooperstown without a ticket.

26.

 

We are 26 days away from The Real National Hot Dog Day and we're counting down the stadiums I've been to in order from worst to best.

 

Today's stadium is Shea Stadium in New York City (where they make all of that cheap ass salsa) the previous home of the New York Mets.

 

In the last three entries, the one thing that ties all of these low-rated ballparks is that they're dumpy. Low rent. Not taken care of. Places that were once grand palaces to sport, now reduced to afterthoughts.

Shea Stadium is no different. I've seen pictures of this place when it first opened up and it looked really bright and vibrant full of electric blues and shocking oranges mixing with the green grass of the playing field. It managed to encapsulate the technicolor vibe of that late 60s era.

 

With their young team on the precipice of a World Series, the Mets played as shiny as that brand new stadium. But like everything else, what once was new is now old. The stadium fell into disrepair. The blues faded. The oranges wilted. Even the green grass wasn't as bright.

 

Shea Stadium needed more than a paint job, it needed a complete resurrection. But Shea Stadium was never YANKEE STADIUM, the House that Ruth Built where a million World Series were won. Shea had the famous 1969 series, the less famous 1973 tilt against the A's, the infamous 1986 bullshit and the cross town series of 2000 that wasn't that exciting.

 

Also, the Jets played there and they were pretty garbage most of the time.

 

When I walked into Shea, I wasn't really blown away. It was like walking into your very elderly aunt's house, where you recognize that this place was once pretty nice but now it's old, musty and probably needs to be fumigated.

 

The Mets did so and now play at CitiField. The lesson today is sometimes just because something is old, doesn't mean it's worth saving.

 

I only went to Shea once and here is the box score: https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/2007/B08240NYN2007.htm

 

The Mets had a pretty good lineup! The Dodgers, not so much. No Hall of Famers, but Carlos Beltran has a shot.

Steve Crawford 1988 Fleer

Sometime in November 2021 I received this card from the Baseball Card Bandit (BCB):

 

I don't know Steve Crawford personally, but if you were to ask me who he was I'd know who you meant. Mustachioed guy who pitched out of the bullpen for the Boston Red Sox in the 1980s. As my brother Jay would say, "I don't know him, but I knooooooow him."

As you can tell, my credentials regarding Steve Crawford are solid.

If you were to ask me how many seasons he pitched in the Majors for, I'd say, "Three, probably. No more than four." But I'd be wrong. Steve Crawford pitched in parts of 11 Major League seasons, starting with a cup of coffee with the Sox in 1980 (two games) and finishing up with 33 games with the Royals in 1991.

That's not bad, he maxed out his Major League pension, which is a success. But was his career a  success? If you're going strictly by the numbers, probably not. When he was in Boston to stay (1984-87) he usually made more than 30 appearances and his ERA hovered around the 4.00 mark, which in the 80s wasn't great. 

But 11 seasons in the Majors is nothing to sneeze at. You don't get that many seasons by being a charity case or completely sucking.

On the other hand, if you look at the numbers Crawford gave up a bunch of hits, he gave up a bunch of walks and he didn't strike too many people out. When the Red Sox went to the World Series, Crawford was mostly used in mop-up duty and got crushed. His World Series 6.23 and gave up two home runs in four innings. He pitched in one game against the Angels in the ALCS that year.

After he bottomed out in 1987 (he was really bad: 5.33 ERA, 91 hits, 32 walks and only 43 strikeouts over 72.2 innings) he was released by the Sox. He was picked up by the Dodgers in 1988 and languished in AAA for the entire year while the big league club won the World Series. He spent his last two season in the Bigs with Kansas City.

I know that I talk about this a bunch in this blog, I'm probably a little obsessed, but I wonder what goes through the minds of players who are stuck on the Albuquerque Dukes (like Crawford was) knowing that you are a big leaguer who can help, but watching as the Dodgers are kicking ass all year. Do you hope they lose? Are you glad they won? Do you root for an injury?

I'm sure it's a bittersweet feeling when your team wins without you. Actually, it's not bittersweet, it sucks. I know that when I see a team that I was once on start to win, I get depressed. "Maybe they won because I was holding them back," I reflexively think. But the professional athlete doesn't think like that. The  professional athlete has confidence to spare. I would bet that they aren't sad, but that they think, "If I was there, we would have swept, not won in five games" or "We would have won 100 games instead of just 99."

For the pro athlete those slights turn into the fuel that they burn for the next year. "I'll show them. I'll be so good that they'll beg for me to come back ... and then I'll stick it up their asses!"

To be a professional athlete you need that chutzpah, that arrogance, than mentality that you--and you alone--can lead your team to victory. I'm sure years and years of being the no-doubt best player on every team you've been on, countless league MVP awards, Player of the Game trophies for every big game you played have stoked this flame (and it's probably why so many athletes are conservative Republicans or Libertarians). My guess is that Steve Crawford felt the same way.

When the professional athlete lets those hobgoblins of doubt creep in--like they do to every other mortal on this planet--that's when they lose their edge. Suddenly the batter didn't get lucky when he hit that homer off you, you start wondering if your fastball was good enough. And that's when you're sunk. You need a short memory and a lot of confidence to perform on the highest level and if you start gaining the former and losing the latter,  forget about it. You may as well start looking for a new job because you're done in the Bigs.

Aside from what I think I know about Crawford and his psyche, about the only other thing that I know about him is that his nickname was"Shag". It's not because he was a lady's man, but because he looked like he always needed a haircut. And with his bushy hair, his equally busy mustache and the reddish-brown color, Crawford also resembled the shag carpeting found in most 1970s dens and rec rooms. On this card, his looks screamed 1970s, despite it being the late 1980s. That's not what you want.

Another thing you don't want is to be part of Wade Boggs' Delta Force. When Boggs' paramour Margo Adams decided to tell all of her secrets, it wasn't just the Boston All-Star third baseman that were parts of her kiss-and-tell article in Penthouse. She talked about other members of the team, one of which was Crawford who along with Boggs and another teammate or two wanted to go back at pitcher Bob Stanley.

Apparently Stanley didn't fool around on the road and stayed loyal to his wife. This bugged Boggs for some reason and so him in the rest of the Delta Force got him hammered and paid a woman to seduce him and bring him back to his room. As Stanley and his lady were getting undressed and ready to rock, Boggs, Crawford and others broke in and started snapping pictures.

I'm not sure what they attempted to accomplish with this "mission" but I guess Stanely was pretty embarrassed. So great job, guys!

Crawford hung up his cleats after the 1991 season. He didn't pitch a ton, but when he did, he got hit hard. I bet those hobgoblins were bugging him big time by this point in his career. 

I'm not sure what the guy has done in the subsequent 30 years, but whatever it is, I'm sure he's doing fine. Whenever he's at his low point, Shag Crawford could always say that he was a Major Leaguer for ten year who got to pitch in the World Series and there is no way that you ever could think about doing that on your best day.

Tom Gordon 1992 Pinnacle

On January 14, 2017 I received this card from the Baseball Card Bandit (BCB):

2019 Notes: Hey! That was two years ago yesterday! Crazy!

On Facebook, I wrote:  The first BCB showing of 2017 and it's Tom "Flash" Gordon pre-Sox edition. And it's postmarked Las Vegas, NV. Sin City, home of Wayne Newton, the Golden Knights (Trump showers praise on these guys--ha! Political!) and coming soon, the Raiders. Speaking of the Raiders, Gordon is shown wearing Bo Jackson's old number 16! Blasphemer! 

2019: Sweet Donald Trump pee tape joke. 

Anyway, we have a lot to thank Tom Gordon for. Saving 46 (I think) games in a row in 1998 -- before blowing a save in the first game of that year's playoffs.And for having the yips in 2004 when he was with the Yankees. 

Gordon did have one of the best curve balls I've ever seen, going from 12 to 6 and making hitters look really silly. He was also a diminutive man, his card says 5'9", but I bet he was smaller than that. 

2019: Gordon was also a member of the Cubs, White Sox, Diamondbacks and Astros. If you put a gun to my head and asked me to name all the teams Tom Gordon was on, I would be dead because his appearances with Houston had been erased from my mind. 

But that's why baseball is the greatest sport on Earth; you don't have to be freakishly tall, wide or have exceptional good balance to be a star. You just have to be you. That's the lesson today, kids.

2019: Tom Gordon was a really good ballplayer. He might not be a sure-fire Hall of Famer, but he was a two-time All-Star and if you wanted to build a bullpen in the 90s or 00s, you could do a lot worse than Tom Gordon. However, once the postseason started, you should probably think about leaving Gordon off the roster. 

His career ERA in October was 7.06 and he was torched by the Sox in 2004, to the tune of ten hits and six runs in six innings including two home runs. His ERA in that series was 8.10 and if you're a Yankee fan and want to point fingers, Gordon might be the guy you start with. Or maybe Joe Torre, why did he keep running him out there to get a beating? I don't know, I'm just glad he did. 

Actually, now that I look at the numbers, Gordon worked nine games in that post season to go along with the 80 that he pitched in during the season. My guess is that he was wiped out come October 1. Torre really put him through the meat grinder that year. BTW, the next year he appeared in 79 games in the regular season and three more in the postseason. That's insane. 

To be fair, Gordon was just as bad with the Red Sox in 1998 and 1999 and again with the Phillies in 2007--though aside from 1998 (73) he didn't appear in nearly as many games as he did with the Yankees. 

Oh well, the post season is a crap shoot, I suppose. One minute, you're Tom Gordon getting your head kicked in and the next minute your Nathan Eovaldi mowing down Yankees, Astros and Dodgers like he's mowing a lawn. Baseball is a funny game. 

Gordon's son Dee has played in the majors since 2011 and like his dad is also a two-time All-Star who hasn't experienced a lot of post season success either. But despite the bad luck in October, that's not a bad career either. 

Scott Cooper 1992 Pinnacle

On September 11, 2016 I received this card from the Baseball Card Bandit (BCB):

This is what I wrote on Facebook:

I received a belated birthday gift in the mail yesterday from the Baseball Card Bandit. Two-time All Star Scott Cooper. 

A cornerstone of some terrible Red Sox teams, Cooper was the only player deemed worthy of joining the Mid Summer Classic. 

Thanks to you Scott Cooper for giving us a bench mark for true mediocrity!

2019 Notes: I think that when people talk about how crappy those early 1990s Red Sox teams were, Scott Cooper is the shorthanded reference which needs to be said. Like I wrote a few years back, Cooper was a two-time (!!!) All-Star representative from Boston and it was because no one on those teams were very good. 

In both games, he came in for the guy he replaced in Boston; Wade Boggs. 

The Red Sox were pretty bad in 1993, but Cooper probably shouldn't have gone to the ASG. Mo Vaughn had a much better OPS+ (Cooper didn't even crack 100), John Valentin did, Roger Clemens could have made it on his name alone -- even Danny Darwin and Mike Greenwell deserved it more than Cooper. The same players, except for Darwin, all had the same arguments the following year when Cooper inexplicably made it again. 

I suppose there were less really good third basemen in the league than there were first basemen, shortstops, outfielders and starting pitchers. Like a lot of things in life, Cooper was just the right guy at the right place at the right time. Or maybe Cito Gaston -- the World Champion Toronto Blue Jays manager who chose the reserves for the 93 and 94 teams -- really liked him for some reason. 

I don't know. 

But I do know that in the annals of baseball history, there are a lot of bad choices for All Star teams; but there isn't many worse for two-time All Stars. 

After everyone came back from the 1994 strike, Cooper was traded to St. Louis where he lasted with the Cardinals for one year. After the 1995 season he played for a year in Japan with the Seibu Lions and then came home. In 1997, he moved across Missouri and signed with the Royals where he finished his career.

The Potential of Potential and the Rules of Winning

There are only two ways you can look at yesterday's trade of Johan Santana from the Minnesota Twins to the New York Mets if you're a Boston Red Sox: a. awesome we get to keep our kids and the Yankees don't get Santana or b. why didn't we try harder to get him? Ultimately the choice you make colors the way you look at winning.

Inspired by a thread on Sons of Sam Horn, “Are there rules to winning?”, this entry is about the aesthetics of winning. In other words, is there a correct way or an incorrect way of building a championship team? To the hard core, “winning is the only thing” type of fan; no, there isn't a right or wrong way. The bottom line is where you finish. If you finish as the World Series runner-up, you didn't have a good year and need to retool right away by any means necessary.

The other side of that coin, is that in order to win “right” a team can't be a collection of guys assembled from other teams. They have to come up and be nurtured through your farm system for a few years to be considered “real” members of your team. Trades and free agency can augment your team, but it can never be the sole mortar used for assembling a championship squad. For some reason, these people want a degree of difficulty added to an already difficult proposition.

Think of the 2003 Red Sox. They had a team that was a brain fart and five outs away from going to the World Series. Did General Manager Theo Epstein and his front office crew think that lightening would strike twice and they were destined to be in the same place the following year with the exact same team? No. They got rid of Grady Little and hired a manager that would heed their scouting reports. Traded some minor league chaff to the Arizona Diamondbacks in exchange for their ace, Curt Schilling, and spent a boatload of cash to land the best reliever on the market, Keith Foulke. At mid-season, they traded their home grown shortstop for a better shortstop and some bench depth.

You know the rest, the 2004 team went on to win the World Series. Was there disappointment because the team only had two home grown players (Kevin Youkilis and Trot Nixon), four if you include Curt Schilling (originally drafted by the Sox, but never played for the team) and Ellis Burks (also drafted and starred for Boston early in his career)? I don't think so. That year, the Red Sox were essentially a team of well-paid baseball Hessians that won the Series after 86 years of failure. From David Ortiz to David McCarthy, none of those players will ever have to pay for a drink in Boston again.

In contrast, look at the 2007 Red Sox. Another World Champion, but this time there are six home grown players, nine if you count Schilling and Japanese imports Hideki Okajima and Daisuke Matsuzaka. Does this team resonate any more or less with you than the 2004 team (forget that the 2004 team erased 86 years of history—I know it's a big caveat, but stay with me on this) simply because Jonathan Papelbon was a Lowell Spinner or Jon Lester spent some time in Pawtucket? Of course not, both teams overcame great post season odds and established themselves champions by playing hard at the right times. Who cares where they played ball before Boston? In the long run, aside from Manny Delcarmen, none of these men are true Bostonians or Massachusetts residents before they put on the Red Sox jersey.

People may have been a bit more exuberant to celebrate the 2004 team than the 2007 team, but that was strictly because of decades of frustration being shrugged off in one magical three-week period. There is no asterisk next to the 2004 Championship.

What does this have to do with Johan Santana? It's simple, there is a faction of people in blogland and in print and on the radio, who feel that the Sox somehow bettered themselves by not landing the best lefthander of the last seven years. They will argue that when/if the Sox win the Series next they'll have done so with their own players and thus not end up like the Yankees. That's the favorite target of these people, pointing to the bloated payroll of a collection of travelling All-Stars who routinely buy their way into postseason year after year.

In addition to supporting a team with the second highest payroll and not understanding that the rest of Baseball America lumps the Sox in with the Yanks, in terms of grossly overspending for talent, many of these same people are smitten with the idea that the the potential for greatness is better than greatness itself.

It's not.

Sure, Jon Lester or Jacoby Ellsbury or Jed Lowrie or Justin Masterson (all names rumored to go to Minnesota in exchange for Santana) could be either good or great players down the road for the Red Sox. The key word in that last sentence is “could” and Santana is great now. Barring injuries, having him anchor a rotation of Beckett, Matsuzaka, and Buccholz for the next five years would've been terrific.

Chances are good that some of those prospects either aren't going to get a chance to prove their mettle in Boston (for example, Julio Lugo is signed for three more years and Dustin Pedroia isn't getting traded—what does that mean for Lowrie?) or they're going to flame out (Phil Plantier, anyone?). If one of them will be even half as dominant as Santana, I'll be surprised. But that's the understood gamble with prospects, only some people don't seem to remember that when it comes time to let go of them.

For every Jeff Bagwell, there's a Frankie Rodriguez. For ever Hanley Ramirez, there's a Tony Armas Jr. or Brandon Lyon. In order to get value, you have to give up value. Trading your highly ranked prospects isn't “going the way of the Yankees” or some other inaccurate cliché. It's Baseball Economics 101. There are 25-30 guys drafted every year, all of them will not be making the big club. The trick in establishing a championship team is keeping the two or three draftees that will make you a better team and unloading the others on poor schmucks for their better players. That's not just the way baseball works, it's the way all sports works.

Whether Red Sox fans like it or not, if the Yankees are number 1 in terms of payroll, the Sox are seen as 1A. It's about time that the fandom embraces that, because the Little Engine that Could version of the Sox left the station the first year their payroll went over $100 million. And that's ok, it's alright to have a team make a lot of money and use that money to win. The owners of the Twins and the Royals are among the richest people in America, do you think that the citizens of Minnesota and Kansas City would rather have them use their money to better their teams or line their coffers? The answer is obvious.

There are no bonus points for winning a World Series through some arbitrary “correct way”. A winner is a winner is a winner, no matter how the team is constructed. When it comes to professional athletics, Vince Lombardi was correct, “Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing.”