Enjoying The Off Season

The Hot Stove League is an expression that has its origins in the period of time when Baseball was THE undisputed King of sports in America. During the off-season, fans would escape winter’s chill by gathering around a hot stove, staying warm and talking about their team, its off-season moves and chances for the upcoming season. It’s sort of like that now, except the “hot stove” is a keyboard and the “around” is the internet in general, and team sites run by fans, for fans, in particular. I tell all my friends who are San  Francisco Giants fans to check out Troy Nelson’s terrific site, http://22gigantes.com. I look at it, too, so I can discuss the local nine with a degree of intelligence. Switching leagues for a moment, it’s no secret that I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for the Minnesota Twins, so I’ll go to http://www.twinkietown.com from time to time. I’ve been pulling for them since the days of Harmon Killebrew, Jim Kaat, Tony Oliva, Bob Allison and Mudcat Grant. I loved the 1987 and 1991 Championship teams, too, especially Kirby Puckett, who died way too young. The New York Mets, dating back to their days as lovable losers from the early 1960’s, are tops with me, so I enjoy the discussions at Joseph Anthony Olivio’s Mets Facebook group, True New York Mets Fans, which resides at this address: 
http://www.facebook.com/groups/TrueNewYorkMetsFans. I like the Mets 50th anniversary logo, which I first saw there. Here it is:

Podcasts have their place too, so I find myself waiting anxiously for the first off-season edition of Mets Musings, accessed at http://metsmusings.podomatic.com. This podcast, among many others, combined with team-centered sites featuring debating, discussing and speculating, add up to good clean fun that keeps many baseball fans fully engaged until the familiar roar of “Play Ball” once again warms our hearts.

Baseball First! I’ve often said that I’m a fan of the game first, then I’ll go to my personal preferences. I pursue my love of the game in its totality, which includes teams, players, umpires, rules, rumors, books, baseball cards and perhaps most compellingly, it’s past. In fact, when I first applied to the Baseball Bloggers Alliance for membership I thought long and hard about requesting admittance into the “history” rather than the “general” category. I have been a keen student of the game’s history from the time I learned how to read. I straddle the baseball time line, with one foot in the present and the other firmly rooted in the past. I spend a large part of the off-season exploring the history of the grand old game. There are so many ways to do this that my only stumbling block is deciding in which direction I want to go. Here are some of the topics I’ve already delved into:

The Negro Leagues: Before Jackie Robinson broke the color line in 1947, African-American baseball players competed in the Negro Leagues. I wish I could go back in time to watch these exceptionally gifted players who were denied the opportunity to complete in the Major Leagues. While that’s never going to happen, it is possible to listen to some of them, which I did by watching the 1970 PBS documentary, “Only The Ball Was White.”  Turning to books, I’ve found a wealth of material. “The Pittsburgh Crawfords,” a well researched and superbly written book by Jim Bankes introduced me to a ball club that is among the greatest baseball teams of all time. The 1935 edition of the Crawfords included five future  Hall of Famers,  “Cool Papa” Bell, Oscar Charleston, Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige and Judy Johnson, whose portrait to the left, by artist Dick Perez, hangs in the Philadelphia Phillies Hall of Fame. “Invisible Men”  is a book by Donn Rogosin that describes life in the Negro Leagues through the eyes of its players, many of whom were interviewed by the author. It’s a well-written book that won critical acclaim and is well worth the time to explore its pages. Any discussion of Negro League literature must include “We Are The Ship,” a superbly illustrated book that aims its retelling of its subject to youngsters. Uniformly praised, this winner of countless awards will appeal to adults, too. My Mother, a career librarian, suggests that adults and their children enjoy this book together, and I heartily agree.

Baseball Cards: I can remember sitting in my home room class in the spring of 1965 greedily opening pack after pack of Topps baseball cards. Each pack was an intriguing mystery waiting to be explored. These days I enjoy the cards on a variety of web sites. My favorite is the “Baseball Card Cyber Museum,” which can be found at http://www.guitar9.com/bccm.html. This site is invaluable because it shows the fronts and backs of the cards on its site. Its collection, which continues to grow, goes back to 1909. This site has to be experienced to be believed. You’ll need a “pass” to get in, but it’s free and easily obtained. The Library of Congress’s collection, “Baseball Cards 1887 – 1914,” at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/bbhtml/bbhome.html, is not to be missed.

Team-Oriented or Baseball History Books: “The Year The Mets Lost Last Place,” by Paul Zimmerman and Dick Schaap, examines a critical, mid-summer, nine-day stretch during the 1969 season when the Mets transitioned to a serious big-league contender for the first time ever. Younger New York Mets fans can relive the earliest years by reading Leonard Koppett’s “The New York Mets – The Whole Story,” which follows the team’s journey from bumbling newborns to improbable 1969 World Champions. My San Francisco Giants customers may enjoy delving into their franchise’s east-coast history, well presented in “The New York Giants: An Informal History of a Great Baseball Club.” Although it was first published in 1952, Author Frank Graham’s book is available at libraries or for a very reasonable price from internet booksellers. Students of the game’s history may enjoy a book that contains interviews with many of the its early 20th century players. Edited by Lawrence Ritter, “The Glory of Their Times” is not to be missed. I’ve already read it, and feel another reading coming on very soon.

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I’d love to hear your ideas regarding positive uses of the off-season months. Please share them in the comments section. Thank you!