The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
On the sidelines ... again
Hartford remains minor player in major sports world
BOSTON — The area around Fenway Park, ordinarily a human beehive of push and shove on game days, is quiet early Saturday afternoon. The Landmark Center garage is being partially torn down, but still there are all sorts of open spaces. The outdoor seating at Wahlburgers is empty.
I turn on to a barren Jersey Street, formerly Yawkey Way, and take a deep breath. No Italian sausages from outdoor carts. No pizza from open windows. I smell nothing. I smell 2020.
Yes, 2020. The year where anything can happen, except a major league team moving to Hartford. Lucy has pulled the football from Charlie Brown once again.
The American League East fills my mind as my temperature is taken and I undergo security protocol at the media gate. Can anybody stop the Yankees? With Eduardo Rodriguez shut down with complications from COVID-19, do the Red Sox have any starting pitching beyond Nathan Eovaldi? Where will I park in
Hartford for Blue Jays games?
What? They’re going to Buffalo? Really? You’re kidding. Hartford was perfect for the Blue Jays, just like it was perfect for the Patriots, NHL expansion, and the Islanders. There must be some mistake.
“You’re good to go,” I’m told. Most everything inside Fenway feels different.
Cardboard cutouts filled every seat above the Green Monster, looking more like targets to be knocked down by line drive homers than fans. Every other seat in the park is empty. Usually when you watch a game at Fenway you are hit by the sight of so much green, the perfect grass, the left-field wall stretching toward center. Yet now thousands of red wooden seats, folded up, sit in perfectly ordered rows. So much red.
A huge Black Lives Matter banner stretches across the center field bleachers. Outside there is an even bigger such billboard facing the Mass Pike. There are many posts on social media saying they’ll no longer support the Red Sox for supporting a “Marxist” organization. This is a scary world.
Before the Yankees-Nationals season opener Thursday night, both teams kneeled while holding a long black ribbon in support of
racial equality. On Friday, so had all the Orioles yet only a portion of the Red Sox did. On this day, there is no black ribbon. A couple of Red Sox take a knee for the national anthem. They are not known Marxists.
With COVID-19 restrictions, there are only a dozen reporters in the press box for the 1:38 p.m. first pitch. The temperature is 83 degrees, wind nine mph from the southeast. Following the home team’s 13-2 rout of the Orioles on Opening Night, we have Boston’s first day game of 2020. It is baseball. And it is beautiful.
Austin Hayes lines Martin Perez’s second pitch to right field and Hanser Alberto follows with a double to left. Renato Nunez knocks in both with a double off the wall. A wild pitch advanced Nunez to third and it quickly was 3-0 after Rafael Devers failed to handle Pedro Severino’s soft grounder to third. It was Devers’ second error in two games. He would go on to strike out four times — the golden sombrero — and along with Andrew Benintendi was 0-for-9 through two games.
On the ride home after the 7-2 Red Sox loss, talk radio rails Devers isn’t in shape, isn’t ready for the season restart. Benintendi? He is totally uncomfortable leading off and shouldn’t be at the top of the lineup. And what the hell was Dylan Covey coming in to pitch the seventh with the Sox only down three runs? Yes, baseball is back in Boston. And it can get ugly quick.
Back at the ballpark, there was canned fan noise that grew louder when Jackie Bradley Jr. made two sterling defensive plays. Otherwise umpire calls from second base were audible. Foul balls can be heard rattling around empty seats far down the third base line. Eovaldi could be heard grunting on his 100 mph fastballs on Friday night.
We even got a few decibels of Alex Verdugo, who had three hits in his Red Sox debut. Verdugo was on second base in the eighth when the Orioles made a pitching change. During the delay, he went over to third base to talk with coach Carlos Febles delay and forgot where he was supposed to be. Umpire Sean Barber chased Verdugo back to second. That led to the two yapping at each
other, even as Verdugo made his way back to right field.
“Man, I could have stolen that bag if I wanted it that bad,” Verdugo said during postgame Zoom interviews. This guy is going to be a hoot to watch.
“Sweet Caroline” was played in the eighth inning and, let the record show, it isn’t nearly as revolting when thousands of fans with beers in their hands aren’t screaming, “Whoa! Oh! Oh” and “So good! So good!”
The decision to expand the playoffs to eight teams in both leagues the day before the restart of the season leads to the argument whether it is fair to include mediocre teams in an anything goes best-ofthree series against a division winner. Then again, are 60 games enough of a grind to really prove a team’s season’s worth? But , hey, it’s 2020 and everything is different …
Except Hartford joining the American League East. Or the NHL Atlantic Division. Or the AFC East.
I listened to Yard Goats president Tim Restall on 97.9 ESPN and Yard Goats GM Mike Abramson on WTIC talk about the Blue Jays. Abramson said, “It
was close. I think it was a lot closer than people know.”
With all 60 games within the AL and NL East, Hartford’s geography made sense. The $71 million price tag on Dunkin’ Donuts Park was far too steep, but everyone recognizes it as a beautiful minor league ballpark. As essentially a TV studio for 30 games it certainly was usable.
The Jays would have had to pay for some facility upgrades to MLB standards. Lighting could be upgraded. Right field with a netting above the fence that is still a ball in play — not a home run — could be passed off as a cool, little quirk. Good grief, maybe they could have gotten the Jays to build a press box where the press could see the whole field.
Hotel space could have been filled. Payroll taxes could have been collected. And, hey, with a year’s experience of having played all their games on the road because of delays in construction, the Yard Goats could have been helpful.
Certainly, it was worth a shot.
Yet even as state officials in Pennsylvania rejected the Blue Jays for PNC Park in Pittsburgh, even as Baltimore hemmed and hawed about Camden Yards, even
as the Blue Jays had to turn away from their spring training site at Dunedin because Florida is a COVID-19 hotspot, even as Hartford mayor Luke Bonin openly courted the Blue Jays via Twitter, even as Gov. Ned Lamont talked to Blue Jays CEO Mark Shapiro for 20 minutes, even as Hartford got a shout-out on ESPN during Opening Night coverage … I couldn’t get past Buffalo.
Oh, Sahlen Field isn’t as nice as The Dunk. Oh, it’s going to get cold up there in late September. Oh, it’s Buffalo (groan). Yeah and Buffalo is their Triple-A affiliate. And the Jays have a portion of their market in Western New York. There’s a comfort level there. The Sabres are helping out with off-site training facilities. And if they’re going to put money into a stadium, why not their Triple-A affiliate? Even with a last-minute scurry, the field won’t be ready until Aug. 11 the Blue Jays announced on Sunday.
According to Restall on 97.9 ESPN, there had been initial contact last weekend and when Pittsburgh fell through that contact grew more serious Wednesday. Can anyone spell Fall-Back Plan.
Before folks in Hartford
groan about Buffalo, which does have NFL and NHL franchises, think about people outside the Hartford area groaning at the prospects of Hartford. Think about how this is yet another pin prick in the ego of Hartford’s balloon. Another time major league hopes were inflated and shot down. Bronin and former Gov. Malloy courted the Islanders as a temporary home when they were desperate and that went nowhere. We won’t even try to relieve the horror of the Patriots and the growing delusion of Hartford as an NHL expansion city.
I learned my lesson the hard way about Hartford years ago. Hartford is a minor league city in a major league state squeezed by two great metropolises. The WNBA team, the world’s best women’s players, is in Uncasville. The Major League Lacrosse team, the best of that sport, is in Fairfield. And as far as MLB, NBA and NFL, they are in New York and Boston.
So enjoy the Yankees and Red Sox rivalry, Hartford, like the rest of us in Connecticut.