Sportsvision on the people, following the sound judgment that you should make people pay for something they used to get free. Both men regret they didn’t think of applying this principle to drinking water.
1977 South Side hit men Zisk and Gamble capture the city’s imagination. Gamble’s Afro negotiates separate contract.
1982 Harry Caray jumps ship for the green green ivy on the North Side. 1981 Bill Veeck sells the franchise. Reinsdorf and Einhorn say they will restore a family atmosphere to the park and achieve same by adjusting prices so that families can attend; the Rockefeller family, the Daley family, the Pritzker family,
1975 Bill Veeck buys the Sox, threatens to bring entertaining baseball to the South Side. Attendance doubles, both men like what Veeck has done.
1973 Dick Allen perfects the art of smoking and stroking monstrous home runs at the same time.
1970 All the Sox players’ knees fall off.
1969 Sox install Astro Turf at Comiskey.
1965 Al Lopez resigns as manager. He had died two years previous.
1959 Sox make the World Series. Lose.
1951 Minnie Minoso and the Go-Go Sox pretty much go-go nowhere.
1931 Charles Comiskey dies. Flying monkeys are freed and Dorothy is allowed to go back to Kansas.
1919 WHITE SOX THROW THE WORLD SERIES. (My favorite!)
Ballpark ambiance: Boston: Green monster, Pesky Pole, Manual scoreboard, Yawkey Way, Citgo Sign Sox: Green seats that were formerly blue. All that concrete. The bar outside the park. The barbed wire and machine gun turrets that dot the neigborhood. And the lesson here? When we want to compare things, best to compare apples to apples, ashes to ashes, and Sox to Sox.
SUBJECT: Shouting at the TV and the 54 game curse Date: 5/29/2011 From: Tom W. To: Tom A. Good morning: I love well played baseball. I can appreciate a great pitcher’s duel, a clutch hit, a big strikeout on a great pitch, a terrific play in the field. If the game is played well and we happen to lose that day, during the course of the regular season I can handle that. In fact, I truly enjoyed the dual no hitter between the Cubs and the Sox last year and I even handled losing that game (it was easier knowing we had dominated the season series at that point.....) However.... When the Sox are playing badly at the ball park, I grumble a lot to myself. My friends who sit around me know that when lethargic hitting, sloppy defense or hanging sliders are the rule of the day I will start telling all around me “I am getting grumpy”.....this is the warning shot across the bow that a steady stream of R-rated criticism of the team I live and die with is about to come spewing from my lips. Occasionally I will simply stand up and shout some well-timed advice to a pitcher or hitter with phrase like: “It’s the white thing shaped like a house, try and throw over it!”; or “It’s called a curveball, they throw those up here in the majors!”; or “Gee, they can get a fly ball when they need one dammit, will someone take notes?” Last year when both April and May were dismal I lost it late in a game. Sitting in the club level Kenny Williams is sometimes visible in the press box and private suite area, and that night he was standing not far from our box behind some glass....but the window was open. As the Sox failed to execute any semblance of situational hitting coupled with a costly error that led to a blown lead late in the game, I blew like an over-stoked steam engine. Before I could stop myself, I started shouting out at the top of my lungs “Hey Kenny, are you watching this crap? Are you watching?? Hey Kenny, we paid to come watch this garbage, are you watching this...????” My compatriots in the box turned and stared at me in disbelief. No one was in a good mood as yet another game slipped away, but calling out the GM with a voice that probably carried out to left field was not something anyone expected. One of my friends just went “wow, I can’t believe you did that....”.....I just stood there shaking my head and said “I can’t take this anymore, if they don’t start playing better baseball I’d rather go watch a train wreck!” At home, my family knows that just about anything may come out of my mouth at any given moment, so it is a fairly regular occurrence that I watch the game alone in my man cave while the rest of them watch it upstairs. If the game is going well the grand kids will wander down first, sit in my lap and watch an inning or two. If the Sox are ahead my wife will come down for awhile and we may even wind up watching the end of the game together. If the Sox are stumbling (which they have been doing all April and May AGAIN this season), the door to the basement remains closed and I have a tendency to shout at the TV as if I was there when particularly bad things happen. In the past two days the Sox wasted another excellent pitching performance by Buehrle and lost 4-2 then followed that
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