A long weekend of baseball on the south side of Chicago and the final result was the Sox won all 4 games.
The clock on top of the venerable Wrigley Field scoreboard read 8:06 p.m. Monday when tornado sirens began to wail in the darkness. Action between the Cubs and Astros had been suspended already for nearly a half-hour.
Then, minutes after the sirens howled, the wind started blowing out. Like, really out. Like carry-a-ball-to-the- Michigan-shoreline out.
Rain pulled a U-turn within the stadium. Debris floated along a river of standing water on the warning track behind home plate.
All of it giving a new, unsettling meaning to "It's Gonna Happen."
On the day before the most recent Super Bowl, the Boston Herald ran a story stating a member of the team's video department taped the Rams' final walk-through on the day before the 2002 Super Bowl.
(later in article)
The Herald meanwhile, bit on a story that more responsible media outlets did not. The Herald was not the only outlet that had the information it printed Feb. 2, the day before the Super Bowl, but they were the only outlet that deemed the story solid enough to print.
Well since the next station was 30 miles away and we were low I grumbled OK. Go to the pump, swipe the card and then it says to select what brand I wanted. Pump would not allow that so back in to see Skip.
The paper is also having an online vote so readers can select their favorite.
My favorite Post headline didn't make the cut. When sports announcer Marv Albert was fired a decade ago after a sex scandal the post headline was
MARV GETS A PINK SLIP
Our feisty tabloid the Herald has tried at times to be a Boston version of the Post but it just doesn't work here. Former NY Post editor Ken Chandler found that out the hard way when he approved the worst front page in Boston history after the death of Victoria Snelgrove outside Fenway Park in 2004.
It's difficult to imagine that the Red Sox could find themselves in a land more foreign than the one they just vacated, but that will be the reality Saturday night when they (or perhaps a minor league lineup wearing Sox uniforms) take on the Dodgers in a Charles Steinberg circus production at the famed Los Angeles Coliseum, a place that hasn't been used for professional baseball in almost a half-century.
There's a reason.
The McCourts say they will sell no more than 115,000 tickets in the Coliseum, which coincidentally is just how many they need to sell to set the world record for the largest baseball crowd, the Australian national team setting the mark in the 1956 Olympics.
I don't know how many times my next-door neighbor has told me, "If only the McCourts can break that Australian record."
Who cares how many people fill the Coliseum other than the people who have to line up to go to the bathroom?
On a bright note, maybe it'll be like every other Dodgers game, the Dodgers announcing a crowd of 115,000 and only 25,000 sitting in the stadium.
The Dodgers could have cut ticket sales off at 90,000, everyone having a grand time without falling all over each other, but just how many people can you cram into a dump?
To help pad the attendance, the Coliseum entrance has been moved back from the building. Fans sitting by the Olympic statues outside the Coliseum will now be considered inside for attendance purposes, and will be watching the game on big-screen TVs.
And with the transcendent lure of bad traffic, bad parking, bad seats and utter meaninglessness as far as the standings go (even though the regular season will have already started for the Dodgers' opponents, the Boston Red Sox, in Japan of all places), more human beings will venture inside the Coliseum peristyle than have ever been to any single baseball game.
"This is more of an event than it is a game," Dodgers broadcaster Charley Steiner said. "It sounds a little grandiose, but it is kind of like a baseball Woodstock. People are coming to be there not necessarily for the outcome of the game. It's a celebration."
The Red Sox will play 3 games in Los Angeles over the weekend but Saturday night promises to be as strange if not stranger than Toyko. They will play the Dodgers at the stadium that Los Angeles played in when they moved from Brooklyn 50 years ago.
Baseball Tavern at 1270 Boylston St will not open until 8 AM
More locations are sure to follow.
By state law the bars can not serve drinks until 8 AM so enjoy a hearty breakfast and 'coffee' until 8 AM
New Hampshire bars can serve alcohol at 6 AM and many will open.
Even in Manhattan some bars will open early and the NY Daily News had a story on it today.
earlier post
60 years ago today the greatest hockey player of them all was born in Parry Sound, Ontario.
GREEN
Evacuation Day?
The holiday, celebrated each March 17 commemorates the day in 1776 when the British redcoats ended their occupation of Boston. By some happy coincidence, March 17 happens to be Saint Patrick's Day. How fortuitous that Suffolk County, a region which has a large percentage of citizens of Irish descent, was able to find an event which just happened to coincide with the day of celebration of Irish culture.
Now you know
Watching the news on Channel 4 Saturday morning the weather person just mentioned in passing that it was snowing at their BRIGHTON studio.Oh, it was a great story. They completed the trade in mid-morning on the East Coast. They flew him cross-country from San Francisco, where the Padres were playing, on a private plane. They arranged for a police escort, rushing him from Logan Airport to Fenway Park in less than 15 minutes as he changed into his game uniform in the back seat. (“First time I’ve ever been naked in a police car,” he later quipped.) He got to the park just in time to trot onto the field for the top of the first inning, to cheers worthy of a Williams or a Yastrzemski. And into the lineup he went, against the Yankees on national TV, no less.
In the 107 games he played for the Red Sox after that dramatic moment, Mirabelli batted .196 with 11 home runs, 41 RBI and 95 strikeouts. In that same time frame, Bard — sent to San Diego as part of the deal — has hit .305 in 211 games for the Padres, with a .380 on-base percentage and a .453 slugging percentage. Reliever Cla Meredith, the other player who went West in the trade, has a 2.55 ERA in 125 appearances.
Not much of a trade. But what excitement.
Books, supplies and expected student expenditures will likely push the annual cost of attendance and living at BU over $50,000. The BU Board of Trustees set tuition at $36,540 for the 2008-09 academic year, up $1,610 from $34,930 this academic year. Up from $10,950, the "basic" room and board rate is set at $11,418 for next year, Brown said in the letter to parents and students. For the 2007-08 academic year, the Office of Financial Assistance estimated books, supplies and "incidentals" at $2,532 for a resident student, according to its website.
