No wonder Buffalo is right for baseball A’s are extra grand
Major League Baseball in Buffalo, New York? Naturally.
Not long after the nomadic Toronto Blue Jays announced the Triple-A city as their temporary home Friday, Michael Billoni began to wonder who could be the club’s Roy Hobbs.
“Hopefully, it’s (Vladimir) Guerrero Jr. who will knock the ball onto Oak Street and win the World Series for the Jays in Buffalo,” said Billoni, a former general manager for the Buffalo Bisons, Toronto’s Class AAA minor league affiliate.
It took the Blue Jays nearly a week — and some coronavirus health-related rejections — to finally settle on Sahlen Field as the site of their home games for this season. Although Buffalo hasn’t hosted an actual MLB team since 1915, the Upstate New York city’s baseball roots run deep.
Hobbs, of course, is the fictional, hard-throwingace-turned-aging-slugger with a bat named “Wonderboy” made famous by Robert Redford in the 1984 movie “The Natural,” which was filmed in Buffalo at old, weathered War Memorial Stadium.
The movie is part of the city’s rich hardball history — no matter if Hobbs played for the New York Knights — that dates even beyond Buffalo’s fascination with the chicken wing.
The Bisons began as a National League team and had a 314-333 record from 1879 to 1885. In 1901, the booming Great Lakes and Erie Canal hub was a candidate to join the newly formed American League before losing out to Boston.
The Buffalo Blues, also known as the Buffeds, had a brief run as members of the Federal League in 1914-15.
And baseball made a resurgence there in the 1980s with the construction of what’s now called Sahlen Field, the downtown stadium where the Blue Jays will roost for much of the next two months. Finished in 1988, it was built as part of Robert and Mindy Rich’s bid to land an MLB franchise in a metro area that already featured the NFL’s Bills and NHL’s Sabres. Their hopes fizzled once Denver and Miami were picked for expasion teams that debuted in the 1993 MLB season.
It took a global pandemic — and Canadian health officials denying the Blue Jays permission to play at their downtown Rogers Centre home — for Buffalo to finally reemerge on the major league map.
“If you would have submitted this as a movie script, it would’ve been turned down because people would have said it’s not believable
enough,” Bisons team president Mike Buczkowski said. “Hopefully, we’re raising a World Series championship in Buffalo. That would be the dream. It’s just a very exciting time for our city. It’s something that we’ll be able to talk about for years and years to come.”
‘Bit of a mess’
WASHINGTON — With only the season opener behind them — Thursday’s 4-1, rain-shortened loss to the New York Yankees in six innings Thursday night — the Washington Nationals were already facing plenty of bad news.
World Series MVP Stephen Strasburg was scratched from what was supposed to be his first start of the season Saturday evening because of nerve trouble in his right hand. Nationals manager Dave Martinez announced about four hours before the scheduled first pitch against the visiting Yankees that Strasburg would be replaced by Erick Fedde.
Strasburg described the problem as a nerve impingement in his wrist and said it initially arose early this month when teams reconvened to prepare for the pandemic-delayed season. One of the first symptoms was that his hand would fall asleep, and he felt something wrong from his wrist to his thumb, particularly during his most recent appearance in an exhibition game against the Baltimore Orioles last week.
Martinez said it was unrelated to a forearm problem Strasburg dealt with in the past.
It’s just the latest early setback for the champs. Star slugger Juan Soto was placed on the COVID-19 injured list Thursday after testing positive for the illness — the Nationals got good news when they learned all of their coronavirus tests taken that day came back negative Saturday — and catcher Tres Barrera’s 80-game drug suspension was announced hours before game two against New York.
“To be frank,” Strasburg
said, “this season is a bit of a mess.”
OAKLAND, Calif. — In the first MLB game with the new extra-inning rule, automatic runner Marcus Semien began the bottom of the 10th inning on second base and scored on Matt Olson’s grand slam, sending the Oakland Athletics to a 7-3 win over the Los Angeles Angels late Friday night.
Olson, whose alert throw from first base nailed Angels free runner Shohei Ohtani in the top of the 10th, connected with one out. The A’s gathered around home plate to greet him and celebrate a season-opening win.
Major League Baseball instituted the extra-inning runner rule for this season to keep games from dragging on during its shortened 60-game schedule.
Ohtani wasn’t quite ready for it: The broadcast showed the Japanese star in the dugout wearing a pullover when the ninth inning ended. Caught off guard, someone reminded him he needed to go to second, and he quickly got organized. He tried to advance on Jared Walsh’s grounder but was tagged out in a rundown.
After Semien took second in the bottom half, the A’s loaded the bases against Hansel Robles (0-1) on a hit batter, a wild pitch and a walk. New Angels manager Joe Maddon brought in reliever Hoby Milner and, with a five-man infield in place, Olson hit the first pitch far over the right-field wall.