84346 is what you get when you add up the ID numbers of which two prisoners?

With all my talk of Gedman, who was more of a cult hero, my true favorite (offensive) player of the (late) 80s kind of gets lost in the shuffle. That's Mike "Gator" Greenwell. Tonight, Mike goes into the Red Sox Hall of Fame. Congratulations, Gator.

(Of course, two of my other faves, Bill Lee and family friend Mo Vaughn, are also getting inducted tonight. I'll be reviewing the new Lee documentary, High & Outside, very soon.)

This page has a photo gallery showing the current Fenway facelift. It's crazy to see all the seats between first and third gone. Also notice the home plate screen is down, as is Pesky's Pole.

When I lived in NYC, my apartment was on the street as Obama's apartment when he lived there. About 500 away. When I lived in Somerville, MA, my apartment was on an adjacent street to Obama's when he lived there, about 1500 feet away.

Also, my Somerville place was 3.3 miles from Fenway Park, and my Manhattan place was 3.3 miles from Yankee Stadium. Did I mention this before?

After writing that, I wondered what was 3.3 miles from where I lived the first 25 years of my life in Connecticut. I thought, Well, the only landmark anywhere near us was the Danbury Fair Mall. So I checked it out: 3.3 miles.

View Larger Map

The Louisville Grays were a charter member of the National League, and played at the Louisville Baseball Park in 1876 and 1877, their only two years in existence. The team was involved in baseball's first gambling scandal. Their ballpark burned down a few years later, and the site became a posh neighborhood called St. James Court. They have an annual art show there, and this page tells about the history of the neighborhood, though it doesn't mention the ballpark.

I don't know how it was situated. But my guess is based on the fact that this page shows a picture of the building at the northwest corner of 3rd and Hill--so I figure it's on that block as opposed to the west side of St. James Court, or further north along that road. I put right field in that spot as opposed to home plate, as that would make for a tough sun. There is a plaque visible on Steet Views at the north end of St. James--I'd love to see what that says. Maybe home plate was actually up there. I thought maybe the park was in what they call "Central Park," but I have read that that park was already there, and the land south of it was all park-land, too, so the ballpark was in that southern section.

Next up: either Providence or something else. Maybe even another Louisville park.

Labels: old ballpark locations

Dustin Pedroia is your 2008 AL Gold Glove winner at second base! Nice job, guy. For a guy with less-than-average height and speed, it's amazing what he does in the field.

Photo by me, ALCS 2008.

Check out my guest blog today on Jungle Red Writers. Thank you to Jungle Red's Hank Phillippi Ryan--some of you Boston-area people may know her from WHDH-TV.

The new Fenway improvements. They're trying to get the All-Star Game in '12, too. I hope so.

I check we move to canada at least daily, and last night I noticed Laura was (kinda) live-blogging the election. Laura, being Allan's partner, is naturally part of the Joy of Sox community, which is where I go for game threads most nights of the baseball season (join us in '09!). So I started noticing other JoS-ers on there. It was like a political game-thread. (I finally left only because they were giving results a little ahead of the TV channel Kim and I were watching....just like in baseball gamthreads when one person's TV or radio or internet is ahead, and plays are given away before you see them at home! I thought that was pretty funny--and I did get to chat with them a little before signing off.)

And here's the podcast my mom and I did yesterday with Henry Delangelo on his show, "HDTV." Remember, all the Dirty Water news is at redsoxmystery.blogspot.com.

When I was little, all the things we learned about U.S. History seemed so far away. The last thing I thought George Washington was was an actual man, even though they told us he used to ride his horse around the Connecticut streets I grew up riding my bike on.

As I got older, it started hitting me like one-ton brick packages that this stuff, compared to, say, all of recorded history, wasn't so long ago, and involved real people just like me. The mass slaughter of Native Americans, the Civil War battles fought on our soil, covered by the New York Times as current events, women's suffrage, and, in my parents' lifetime, black people being thought of as less than human, forced to use their own bathrooms and water fountains, and not allowed to vote.

Today, we elected a black man president. Think about all those protest songs you know. All those Public Enemy albums. All those radicals who raised a fist in the face of the old, white, guard. Didn't it almost seem like a pipe dream? Like, "Yeah, we want black and white to come together, to be equal, of course--but the crusty white guys in charge will never actually let it happen...." Well, now a young, black, guy is in charge. It's almost like we skipped some steps and shot right for the mountaintop.

This is one of the most important days in this country's history. It may take a while for policies to change, for us to get out of Iraq, for health care to become universal, for the economy to be fixed... but race relations just got an immediate boost, and that might just be the most important thing.

Barack Obama, President of the United States. I'm proud to be here to see it.

284. Obama will get at least that many electoral votes by my math. Only needs 270. It's ovah, Republicans!

ARSFFPT has called it for Obama!

Look who missed Ohio....

With Barack winning the round on the sides and high in the middle state, it would appear he's got it wrapped up--McCain will get the giant middle patch, and Obama will get the west coast and Hawaii, and that alone would be enough to win it for the Democrat. And cover the spread.

Obama leads by 110. What's the point spread? Is he covering?

I was curious as to what a young* me wrote in November '04 on this blog. Turns out I just said the election was BS, and linked to Joy of Sox' coverage. He was still doing political posts back then.

I still say both puppets are being held by the same guy--but that doesn't mean I'm not rooting as hard as I can for Obama. Step one to turning this place around is getting a non-Republican in the White House. The fact that it actually would be a black dude would be incredible. Even if you're a right-winger, you gotta admit how cool it would be to know that all the hateful neo-Nazi, Klan-types in this country have a black man as their leader.

But you never know with these elections. Hopefully nobody screws with it to the point where McCain actually wins. More updates later....


*"Young" meaning I'd just started blogging that year.

5:00, i.e. right now, I'm on an internet TV show. It's audio only, but with slides, and it doesn't work for Macs, so I can't see/hear it myself, BUT, anyone will be able to watch the podcast later. I'll link to that when it's up.

Henry Delangelo Dot TV. (Click the green arrow on right side of that page.)

Planning a trip to Atlanta to see the Red Sox play in late June 2009? Register here for your chance to buy tickets.

I might actually attempt that trip this season--Baltimore, DC, Atlanta in a row. We'll see. Nothing like the above opportunity on the Nationals' site yet, but I think they'll do one since it's our first trip to their park.

UPDATE, 1 minute after last update: This Kwiz has been solved, see comments.

UPDATE, 2:12 PM: I went back to the comment style, in a pop-up window. So if you had problems, try again. Pweezil has already guessed Jeff Bailey by emailing me, that is incorrect.

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Who's this?

Saturday Night Live was my church. While all the other families were worshipping their respective gods, my family sat around the TV Sunday mornings watching the comic stylings of Terry Sweeney, A. Whitney Brown, and Gary Kroeger, to name a few non-famous players. I would tape the show, switching over to Headbanger's Ball on commercial breaks, and then watch it again with the rest of the family over donuts the next morning.

Obviously, the show has had down-periods, but I've always stuck with it if no no other reason than the fact that I'm always up late, and I'd almost rather watch a bad live show than a good taped one.

I don't watch "religiously" any more, but I've always wanted to see a taping in person. It's not as easy to get into as the nightly shows. You might remember my posts about Colbert, Conan, Dave, and The Daily Show. For those, you ask for tickets, and they give you some. For SNL, you have to send in an e-mail in the month of August. If they choose you at random, you get tickets to a live taping, or a dress rehearsal, which they do a few hours beforehand. Usually I think of this around the first week of September. This year, I remembered in time, told a bunch of people to send e-mails, and my lucky mom won. Of course, part of her "prize" was that I would be her companion. We got a dress rehearsal--last show before the election. We were psyched.

Took the train in. Got to 30 Rock in time to be pretty far up on the line. We knew McCain would be on, but we thought maybe he'd have a stand-in for our dress rehearsal. Nope. Secret service was there, ready to work security on top of the regular NBC guards. When we got up to the ninth floor after the detection of metal, we stood on a new line. We were right by the women's room, and got to watch as each woman coming out had her bag re-searched by a "uniformed division" member of secret service, since the bathrooms were "out of their territory." Uniformed division? Might as well call them the "un-secret" division. The guy was missing women left and right, as none of them were expecting it. Funny thing is, even a secret service person, as long as he's all alone and completely outnumbered, is treated like a rent-a-cop. "Hey, asshole, you missed another one!"

No, I didn't ask the secret service guy for an application, nor did I tell him my name was Henry Krinkle of Hopper Ave. You know, like a rabbit? Hip....hop...

So we get into the studio, are about to be seated in the last row on backless cushions against the back wall, and my mom tells the page she needs a chairback. He puts us down in the front row. Sweet! Same deal as any show, you've got cameras and sets all over blocking sight lines, so there are advantages to being in the front and back, but I liked our spot. Cast member Jason Sudeikis came out and said hi and warmed us up. Then he turned it over to Fred Armisen and Kristen Wiig. They didn't say anything--just broke into Blondie's "One Way or Another," with Fred on guitar backed by the SNL band, and Kristen doing a spot-on Debbie Harry. (Just the voice, she wasn't dressed as Blondie or anything.)

Then 80-something year old Don Pardo spoke for a while. I read that he still flies in from Arizona every week to do the announcing.

It was a little surreal to be in the studio, seeing the permanent sets right in front of me. When I say "front row," I mean the balcony--but that's where the bulk of the audience is. You see the floor seats during the monologue on TV, but there are very few of those. I think those are "special" people. But we were only maybe 50 feet from the front edge of the "stage," though that's only used for the house band, and then, to the left, the musical guests. The skits are done on the floor, configured every way possible. Sets are moved around quickly between segments, and the stars are whisked in and out of their spots. Ben Affleck was the host, and he almost couldn't keep up with the woman in charge of speeding him through the moving sets.

It was a pretty good show. I'm an Olbermann fan, but I thought Affleck's version of him was hilarious. McCain was okay, but a little stiff, which makes no sense, since he's always talking in front of people. I saw the final product, and it was cool to see what got left out and which jokes were cut from Weekend Update, and to see some mess-ups, like Affleck losing his gold tooth mid-sketch and telling us so. Did you see the High School Musical parody with adult students at night school? Affleck's character was in a wheelchair during dress rehearsal. They decided against it for the live show. He also did a James Carville impersonation that I think was completely cut. They seemed to speed everything up during the live broadcast, almost as if they purposely had extra things in each sketch in dress, ready to make cuts and fit it all into 1.5 hours.

I didn't take pics--not allowed. So that's it. Next August, don't forget to send your e-mail.

1. I got an advance copy of the new(est) Bill Lee documentary--I'll be watching that very soon and posting a review here.

2. Red Sox' spring home to stay in Lee County, FL, for the next 30 years. The new park, set to open in 2012, is supposed to be modeled after Fenway. I'm not a fan--every park's modeled after Fenway, I say do something different. You want the spirit of Fenway in your park, not a re-creation.

Update: Kara got third. Here's some video of runners going by from the window:



And here's another vid we shot with Chan's "better" camera, right at noon:


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Stayed at Chan's last night after the SNL taping, and it just so happens today is the NYC Marathon. Chan's window is few feet away from the route, so we just went out and watched the women's leaders run by. We were totally rooting for this Kara person, and when they went by, she was in second, but she's dropped back now. It's so funny, watching these people on TV, then going outside, watching them go right by, and then going back inside because it's too cold, and continuing to watch them work as you relax in a nice chair.

Went to SNL tonight. Dress rehearsal. I'll probably talk more about this later.