A few days before Christmas, I contributed a post to Jessica Quiroli’s High Heels on the Field about why I love minor league baseball. I came up with a bunch of reasons, all of them valid in my eyes, but one thing that didn’t make the cut was the story of the first minor league baseball game I ever attended. Part of the reason I left that game out and avoided turning the piece...
Baseball blogs have been aflutter with the antics of State College Spikes manager Gary Robinson. Robinson got tossed, pulled a base out of the ground, autographed it,and gave it to a fan. Baseball Tonight made a big deal out of how original this was. Others are hailing it as the greatest ejection of all time. In my ongoing quest to remind the world how awesome Butch Hobson is, however, I must point out that...
It’s a banner day: Nashua, New Hampshire made Deadspin. Wheee. For those who don’t like clicking links, the city of Nashua locked the American Defenders of New Hampshire out of Holman Stadium yesterday afternoon due to a number of unpaid bills. The team and city could not reach an agreement on an acceptable payment plan, so the few remaining home dates have been rescheduled as road games. As the title suggests, the situation calls...
Yesterday, Extra P brought us the story of Jacob Osterhout and his audition to be the mascot for the Brooklyn Cyclones. Jacob’s story made me laugh, yeah, but it also caused some seriously scary flashbacks. As I’ve mentioned on here a time or ten, I used to work for a professional baseball team (I think this is the first time I’ve talked about it this season, so if you had May 7 in the...
So hey, remember yesterday when I went on a mini-rant about the way old ballplayers have a tendency to fade gently into anonymity without anyone really noticing, and as an example I used the fact that I knew the whereabouts of perhaps one or two of the guys from my time in baseball? Mr. Moynahan, “Irony” is waiting for you on Line Two. As I was walking into a building with a client this...
I wrote early in the season about the ceremony to retire Butch Hobson’s number 17 in Nashua. Looking around YouTube tonight, I found a video of the event:
I was sitting in the scoreboard booth of the Holman Stadium press box, above and to the left of home plate, when James Lofton hit the most dramatic homerun my eyes have ever seen. The game had not started off well for the hometown Nashua Pride, knotted with the Bridgeport Bluefish at one-win apiece in the best-of-three Atlantic League North Division playoffs. Heading into the bottom of the sixth inning, they trailed 6-2, with...
You remember the old show “Unsolved Mysteries”, right? The one hosted to perfection by Robert Stack? Every so often, they would go through a case, present all the weird details, Stack would wrap it up…then, out of nowhere, the word “UPDATE” or “SOLVED” or something like that would flash on the screen and we would learn that what we had just seen was, in fact, no longer an unsolved mystery. Tonight’s Nashua Pride game...
When I went to a couple Nashua Pride games over Opening Weekend, I remember making a mental note that the team’s hitting coach was former major league slugger Richie Hebner, who also coached in Boston during my formative years as a fan. Maybe a week or two later, I noticed that Pittsburgh was giving away a Hebner bobblehead and thought it might be cool to talk to Hebner and get his thoughts on the...
“You know, they have Monkey Boy bobbleheads for sale out front.” Those were the words uttered by my friend Allison in the eighth inning of the Nashua Pride game last night. She and her boyfriend, Cody, had just returned from an excursion around the ballpark with my son. Holman Stadium is not that big, and they had found themselves on the main concourse. Their reason for being there is unimportant: what matters is that...
2012 05 14 Scranton Wilks Barre/ Empire State Yankees vs Pawtucket Red Sox
