Photo Ops at The Ballpark

Back in May, I wore my Roberto Clemente jersey to a Pirates-Giants game at PNC Park, and upon seeing all the folks there in Giants gear, I hit upon an idea for a photo opportunity, and when I saw a guy wearing a certain Giants jersey, this photo was taken:

Followed soon by this photo:

This whole idea became a quasi-obsession as I determined to seek out certain jerseys worn by fans of the visiting team to take similar pictures.  Here are the results:

I wanted to find a "Musial" jersey, 

but was more than happy with Bob Gibson.

No, the Pirates didn't play Detroit here, 

but I couldn't pass up this one.

The goal last night was Ernie Banks, 

but Ryne is a Hall of Famer, too.

Everyone that I have approached for these pictures have been more than accommodating, and, in fact, often end up taking a similar picture themselves, and it has always sparked some nice conversations.

Not sure if I will get to PNC Park again this year, but if I do, there is a possibility that I could see the Royals (George Brett) and/or the Brewers (Robin Yount, Paul Molitor, Hank Aaron, Rowdy Tellez).  I also need to get one with a Willie Stargell and Dave Parker jerseys.

As Linda puts it, just another example of "Bob doing Bob things."

The Cruz Affair, and A Humiliating Loss

 

The announcement from 115 Federal Street that Oneil Cruz would be moved from short stop to centerfield came in such  a wonderfully ham-handed Only-The-Pirates fashion.  Let me count the ways.

1. It comes only a week after GM Ben Cherrington announced that Cruz "is our shortstop."  We weren't paying close enough attention when GMBC added "for now" to his ringing endorsement of his then-shortstop.
2. It comes 131 games into the season.  Not try it out in winter ball or spring training.   Let's start RIGHT NOW.  This, effectively, turns the remainder of the Bucs' season into early spring training, at least as far as the up-the-middle defense goes.
3. It was offhandedly announced midway through another stultifying Derek Shelton pre-game presser.  Not to be confused with his always riveting post-game pressers.
4. Word is that Cruz is "unhappy" about the move.  So much for what might be best for the team.  I also read that when the Pirates did try Cruz in the outfield a couple of springs ago, he made minimal effort in trying to learn the positions.   So now we will have yet another disgruntled ballplayer who will be counting his days until Free Agency Eligibility.

No way do I see this ending well for our Beloved Buccos.

(And thanks to Tim Benz, whose column HERE in Trib today served as inspiration for this post.)

********

And speaking of farces, how about that 18-8 loss to the Cubs last night?  Hey, lopsided games happen to everyone over the course of 162 games, but there was just SO MUCH to chew on in this one.  Again, let me count the ways.

1. The Cubs stole 8, count 'em, 8 bases on the Pirates.  This broke a team record that was set the year before the Titanic sank.
2. Mitch Keller struggled through four innings, throwing 97 pitches as the Cubs stole base after base.  Still, when he was pulled, the Pirates trailed only 3-2, and it was still a ballgame until.....
3. Domingo German came in and gave up 8 runs in the sixth inning, and effectively ended the game.  As was stated in a text chain conversation I was in during the game it was the worst performance by a German since their Army at Stalingrad.
4. Now down 11-3, Nick Gonzalez tried to stretch a single into a double and was thrown out by a mile.  As Greg Brown was incredulously saying "Gonzalez is headed to second", his colleague Neil Walker was heard saying "He'd better make it", and, of course, he did not.  Even the always rose colored glasses wearing Brownie was stunned that such a bone headed base running play was made when you're down by eight runs.
5. Not to be a "back in my day" kind of guy, but there was time in baseball when a manager would yank a guy out of the game right then and there and sit his ass on the bench to make an example and send the message that such stupidity will not be tolerated.  Guess that moves like that are not spelled out on the computer print outs that  so obviously governs Sheltie's decision making.
6. Then we got the Feel Good story of 33 year old pitcher Brady Feigl, who, after a journeyman career through the minors, struggling with injuries, and playing independent league baseball, got to make his first appearance in the big leagues, when Shelton finally pulled the plug on German, and immediately retired the first batter he faced on four pitches and ended the inning.  We got to see the proud parents and the tearful wife in the stands watching this long awaited debut.  Feigl then came out for one more inning and one-third of another and gave up six runs on seven hits.  This led to the ultimate embarrassment of.....
7. Sheltie asking first baseman Rowdy Tellez to finish the last inning and end the misery.  This, by the way, was the second time in three games that Sheltie did this with Tellez.  To me, having a position player come in and pitch in a blow out is the ultimate embarrassment for a team.  There is nothing cute or funny about it.  If I'm Rowdy, I march into Shelton's office after the game and say, "I've done you this favor twice now, but don't embarrass me like this ever again."   (Still, Tellez' ERA of 5.40 is a whole lot better than Feigl's 32.40.)

This is Year Five of the Cherrington/Shelton Regime, the year when it was ail to come together, and right up until August 1, the team was contending for a spot in the playoffs.  Then the bottom fell completely out and there were bad losses and a ten game losing streak.  Some sources are saying the GMBC really felt that 2025 was to be the year when it all came together.  Same old bullshit from the Front Office.

I never like to see anyone lose his or her job, but if it was up to me, after seemingly giving Gonzalez a pass on that base running gaffe and the Tellez pitching embarrassment, I would not have objected if Sheltie was given the pink slip before he even got to take a shower last night.

Tonight Linda and I head on down to PNC Park to watch this mess of a team take on the Cubs once again. It will be my ninth game of the year, and looking at the schedule and my calendar, it just might be my last visit to the ball yard this year.  The team is a mess, the manager stinks, and the team owner may well be the worst in all of professional sports.  Loyalty to a sports team is always a one way street, but it is an addiction that can never be shaken, I'm afraid.

At The Movies with The Grandstander

Two movies for your viewing pleasure..... 

It Ends With Us

A 2016 best selling novel by Colleen Hoover was big on the book club circuit, and it has now been brought to the screen by producer and star Blake Lively and director Justin Baldoni, who also co-stars in this with Lively.

This is a movie about domestic violence and the cycle of it that seems to repeat itself through generations.  Frankly, I would never have chosen to see this movie on my own, but Linda wanted to see it, and God knows she goes along with a whole lot of stuff that I want to see, so what the hell, off I went to see something that I thought might be just a glorified movie-of-the-week type melodrama.

In fact, It Ends With Us turned out to be pretty good movie about a most disturbing subject.  I knew of Blake Lively, but was not familiar with any of her work.  My favorite movie critic/podcaster Arch Campbell likens her to the type of leading lady that was prominent in the so-called golden age of Hollywood glamour girls like Rita Hayworth, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, or Myrna Loy, and I won't disagree with him.  She is certainly beautiful, and she was great in the lead in this one.  The male lead with whom she falls in love, marries, and has a child with was played by Baldoni.  He was okay, but that rugged handsomeness that he projected, with the multi-day growth of beard, and tousled hair with the lock that doesn't quite stand straight up and doesn't quite fall on his forehead was just a bit too manufactured for my taste. Then again, maybe I'm just jealous.  Jenny Slate, as Lively's girlfriend and Baldwin's sister, struck a great chord between comic relief and wise counsel to Lively's character.

I ended up liking the movie and I'm glad I went.  Domestic violence is a serious topic that doesn't make for "feel good RomComs", so know what to expect going into this one.  (A group of thirty-something women were seated near us in the theater and when the movie was over, one of them looked at the one of the others and said "Why didn't you tell me what this was going to be about?")

Three Stars from The Grandstander.

The Greatest Night in Pop

Were you around in 1985, and do you remember when the song "We Are The World" was recorded by group over forty pop music stars of the day in an effort to raise funds for famine relief efforts in Africa?  This was inspired by Bob Geldof's Live Aid concerts that were held in London and Philadelphia that same year.  This documentary of how that project came about, and the amazing effort that went into recording the song in one night when all of this incredible talent came together was released on Netflix earlier in the year, and we finally got around to watching it thais past Sunday.

If you don't know the story, the project was conceived by Quincy Jones and Lionel Ritchie.  They had to come up with a song, which Ritchie and co-writer Michael Jackson did, find a studio, and, most importantly, figure out a way to get so many stars together in the same place an the same time, and record the song in one session.   How they managed to do all of that is the story that is told in this terrific documentary.

The recording session was filmed throughout in order that a music video could be released along with the record.  In this film, current interviews are held with Ritchie, Jones, Bruce Springsteen, Huey Lewis, Cindy Lauper, and Sheila E, artists who performed in the song, as well as many of the recording technicians who were there.  In addition to those artists others who performed included Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Paul Simon, Kenny Rodgers, Al Jarreau, Darryl Hall and John Oates, Kim Carnes, Diana Ross, Dionne Warwick, and Tina Turner. and I know I'm leaving a whole bunch of them out.  One great line in the film was Paul Simon being quoted as saying "If a bomb goes off in this place tonight, John Denver is back on top again."

It was fun seeing people like Ritchie, Springsteen, Dylan, and Lewis forty years younger than we know them today, and sobering to see how many of those stars are no longer with us.  

"We Are The World" won the Grammy for Jackson and Ritchie for Song of the Year, and it did what it was supposed to do, raising hundreds of millions of dollars for famine relief, and in fact, royalties from the song continue to provide such relief to this very day.

Four Stars from The Grandstander.

"JAWS" - Book vs. Movie

 THE BOOK

vs.

THE MOVIE

Back in 1970 or so,  Peter Benchley, a former speechwriter for Lyndon Johnson, and now a freelance writer, saw a story in a newspaper about a shark attack on humans near Long Island.  Intrigued, he clipped the story and carried it in his wallet.  Benchley was both the son and grandson of literary men, and he was an aspiring novelist himself, and he kept kicking around the idea of writing a "shark story".  Long story short,  Benchley struck a deal with Doubleday to publish what would be Benchley's first novel, "Jaws".  

The book was released February 1974 with low expectations.  What first novel ever became a best seller, right?  Well, "Gone With The Wind" did, but that was about it.  Funny thing, though, the book caught on, and even before it began its climb up the best seller lists Bantam bought the paperback rights for $500,000 and Universal Studios bought the movie rights for $150,000.   When the paperback edition was published in 1975, it ended up selling over nine million copies, and it seemed that just about EVERYONE was reading it, including a 23 year old, pre-Grandstander Bob Sproule.

Universal, meanwhile, had assigned some 27 year old kid, a guy with one feature film on his resume, named Steven Spielberg to direct the movie version of the book.   The rest is movie history.  When the movie was released in the Summer of '75 people stood in lines around the block to see it, and the concept of a Summer Blockbuster Movie was born.  If Everybody had read the book, Everybody and their Mothers, Fathers, Sisters, and Brothers went to see the movie.

So what's prompting this Blog Entry?

Well, last month on the 4th of July, I thought it would be  terrific idea to pull out my BlueRay Disc of "Jaws" and watch it once again.  This was, I felt an especially good idea since Linda had never seen the movie, a fact that I couldn't believe.  Shortly after that viewing, I saw a  Kindle Deal of the Day email that offered an e-version of Benchley's original novel for $1.99, so I snapped it up.   While I had seen the movie many times, I had only read the book once, and that was forty-nine years ago.  As I have alluded to many times in this forum, reading a book or seeing a play or movie many years after the first time  can offer a different perspective on the work in question, and I wanted to see if, like the movie, the novel has "held up" fifty years after it's publication.

It would also offer yet another opportunity to answer the age old question, What was better, the book or the movie?  

SPOILER ALERT: At this point I will tell you that there will be spoilers in the following paragraphs.  If you've neither read the book nor seen the movie, but want to do so, then don't say that you haven't been warned.

In researching for this piece, I found an article by Benchley written in 2004 where he said that the movie folks told him early on that it was the punk kid director's wish to do away with the "mafia and sex stuff" from the book and just make a movie that was an all out suspense thriller.  Benchley said, in effect, what the hell, once Universal bought the rights, it was their property to do with what they wanted.

Sex stuff?  I do remember that in the book, Chief Brody's wife Ellen had an affair with Matt Hooper, but I couldn't remember the context.  Turns out that Ellen came from a rich summer family that came to Amity every summer, and that she "married down" when she married Brody, an Amity townie (not a transplanted NYC cop as he was in the movie) who had been on the police force his whole career.  She was at a point in her life where she was questioning her life decision and missing her days as one of the summer people elite.  Oh, she loved Brody and her kids, but, man, there just HAD to be more that being a cop's wife in tourist town.   Matt Hooper, the shark expert sent down by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, turns out to also come from a summer elite family, and was, in fact, the ten years younger brother of a guy that Ellen used to date!  Well, you could see what was coming a mile away, but the affair turned out to be a one time nooner in  cheap Ling Island motel, and in the end, Ellen realized that in Martin Brody, she really did have the life that she wanted.

Mafia stuff?  Remember Mayor Larry Vaughn, played so perfectly smarmy by Murray Hamilton in the movie?

Remember how he kept saying that they just COULDN'T close the beaches for the 4th of July Weekend, because, well, Amity was tourist town nd the residents depended on people flocking to it's beaches.  If there were no tourists, the residents would be unable to survive for the other nine months of the year.  It would be an economic catastrophe.

Well, that lesson in tourist town economy is still very much a part the novel.  Mayor Larry is also a real estate broker, so his income is dependent upon lucrative summer rentals, but it also turns out that Larry was involved in some shady land deals, stemming from a loan he had to take out years earlier from some loan shark Mob guys to help pay for his wife's medical expenses.  It was contrived and cliched and the denouement of this element of the plot was wrapped up by Benchley in a couple of paragraphs almost as an afterthought.

Oh, and disappointingly, in the novel Mayor Vaughn did not utter that line, "Amity, as you know, means friendship."

The three main characters from the movie are, of course in the book:

Chief Martin Brody.  The book version of Brody is, as noted, a lifelong Amity resident, not a transplanted New Yorker.  He understands the economics that drive the town, and, unlike Roy Sheider in the movie, he is willing to hush up some lawlessness in order to avoid publicity that could ruin a summer (a series of rapes from the prior year, for example).  He even agrees to leave the beaches open and stay quiet about Crissie Watkins' ill-fated midnight swim.

Matt Hooper.  Unlike Richard Dreyfuss' Hooper, the guy in the book was not at all likable.  A know it all punk kid, who thinks nothing of boffing the police chief's wife.  The novel's Hooper meets a different fate than the Dreyfuss Hooper, and you don't really feel bad about it at all.

Quint.  The hardboiled, hard scrabble fisherman who offers to kill the shark that has been demonizing Amity, if they pay him twice his going rate.  He is still concerned only about his money, still can barely tolerate the two goofs, Brody and Hooper, who insist on being on his boat with him.  He is not as introspective as Robert Shaw's version was (and by the way, how is that Robert Shaw WASN'T even nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Award that year?)  There is no USS Indianapolis speech in the book.  In the ultimate climax of the battle between boat/men and shark, this Quint becomes an almost cardboard character spewing profanities it the great white.

As for the movie, I wrote about it in a post on July 9, 2017:

When Spielberg agreed to do the movie - and he was only 27 years old at the time, let that fact sink in on you - his vision was that the shark should not be seen by the audience for at least the first hour of the film.  This would build suspense to the point that you would leave you seat when you did see it, and, yes, I STILL jump when that shark puts his head out for the water as Roy Scheider lays out that chum line.

Two lines of dialog from that movie have made their way into the current vernacular to the point that many people who use them may not even realize from whence they came:

• "This was no boating accident." To be used when presented with a set of facts and suppositions, often in the work place, that are obviously pure unadulterated bullshit.
• When confronted with a seemingly insurmountable obstacle, either at home, with your family, or in the workplace, who among us hasn't said "We're going to need a bigger boat."

So, what was better, the book or the movie?  As you can probably tell, I believe that Spielberg made the correct decision to eliminate the "sex and mafia stuff" and gave us a movie that is as fresh, and as terrifying, as it was when it first appeared in theaters almost fifty years ago.   The book is a good read, and maybe I've just seen the movie too many times to appreciate Benchley's book as I did when I first read it in 1975.  It's a Grandstander Three Star book, but the movie is a full blown Four Star movie.

Post Script:  After seeing it for the first time, what did Linda think?  She didn't like it, so what do I know?

 

The Paris Olympics

The 2024 Summer Olympics, or to be technical, the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad of the Modern Era, came to a close in Paris yesterday, and you can most certainly say that they were one terrific show.  

First of all, can any city in the world top Paris for sheer breathtaking beauty?  Credit the Paris Organizers for taking full advantage of the amazing backdrop that is Paris.

Secondly, NBC and it's various platforms did one tremendous job in covering the Games, and in Mike Tirico, they had a great host for the show.  Having the Peacock streaming app made it possible to see just about every event that you wanted to see, and see it LIVE as it was happening.  It made the five-hours-ahead time zone difference nonexistent.  Of course, being retired and being able to stay home all day and watch, helps out, too.

And while on the subject of NBC, I got a huge kick out of swimming announcer Rowdy Gaines and track announcers Leigh Diffey and Ato Boldon. Let's face it. swimming and track and field are pretty much niche sports that appear on most peoples' radar once every four years and to hear these guys get so excited and geeked out about this swimmer's split times or that runner's best race since the Worlds in Copenhagen three years ago was joyous to listen to.

And who would have thought that the absolute breakout star of NBC's coverage would have been this guy?

Snoop goes mainstream.  

Who saw that coming twenty years ago?

Snoop Doggy Dogg himself was pure entertainment.  In the pool with Michael Phelps.  Running a 200m sprint.  Covering equestrian events with Martha Stewart. Commenting on artistic swimming with Tirico.  Sitting on the sidelines and cheering at gymnastics and basketball.  It was great.  One story I enjoyed was some athlete telling of getting a text from his mother about how she was enjoying Snoop's coverage of the games, and the athlete reminding her that twenty years ago, she grounded him for buying one of his CD's.  Word is that NBC paid Snoop $500 thousand a day for his services in Paris, and it was worth every penny.

Now, to the games themselves and what stood out to me over these last sixteen days.....

Discovering the sport of Rugby 7s.  I'm still not sure of the intricacies of the deep-in-the-weeds rules of the game (like, how can you be offsides?), but for sheer non-stop action and entertainment, it couldn't be beat.  And the games are fast.  They consist of two seven minute halves with a short intermission and are over in less than half an hour.  Add to the fact that the USA Women won their first ever medal in the event, a bronze, and that they did on an Immaculate Reception-like score by Alex Sedrick (see photo below) with no time left on the clock only added to the fun.  Can't wait to see it again in 2028.  Unless, of course, some American entrepreneurs want to start up Major League Rugby 7's.

The performances of the USA Women's Gymnastics squad, led by Simone Biles.  The overall Gold won by the team and the All Around Gold won by Biles herself was great story given the back story of Biles' difficulties and subsequent struggles at  and after the Tokyo Olympics.  Although did you, like me, get a bit tired of the announcers playing up the "Redemption Tour" angle?

French swimmer Leon Marchand winning four gold medals in the pool and the home crowds going crazy each time he swam.

American Katie Ledecky, in her third Olympics, showing once again that when it comes to distance swimming, she is still Secretariat at the Belmont Stakes.

Where are the other swimmers?

On the track, there was Noah Lyles' photo finish Gold medal in the 100m, Cole Hocker's stretch drive for Gold in the 1500m, and American Men and Women winning Gold in the 4x400 relays.

Speaking of Secretariat at the Belmont, 

this is the number that the USA Women

 put on the field at the 4 x $00m relay.

And in team sports, Gold medals were won by the USA in women's soccer and in men's and women's basketball.  All three of the gold medal games were memorable, with the USA defeating Brazil 1-0 in soccer and both the men and women hoopsters beating France in tooth and nail battles, the women winning by one point and the men going right to the wire before Steph Curry took over and buried three - or was it four? - three pointers in the final minutes to secure the gold medal.   Oh, and let's not forget the men overcoming a 17 point halftime deficit and defeating Serbia in the semi-final game. The rest of the world is catching up to the USA in basketball, so winning these events will no longer be the sure thing that it has always been, so it makes this victories even more enjoyable.

A'Ja Wilson leads the ladies

Steph over Wembanyama

Talking about back stories, nothing can top the image of Brittany Griner on the Gold Medal podium, less than two years removed from a Russian prison.

It was indeed a most entertaining and enjoyable two weeks of sports viewing/entertainment.   After I turned 70 three years ago, the thought occurred to me of "how many more of these quadrennial events do I have left in me?"  My dad lived into his nineties with a sound mind and a reasonably sound body, so, God willing, I am hoping that there will many more Olympiads, World Cups, World Baseball Classics, and even, believe it or not, Presidential elections in store for me in the years ahead.  Any one of them, though, is going to have a tough time topping Paris 2024.  Good luck with that, Los Angeles.

A Chautauqua Sojourn

A few days ago I teased on Facebook by saying "When was the last time you checked into a hotel and got one of these?":

Well, the answer is that you get an old fashioned key when you check into this place:

This is the Anthenaeum Hotel at the Lake Chautauqua Institute and Resort in Chautauqua County, New York, about a three hour drive from the our home.  As an early birthday gift, Linda treated me to a one night stay in this old grande dame  of a resort hotel.  Many years ago, I had driven through the Chautauqua resort area, but had never stayed there, so this was quite a treat.  The Chautauqua Institute was founded 150 years ago in 1874.  In fact, we were there on the literal 150th Anniversary of the place, August 4.  It was started as a religious retreat and it is still that, but it also has evolved into a vacation resort with boating, golf, swimming, places to eat, and an amphitheater which houses the wonderful Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra.  More on that in a bit.

The hotel is a beautiful building, as are the grounds on which it sits, but it is old.   The key is only one example.  Window air conditioners and outdated bathrooms in the rooms are two others, but at least they had an elevator!  We were disappointed with our room, but, hey, we were only there one night, and the setting, the food, and a great lobby bar more than made up for it.  Another thing that is old at the Anthenaeum is the clientele.  I turn 73 next month, and I'm guessing that I was below the average age  of the folks who stayed there.

No matter though, because the highlight of our stay was a pops performance by the Chautauqua Symphony entitled "Sinatra....and Beyond" featuring guest vocalist Tony DeSare.  Linda was limited by our calendar by what date we would be in Chautauqua , so she was flying blind insofar as what we would see at the Amphitheater that night.  She was gonna take whomever or whatever happened to be scheduled for August 3, and did we luck out.

No, we had never heard of Tony DeSare, either, but what a performer!  He did a two hour twenty minute set, with an intermission, that paid tribute to Frank Sinatra.  He was not a "Sinatra impersonator", but rather a talented and engaging performer in his own right, who more that did justice to the Chairman of the Board's musical stylings.

He also did some of his own songs.  He is also a singer/songwriter who has recorded his own  music and has performed across the country.  He told a delightful story about performing in a New York City hotel cabaret when he was terrified to discover one night that none other than Paul McCartney was in the audience.   And after an program of Sinatra ballads and his own jazzy love longs, he and the terrific Symphony closed the evening by bringing down the house with Jerry Lee Lewis' "Great Balls of Fire".  He didn't play the piano with his feet like the Killer did, but he more than did it justice.

It was great one day/night getaway, and a terrific birthday gift from my wife.  I will close with some pics from our trip.

We ate lunch at a place called The Fish in the town of Bemus Point, NY

Here we are with the maitre d'.

We also stopped at this Bemus Point watering hole, which was, apparently,

a big stop on the Big Band circuit back in the day.

By the way, I had mentioned that I had been in this neck of the woods once before.  In a Grandstander post dated September 20, 2013 (you can look it up) I called Bemus Point a "Mayberry-like village" and posted this photo to prove my point:

Well, times have changed, and Bemus point has changed with them as this photo taken this past Saturday from the same approximate spot proves:

Finally, a couple of shots if that terrific open air amphitheater where we saw the concert on Saturday night.  What a wonderful musical venue!

I will close by telling you that someone had an idea about what a great time we would have and tried to stow away for the trip.

She didn't get away with out, though.  And we aren't going to tell her that the Chautauqua grounds are dog friendly.