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| Monday, June 10 Baker's Dozen: The week in preview By Jim Baker Special to ESPN.com |
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1: Best Matchup of the Week Was the 2001 World Series the "best ever," as many have claimed? Whether it was or not, here's a chance seven months later to relive it with many of the same characters. Do you ever notice how stuff that is classified as "the best ever" is usually not very old? It's as though we can't stand the thought that maybe our great grandparents witnessed something that deserves that title.
2: The Finally! After All These Years We Finally Get to
See It! Matchup of the Week I think I speak for most people when I say that my nightly prayers as a child always included this addendum, (usually right after "God Bless Mommy and Daddy and all the ships at sea"): "Oh ... and please God, make there be some way that the Angels could play the Pirates. Please?"
3: The No Excuses This Time Matchup of the Week Baseball's longest-running unresolved feud will finally have its day in court this week -- provided Roger Clemens shows up for his appointment with destiny. It's been nearly two years since he trepanned Mike Piazza with a fastball and will, for the first time since, have to bat against the Mets. Like a lot of things that get tons of hype, (most Super Bowls, your senior prom) nothing will probably come of it. Let's see if the Mets prove Dusty Baker right. Responding to Clemens hitting Barry Bonds yesterday, the Giants manager said, "In our league he might be Roger the Dodger."
4: The All Florida, All the Time Matchup of the Week
There is a young team called the D-Rays
5: The Ron LeFlore Memorial Matchup of the Week No, he's not dead, but I didn't know how else to phrase it. With these contrived interleague matchups, there is often so little that links the teams to one another that one can almost make a game out of trying to find some bridge -- no matter how tenuous -- between the teams. This is the one I came up with for this series. Perhaps you could do better. LeFlore played brilliantly for the Tigers after his release from prison, but they traded him just in time to Montreal for Dan Schatzeder in 1979. It was they and the White Sox who paid the freight on his quick decline. (There were rumors he was older than his actual given age -- imagine that!)
6: The C.A.D. (Contraction Anxiety Disorder) Matchup of
the Week Now that the Twins have dodged the reaper's scythe (all cartoons of faux fuhrer Bud Selig should show him dressed as Mr. Death), the dark spotlight now falls on the Kansas City Royals as a possible victim of this malignant malfeasance. Here's a question: if the Royals were to be contracted, what would become of Kaufmann Stadium? Would Kansas City join the Pacific Coast League and have the finest facility in all the minor leagues? Has anyone taken the time to consider the ripple effect of contraction on down the minor-league chain? Not only would two major-league teams be lost, but 12 to 14 minor-league teams as well. Triple-A cities would be especially effected. Up to four current Triple-A franchises might go away; two would be lost because they would no longer have parent clubs and another two could become history if the cities that lost a major-league franchise took up the Triple-A banner.
7: The Polarity of Managerial Playing Experience Matchup
of the Week Without anything close to an argument possible, Frank Robinson of the Expos had the best playing career of any current manager. On the opposite end of the spectrum is the skipper of the Blue Jays, Carlos Tosca, who never played a single game of professional baseball. Let us distill the "who makes the best manager?" down to this simple sentence: it takes all kinds. To illustrate this, here are the career Bill James Win Shares totals for all 30 current major-league managers. There are successful and unsuccessful managers in every strata: Frank Robinson, Expos: 519
Joe Torre, Yankees: 315
Larry Bowa, Phillies: 179
Bob Brenly, Diamondbacks: 93
Clint Hurdle, Rockies: 43
Jim Tracy, Dodgers: 4
Grady Little, Red Sox: never played in majors
8: The Old School Matchup of the Week What -- you think I was going to say Detroit at Arizona, maybe?
9: The Biggest Mismatchup of the Week Poor Detroit. With no natural interleague counterpart to play on Natural Interleague Counterpart Weekend, their lot in life is to be paired with the world champion Diamondbacks, who also have no natural interleague counterpart. And, if they thought hosting the team with the worst road record in baseball was tough (the Phillies, who swept them), now the Tigers have to go on the road and flick sticks at Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson. Has a baseball game ever been given a line of -400? (In which a bettor had to lay down four dollars to win one.) If so, it can't have happened very much but it could happen this weekend in Arizona.
10: The Not You Again Matchup of the Week While their National League brethren are traveling to such far-flung destinations as Seattle, Minnesota and Tampa Bay, the Cubs are returning to Houston for the second time in the space of two weeks. I don't know what they're paying the schedule maker these days, but it can't be enough. What they are asking is some hard work.
11: The Buy Us a New House Matchup of the Week Before leaving office, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani promised both the Yankees and the Mets new stadia in which to ply their trade. This promise was quickly rescinded by the new major who balked at the $64 megagodzillion budget such incredible undertakings would require (and that was just for the payoffs to keep the project running smoothly). Do you think these teams need new homes? My answer is a rather predictable "no." But their homes could certainly stand for some serious sprucing up. I propose that the ballparks be kept in existence but reworked considerably: Yankee Stadium. That anyone would consider replacing Yankee Stadium for even a moment is wrong on so many levels I can't begin to address it. There exists, under all that '70s reworking, a jewel. My proposal is to renovate it once more and undo what was done 30 years ago. If you were a historical landmark and were up for renovation, the last decade in which you'd want it done was the '70s. This was a period in time when everything that was old and cool was being given a plastic remake. We've come a long way as a country in this regard and the time to bring the new preservation sensibility -- along with all the mod cons -- to the big ball orchard in the Bronx, as Art Rust used to call it, has arrived. The place needs to be opened up again, don't you think? That wall that stretches around the outfield should come down, exposing the place to the elevated trains once more. The concourses inside must be redone. A lot of cosmetic changes can be made to the exterior to make it feel right again (How about no more white wash?). At the same time, the place is big enough to accommodate the main need of a modern ballpark: luxury boxes. Clearly there are talented people out there who could make this all happen for a fraction of the cost of a new stadium. Shea Stadium. I warn you: do not wish away your ballpark, for it is the repository of your memories and once it is gone you will have less to go on when conjuring images from your past. A building of this magnitude should have a shelf life of more than 40 years. However, there is room for improvement. There is a lot of room beneath the stands to play around with. By reconfiguring those areas, Shea would lack for nothing that a place like Minute Maid Park in Houston has: museums, gift shops, restaurants, and wide concourses with floors so clean you can eat from them. There now remain just two ballparks from this era and we might want to try to save them for posterity's sake. If somebody had put the wrecking ball to Fenway and Wrigley in 1955, we wouldn't have them to cuddle up to anymore, would we? Not that Shea is cuddly -- it's too big for that. But its size could save it. There has always been a lot of wasted space in the outfield (early renderings had configured it to be the first "ashtray stadium" but the outfield area was eventually left open). This could be utilized to house more than five rows of rural high school football field bleachers and a giant top hat with emerging apple that looks very much like the papier mache project of an over-ambitious fourth-grade class. This is another stadium with plenty of room for the dreaded luxury boxes that modern owners demand. Part of me would like to see the Mets redo the stadium as it once appeared: as a stylistic adjunct to the 1964 World's Fair. (The strange thing about Shea is that it never really looked new. The lack of landscaping in the open end of the park always made it look like an incomplete construction site.) Failing that -- which would be a pretty cool retro look, although recalling a time nobody equates with the way ballparks should look if they are to drip with faux nostalgia -- the city could save 70 box cars full of money by hanging a new ballpark on the existing superstructure in Queens.
12: The Lonnie Smith Memorial Matchup of the Week No, he's not dead either, but -- again -- what else would you call it? This is so named in honor of the man who, had he run the bases with a little more acumen in Game 7 of the '91 entry between these two teams, would be the only person in history to play for four different World Champion franchises (he played for the '80 Phillies, '82 Cardinals and '85 Royals). If you're gauging "best" World Series in terms of closeness of games, this one gives last year's a run for its money.
13: The On the Road Again -- Thank God -- Matchup of the
Week
Check out ESPN Insider Jim Baker's 'Baker's Dozen' column appears on Mondays during the baseball season. He also writes Monday through Friday for ESPN Insider. |
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for the details on Boston's amazing road record.
