Cooooooop!

Cecil Cooper is the special guest at Time Warner Cable Field today.  He is the subject of this column in the Post-Crescent.

So how about telling us about that cool autumn night in '82 when you strolled to the plate facing this situation: Bags full. Two outs. Outcome in doubt. A pennant aching to be raised. Tension unbearable.

"You're thinking maybe this is another chance for me," said the 60-year-old Cooper and former Brewers slugger, who will be at Time Warner Cable Field at Fox Cities Stadium today in conjunction with the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers' scheduled Midwest League game against Burlington.

"You're kind of hoping there's another chance here. There were two outs, and there might not be another chance to do it again, to get up there again in that situation. You always want to do that as a player. You want to be up in those moments. So I'm sitting there, wishing and hoping that it comes to fruition.

"Lo and behold, I get up there with a chance to give us the lead. I had to kind of battle a little bit in the at-bat, but I got a pitch to handle and laid it out in left field and it turned out to be, I guess, the biggest moment in Brewers history."

Relive it now..

June 6, 1944

Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!

You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened. He will fight savagely.

But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!

I have full confidence in your courage and devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!

Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.

....................SIGNED: Dwight D. Eisenhower

MLB.com story from June, 2004.

Sixty years ago today, on June 6, 1944, with thousands of Allied troops storming the beaches of Normandy and the future of the free world hanging in the balance, America held its collective breath. As the battle raged throughout the day, news trickled back to the homefront. When it became clear that this was the beginning of the end of World War II, all of the day's baseball games were canceled.

That had happened only once before, on the day U.S. president Warren Harding died in 1923, and the only time it happened afterward was when Commissioner Bud Selig stopped play for six days from Sept. 11-16, 2001, because of the terrorist attacks.

Thirty-five Hall of Fame members and more than 500 Major League players served in World War II, according to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Many of them served as fitness trainers, morale officers or in other non-combat roles. But among the sailors and soldiers participating in the D-Day invasion were future Hall of Fame baseball players Yogi Berra and Leon Day.
...
n the 1998 book, "A Mile in Their Shoes: Conversations With Veterans of World War II," author Aaron Miles included a conversation with a veteran named Lou Putnocky that offered an interesting view of serving on D-Day along with Berra.

"He was a coxswain on one of the rocket boats," Putnocky said in the book. "He was attached to the admiral's staff. Let's figure they brought maybe a hundred men to supplement our crew of 500, and Yogi Berra was attached to Admiral Moon's staff. He latched onto our particular group because that's where the action was, and he said to us that the admiral was such a nice man. He said that when he was in England, with thousands of sailors, he was able to recognize men and he would stop his jeep with the two stars and he would pick up seamen that were part of his ship. He didn't know them by name but he knew them by looks, and he would pick them up in the staff car, which was very, very unusual. But this was the kind of man he was, very well-liked.

"Yogi was very personable. Of course it always would come up in conversation when you had new people, 'What are you gonna do after the war? What did you do before the war?'

"And he said, 'Oh, I played ball, at Norfolk, in the minors.'

"And we looked at him, with his bandy legs. What the hell kind of ballplayer is this; are you pulling our leg? Were you a batboy or something? And we never paid much attention. He didn't elaborate on it too much. It would come up every now and then, and we would kid him about it.

Go read it all.

Bird on a Monday Night

That's the title of this week's Mehring Monday. The topic is:



Plus, my rambling idea for a TV show.

A Little Phillies-Dodgers History

Since my go-to source for all things Dodgers hasn't updated in awhile...(Alyssa, where are you?)

I thought that this might be a little primer for the Dodgers-Phillies NLCS that starts tonight.

Philadelphia and Los Angeles have met in the NLCS four times. The Dodgers won in 1977 and 1978. The Phillies won in 1983 and 2008.

The Phillies probably could have won in 1977, but there was this little thing called Game Three or "Black Friday".

The Phillies led 5-3 with two out and nobody on base in the top of the ninth. Gene Garber, the closer, had retired the first two batters. Then, the Dodgers were down to their last strike and...

pinch-hitter Vic Davalillo shocked the Phillies infield by laying down an 0–2 drag bunt and beating it out. Lasorda then sent another pinch hitter, Manny Mota, to hit for pitcher Lance Rautzhan. Mota sent a deep drive to left that Greg Luzinski trapped against the wall. Ted Sizemore then mishandled Luzinski's peg attempt at second to try to nail Mota, scoring Davalillo and sending Mota to third. Phillie manager Danny Ozark came under fire later from the media for not having Jerry Martin, a faster outfielder, in left field at that point. Martin, many felt, would have reached Mota's liner easier than the bigger, slower Luzinski.

Davey Lopes followed by hitting a blistering grounder to third that took a wicked hop and struck Mike Schmidt in the left knee. Larry Bowa retrieved the carom out of the air, fired to first, and appeared to have retired Lopes, but Lopes was called safe. TV replays showed that Bowa's throw beat Lopes.[citation needed] Meanwhile, Mota scored to tie the game at 5–5.

Garber, in an attempt to pick off Lopes at first, threw wildly past Hebner, sending Lopes to second. Bill Russell then singled to center to score Lopes with the go-ahead run. Mike Garman retired the side in the ninth for the Dodgers, who narrowly escaped defeat.

The Dodgers went up 2-1 in the series and won Game Four in Philly to advance to the World Series against the Yankees.

They still take it a little hard in Philly.

That would be a link to an abstract of a paper written by an Associate Professor of Law Writing at Villanova. It's title is: The Fall of the 1977 Phillies: How a Baseball Team's Collapse Sank a City's Spirit.

The events that unfolded both in the stands and on the field at the Vet during the afternoon of what has become known in Philadelphia simply as Black Friday (October 7, 1977) would forever change how Philadelphians viewed the Phillies and ultimately themselves. After Black Friday (considered by some to be the worst single moment in Phillies history, eclipsing even their infamous 1964 collapse), Philadelphians would question whether things really were as different with both their team and their city as they were led to believe.

Whoa.

More than...

The Prodigal Beat Writer has this column on Phil Niekro, our Hall of Fame visitor to the ballpark last night.

"When I thought of the Hall of Fame, I always thought Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and Ty Cobb and all those guys that played way back," Niekro said. "And then you get in there with that group and you say to yourself, 'What the hell am I doing here? I'm not as good as these guys are. These are the greatest players in the game.'

"And then you get on that stage up there, and they give you that induction plaque. And you turn around and there's Whitey Ford and Yogi Berra and (Al) Kaline and (Harmon) Killebrew and Brooks Robinson and Tom Seaver and Steve Carlton. And you say, 'Well, I played with these guys — hell, I didn't know I was that good.' It's probably the greatest compliment a player can have in his career."

Lots of good stuff over that covers the career of Niekro to show that he was more than a guy who just threw a knuckler.

There is this keeper from Niekro's 300th win:

Finally, did you know Niekro, then donning Yankees pinstripes, won his 300th without throwing his patented knuckler until the final batter he faced? He was 46 years old at the time. And he fanned the guy.

"(Toronto) beat us and clinched the (division) pennant, and I think they were so 'champagned-out', I don't think they knew who was pitching, who they were playing against or what I was throwing up there," he said with a laugh.

Thanks for coming out to the game last night.

Sports & Spirit

The Appleton History Museum has a new exhibit starting tonight. You may want to check it out.

First from the Post-Crescent: Dan VanderPas column: 'Sports & Spirit': A new exhibit where Fox Cities athletes and fans can team up

Certainly, items worn by sports professionals with ties to the sports-crazy Fox Cities are interesting and make the past come alive. Who would have remembered that the football shoes Bleier, a four-time Super Bowl champion, wore while with the Steelers were two different sizes (10½ and 11) due to the war injuries the '64 Xavier High graduate incurred while in Vietnam?

And the scuffed-up bat Rodriguez used at Goodland Field during his first step on the way to an outlandishly rich contract in the bigs is a piece of our history, too.

But for me — a sports reporter who has covered the games people play in the Fox Cities for nearly 40 years — the upcoming exhibit will be about more than shirts, old clubs and footballs. It'll be about more than winning and losing, too.

What's precious about sports at all levels is that you don't have to be a star player or a member of a championship team to be an integral part of them. Sports are about camaraderie. They are a way to become involved in a pleasant diversion from the trials of daily life for participants and fans.

During my brief preview of the exhibit, I stood before a photo from a team that did its thing at the Appleton Curling Club during the '60s. You couldn't tell if this were a championship curling team or an also-ran. It didn't matter. They were all smiling. Through the history of Fox Cities sports, our games have brought us all together, just for the fun of it.

Channel 11 was there for a preview last night. Oh, video, too.

Here is the link to the exhibit site at the website.

I'll probably be checking this out at some point.

There is a new book out

Milwaukee Braves: Heroes and Heartbreak by William Povletich gets a review in the Hudson Star Observer. Reviewer Doug Stohlberg recounts how the Braves first came to Milwaukee.

In Boston, the Braves were unable to compete with the Red Sox and in 1952, the Boston Braves drew a paltry 281,278 fans – an average of 3,677 per game. Owner Lou Perini came up with a plan to move to Milwaukee. But, no announcement was made and the Braves went to spring training in Florida with the apparent intentions of playing in Boston in 1953.

A fact I did not know until I read Povletich’s book was that the St. Louis Browns (later to become the Baltimore Orioles) had announced intentions to possibly move to Milwaukee. Perini, however, owned the minor league Milwaukee Brewers (from where the now major-league team got its name) and had “territorial rights” to Milwaukee and essentially blocked the Browns’ move to the beer city.

Milwaukee citizens, of course, were upset with Perini for stopping major league baseball from coming to Milwaukee. Losing in the court of public opinion, Perini and major league baseball announced on March 18, 1953, that the Braves would play the 1953 season in Milwaukee. The official 1953 Milwaukee Braves team photo showed the team with a mixture of hats, some with a “B” for Boston and some with an “M” for Milwaukee.

I seem to remember a review copy around the office.....

Because I've got nothing else today

I was looking for a opening to Monday Night Baseball on ABC, but there was a theme only version at youtube. But, here is a little tour into the past that will work for a last post of the day.

Travel back to the heady days of cheesy animation and cheesier music. The open to Game Two of the 1982 World Series on NBC.



A few things:

Really liked the busts of the hall of famers.

Tony Kobek? C'mon, Dick.

Coleco Vision AND Anco were the sponsors. Awesome.

45 dies insquequo Oris Dies

Happy Birthday, Hammer

Hall of Fame Page.

Henry Aaron is 75 today.

Here is a newsreel of the pennant-clinching home run in 1957.



Thanks for the reminder, Right Field Bleachers.

Philadelphia Stars

Bleacher Report has this story on the Philadelphia Stars of the Negro Leagues. It starts with some pictures and a little history.

Decades before Jackie Robinson crossed the infamous color barrier in Major League Baseball, black baseball players were making names for themselves on the diamond in another way. African Americans had been playing the game of baseball since the mid to late 1800's, forming teams after the Civil War days and traveling on their own around the country to play anybody that would challenge them.

It was not until 1920 that a meeting was held between owners of these independent teams that the Negro National League was formed. The first organized Negro league consisted of teams from the midwest. With the organization of the league came more upstart leagues along the east coast, and in the south. The game of baseball was quickly spreading to communities in more urban and rural regions.

Ed Bolden owned the Hilldale Daisies, founded in 1910 and located in Darby, Pennsylvania. The Daisies were one of the early powerhouses of the Negro Leagues in the Eastern Colored League. The Daisies won the ECL's first pennant in 1923. The following year the Daisies won the pennant again and lost to the Kansas City Monarchs, the team Robinson would later play for, in ten games of a best of nine series (there was one tie). The Daisies won the rematch in 1925 in six games.

Make sure to read it all.

The Roosevelt

MiLB.com has the story about Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City and Jackie Robinson

Almost every baseball fan has heard the story of Roosevelt Stadium's most famous day. At the Minor League ballpark in Jersey City, N.J. on April 18, 1946, Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier by playing in the first integrated professional game in decades.

Playing for the Triple-A Montreal Royals against the Jersey City Giants in front of a standing-room-only crowd of more than 25,000 -- the stadium's official capacity was 24,000 -- Robinson hit a three-run homer, scored four times, collected four RBIs, stole two bases and went 4-for-5. Twice Robinson scored by bouncing explosively off the third base bag and causing a Jersey City pitcher to balk. In his first game in the Dodgers organization, he led his team to a 14-1 victory.

But Robinson's breakthrough day was only the first pioneering performance at Roosevelt Stadium by an African American, making the ballpark, which has since been demolished, a significant piece of baseball, and cultural, history.

There is more on Monte Irvin and Hank Thompson and their performances at the now-demolished stadium. Plus, there is this interesting story:

On August 15, 1956 -- 10 years after Jackie Robinson played in his first professional integrated game -- the Dodgers, who were looking for a replacement for Ebbets Field, crossed the Hudson River to host the Giants at Roosevelt Stadium.

This time, though, Robinson had a game to forget. The Dodgers veteran went 0-for-4 and was booed by the 26,385 fans at the game. The "visiting" Giants had built a considerable fan base in Jersey City through their Minor League affiliate.

This guy named Willie Mays hit a long home run for the only run in a 1-0 win for the Giants.

Evolution

Today's unpaid promotional announcement for the MLB Network is follows.

MLB Network can be found on channel 107 in the Appleton area on Time Warner Cable. Right now there is just a promotional film on the channel. Regular programming starts tomorrow at 5:00pm CDT.

Now, to today's story on the evolution baseball coverage.

Starting with print:

In his book, "But Didn't We Have Fun? An Informal History of Baseball's Pioneer Era, 1843-1870," author Peter Morris writes on page 40:

"The game's association with the printed word spurred its growth. For starters, print was ideally suited to communicating the changes made by the Knickerbockers. As anyone who has struggled with an instruction manual can appreciate, print is not a medium that is well suited for explaining something to someone who is entirely unfamiliar with it. But ... that was not much of a problem in the 1850s because the country knew the rudiments of the game. More important, print was effective for the task at hand: listing changes, updates, and revisions to an already familiar activity and thereby creating the uniformity that American bat-and-ball games had lacked.

To Telegraph?

In the book "Breaking News: How The Associated Press Has Covered War, Peace, And Everything Else," Thomas Edison is quoted on the remarkable manner in which AP set up a single, national circuit for the 1916 World Series that featured a knotted strand 26,000 miles long. That allowed AP to deliver the play-by-play direct from the ballpark to all 700 of its media members with no intervening relay or delay.

To a certain media that is pretty important to me:

That game on Aug. 5, 1921, was broadcast by KDKA of Pittsburgh, and the hometown Pirates beat the cross-state Phillies, 8-5. Harold Arlin was the first announcer. That fall, KDKA and WJZ of Newark, N.J., broadcast the first World Series game on the radio, with Rice and Tommy Cowan calling the games. They were not actually at the game, but rather, were reading the telegraph reports over the radio. The next year, they did it from what would become known as a broadcasting booth.

To another certain media that I've spent a lot of time with:

The first televised baseball game was on May 17, 1939, a 2-1 victory by Princeton over Columbia at the latter's Baker Field. The game was aired on W2XBS, an experimental New York station that later became WNBC-TV.

The first televised MLB game was on Aug. 26 of the same year, once again on W2XBS. Just as Rice had overlapped the transition from print to radio in calling that first game, now Barber was overlapping the transition from radio to TV by calling this Dodgers-Reds doubleheader at Ebbets Field. The Reds won the first game, 5-2, and the Dodgers won the second, 6-1. Barber made the call without benefit of a monitor and with only two cameras capturing the action. One camera was on Barber and the other was behind the plate.

with this little note

The 1948 Boston Braves won the National League flag and drew 1.46 million fans, and then they decided to sell the TV rights to all of their home games for the next two years. Before long, they were raking in TV revenue but fans were staying home in droves to watch on TV instead. In 1953, the Braves moved to Milwaukee and refused all offers to televise home games.

The internet in August 2002

It was an experimental stream of a Rangers-Yankees game, viewed by 30,000 fans, many of whom were at work and going back and forth between work and play windows on their computers. The following season, Major League Baseball became the first sports league to stream its full schedule over the Internet via what would become known to fans worldwide as MLB.TV. It also presented the first opportunity for full-scale on-demand viewing, letting fans choose any half-inning of any game that season as well as classics. In 2008, iTunes downloading of key MLB games became another staple for many of us.

Mobile and MLB Network finish the story.

A new way

During the Third Punic War between Rome and Carthage, Cato the Elder (pictured above) would end his speeches -- no matter if the speech was on Carthage, tax policy, or the latest play -- with the phrase: Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam. That would be Latin for: Moreover, I advise that Carthage must be destroyed.

That has been shortened up over time to Carthago delanda est (Carthage must be destroyed).

Where am I going with this?

Where am I going with this?

From now until Opening Day, the last post of a session or a day -- no matter what the topic of the post -- on Rattler Radio will have a similar ending to Cato the Elder's speeches.

110 dies insquequo Oris Dies*

110 days until Opening Day!

The Family Tree

Larry Stone uses the current search for a Marine manager to touch on a theory of managers.

About 650 men have held managing jobs in the major leagues in the past 137 years, but none of them is among the first round of seven candidates for the Mariners' vacancy.

And yet each of those candidates, for all his top-level dugout inexperience, carries with him threads of the game's history, and echoes of some of the titans of the lineup card.

Call it Six Degrees of Casey Stengel.

In fact, it was the Old Professor himself who once said, "If you're playing baseball and thinking about managing, you're crazy. You'd be better off thinking about being an owner."

Odd words from someone who managed for 25 years, with tremendous success (until he joined the Mets, anyway).

Believe it or not, the roots of Stengel himself can be found entangled in the current crop of Mariners candidates, if you believe a theory by the late baseball historian, Leonard Koppett.

In his 1993 book, "The Man In the Dugout," Koppett put forth what he called the "family tree analysis" of major-league managers. Koppett posited that all modern managers are descended from three epic figures — John McGraw, Connie Mack and Branch Rickey (who managed for 10 years before becoming a seminal executive).

McGraw, he said, was the original disciplinarian. Mack was expert at finding talented players. Rickey was at the foundation of teaching fundamentals.

It's an interesting read because of bits like this:

McGraw's stem passed to, among others, Stengel, who played for him on the New York Giants in the 1920s. Stengel, in turn, greatly influenced his fiery second baseman on the Yankees, Billy Martin, who passed on his managerial intensity to Lou Piniella.

Piniella absolutely rubbed off on his own sparkplug infielder in Seattle, Joey Cora — who interviewed for the Mariners' vacancy Tuesday.

"Invariably, some of these kids, they play for a manager, and they cherry-pick the things they like, and shy away from the things they don't like," Piniella said last week in a phone interview.

There are more examples like this and examples of cross-pollination. Just go read it.

Remembering 1982

in TV.

Continuing the look back to the last year the Brewers made the playoffs, here are the Top 10 TV shows from the 1981-82 season from this list. Mostly theme songs. Curse copywritten material.

#10


#9


T-#7


T-#7


#6


T#4


T#4


#3


PT I: #2


PT II: #2


#1

Remembering 1982

Since the Brewers are in the Playoffs for the first time since 1982, Rattler Radio is looking back at that year. Yesterday in song. Today...in movies.

Here is a top ten list of 1982 movies from Film.com.

Again, Rattler Radio challenge: Guess the film from the YouTube freeze frame.

#10


#9


#8


#7


#6


#5


#4


Bonus #4


#3


#2


#1:

Remembering 1982

in song.

The top 10 songs of 1982 according to this list. Please note, that it is not the Billboard Top 10 for that 1982. Despite the inclusion of Quarterflash on the Billboard list, I'm going to go with the listmaker's choices.

Rattler Radio Challenge: Can you name the songs without clicking on the link and by just looking at the freeze frame of the YouTube video?

It reminded me of something

This is how the first game at the new Washington ballpark ended:

This is how the first game at Coors Field ended.

Gleaming, new Coors Field hosted its first regular-season game on April 26, 1995, and Dante Bichette ended the night by leaving a glorious impression that still hasn't faded. The place opened with a wild game that ushered in a season of high-scoring, exciting and successful baseball, and Bichette punctuated it with a 14th-inning, three-run homer to beat the Mets.

There is a video link at the story. I'd love to embed it here, but MLB.com isn't that enlightened yet. I'm surprised Awful Announcing has the video of the Nationals game still available.

This should be fun

The Dodgers are hosting the Red Sox at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum tonight. The Coliseum was the first home of the Dodgers when they first moved to the West Coast in 1958 and with this being the 50th anniversary season they return to the cozy confines. How cozy?

Carl Erskine vividly remembers a most distressing experience at the Los Angeles Coliseum 50 years ago. Don Newcombe easily recalls the difficulty of doing his job there.

Erskine and Newcombe had plenty of company as pitchers for the Dodgers in their first four years in Los Angeles, having to ply their trade at a facility that was never meant for baseball.

Routine fly balls, pop-ups actually, soared over a 42-foot-high screen in left field, where the distance from home plate to the foul pole was a ridiculous 251 feet.

"I won't say it was a joy to pitch in the Coliseum," Newcombe said. "You felt like you were shaking hands with the left fielder."

No. Cozier.

Actually, it will be even more challenging, because the distance from the plate to the foul pole will be only 201 feet, although batters will have to clear a 60-foot screen.

"It'll be interesting and definitely something that will be talked about for years," Boston's Kevin Youkilis said. "[Batting practice] could be interesting."

Gotta love how AP uses a Red Sox player instead of a Dodger player for a quote.

Oh, and there will be people, lots of people.

The Dodgers said Friday that the full allotment of 115,300 tickets — with all the proceeds going to ThinkCure, the Dodgers' official charity — have been sold, including about 25,000 for standing-room only behind the lower fence in right and center. Two big-screen televisions will make it possible to watch the action.

Coliseum diagram from Ballpark Tours.