Babe Ruth In The Papers

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This is the photo that is currently on the front page of the Washington Post’s Sunday Metro section:

Before I go any further, let me make sure that I take time to thank the staff at the Gaylord National Hotel inWashington, DC for their tremendous professionalism and attention to every detail. These people are the standard for their industry. I have, in all honesty, never seen such elan in my life. It was a real treat. With the hotel slated to open in a few days, you could ride on the energy of these folks as they readied their jewel of a hotel.

I would also like to thank Michael Hudson of Gaylord Hotels. He is a throwback to a more civil time in America and in business. He is a true gentleman and a visionary in his field. You don’t run into too many people like him and it was my good fortune to have done so. Thanks Michael, for everything.

This is a shot someone took for me with my camera during the installation.

The Babe Ruth statue is now permanently on display at the Gaylord National Hotel & Resort in Washington, DC at the new National Harbor area.

I went down there on Tuesday and stayed until Thursday and The Babe was installed and well received. The Washington Post came by and did a story on the hotel opening and included a fair amount of interest on the statue. I was not sure how much would run on the statue but I was pleased to have folks in Washington DC call and tell me the good news.

The full story of the statue and everything surrounding it is on the Birrerart.com website:

Click here to open the Birrerart.com website up in a new window

Other things that were noteworthy while I was down there was the fact that the Nationals has declared the sportsbar in the Gaylord as the official sportsbar of the team. Because of this, they had sent over the last home plate used at RFK stadium so it could be permanently installed at the entrance to the sportsbar. Here are a few shots of that and the Washington Post getting their story at the time:

That’s Michael Hudson, Director of Brands at Gaylord Hotels, with homeplate from RFK Stadium.

And here is the laying ceremony while the PR folks take photos.

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The Gaylord National Hotel is so immense that it is difficult to photograph it all in one frame. The atrium that overlooks the Potomac River and Old Alexandria, Virginia, on the opposite bank, is 18 stories high. There is a village of little shops and fountains and trees and restaurants all inside the enclosure. It is so big that you mostly aren’t aware that you are inside.

Here is a view of the upper part of the atrium. These gaslights are 20 feet high. The scale is just hard to fathom.

On the 24th floor, there is a state of the art nightclub and one of the unique features is, believe it or not, the men’s room. Here are the fixtures and the view is outrageous. The Washington Monument can be seen while you are, well…ahem, you know. It’s just one of a myriad of details that make this hotel one of the most amazing in the world.

Babe Ruth Goes to Washington DC Today

 

Up early and caught the first pitch of the 2008 MLB season while booting up with the coffee to take the Babe Ruth statue down to DC to the Gaylord Hotels’ newest property: The National.  A lot of work has gone into this project and it didn’t end until 2am last night.  Babe’s ready.  I’m tired but ready and excited to see the hotel and Babe’s new home outside the sportsbar there.  I’d like to thank my wife and my boss (Nightrangers) for being understanding at various points (different points) all along the way.  We need the money to send little Tommy to college someday so you have to try sometimes and when you try, good things happen.  Thanks.

 

The Greatest Single Inning of Baseball

Just finished The Glory Of Their Times by Lawrence Ritter. Probably my 3rd reading in 20 years or so. I’m glad I hung on to it.

Dizzy and Paul at the Polo Grounds

I’ve spoken of him before, and even of this event re him, but I found a written account of the game that 93 year old Max claims to have gone to at the Polo Grounds.  Apparently the Yankees were out of town.  Max is a big Yankee fan and he lived at 165 and Grand Concourse in the Bronx.  Yankee Stadium is at 161st.  The Polo Grounds was right across the Harlem River in Manhattan at 155th Street and Max was such a fan that he’d go and see the National League doings there if the Yanks were away.  So that way, he didn’t miss Mel Ott, JoJo Moore, Bill Terry, Chick Hafey, The Waner Brothers, Lloyd and Paul and the Gashouse Gang. 

This series with the Deans pitching lights out is as the center of the Gashouse Gang legend in 1934, the year they won it all.  The Gashouse Gang was the St. Louis Cardinals, for those who don’t know.  They got their nickname somehow because of a comment that the American League champs wouldn’t play them “in a gashouse”, whatever that means.  “Gashouse” was some sort of Depression-era place or phrase and I have no idea what it means. 

The Gashouse Gang had the last 30 game winner in the National League in Dizzy Dean and his brother Paul Dean, who won 19.  The manager was Hall of Famer Frankie Frisch, “The Fordham Flash”, who had already played in a ton of World Series with McGraw’s Giants and the 1931 Cards. 

The shortstop was Hall of Famer (as manager–he couldn’t hit) Leo Durocher, who up until that time, was known for passing bad checks and stealing money from his drunken roomate, Babe Ruth, on the ‘28 Yankees. 

Third base was Pepper Martin, “The Wild Horse of the Osage”.  Martin, not only played third without a cup, he such a country boy, he played without even any underwear. 

Ripper Collins drove in a 100+ at first and Joe “Ducky” Medwick played the outfield and had to be removed from the 7th game of the World Series in Detroit, because his presence was inciting a riot.  Yup.  The commisshioner yanked him off the field to restore order.  The commisshioner was Landis and you should use a lower case “c” for Landis, because he doesn’t deserve a capital “c”.  He’s the racist bum who single handedly kept non-whites out of the big leagues for 27 years until Branch Rickey stepped up and signed Robinson.  Besides being a low-down nasty thing to do, it deprived us of seeing guys like Josh Gibson play against big league competition.  And Satchell Paige and Buck O’Neill and Judy Johnson and Double Duty Radcliff and on and on.  Every stadium’s tape measure homer story that didn’t involve Babe Ruth, involved Josh Gibson.

Anyway, Max was at this very historic game, for all of you seamhead geeks who like this stuff.  Apparently, it was the attendance record at the Polo Grounds. 

Kewell: The John McCain of Liverpool FC

[Freddie and I and the old Joe DiMaggio statue at the last Joe DiMaggio Day at Yankee Stadium in 1998. I am wearing the 97 or 98 away kit so that's your tie in.]

Detail Oriented Stadium Meister

Click here to open the site in a new window

http://www.majorleaguemodels.com/about.asp

This is something interesting I found while looking for the little plaster model of Yankee Stadium for 93-year-old-Max’s grandson. This man builds huge, tabletop scale models of old ballparks from scratch. You know, the exacto knife and the balsa wood and a thousand other things. I can relate to this man because of what I do with the wood products and all and will even admit to having built a cardboard model Shea Stadium in 1976 that was pretty darned good.

I love this kind of wacky, I’m-going-to-build-this-thing-in-my-cellar-and-sell-it-for-150k attitude. Take 5 minutes and visit the guy’s site. Look at the original wooden 1888 Polo Grounds model and see how baseball was just after the Civil War. It’s amazing work.

It also points out that I need to do better on my website. But now, we’re 7 minutes from the kickoff of Liverpool-Chelsea. The first league encounter of the year was way back in August, on the day we had our boy christened. I left for the church at half up 1-0 only to come home and find out that the ref called a silly PK and GIFTED the point to Chelsea. So strange was the call, that the next day, the ref PUBLICLY stated that he was wrong to point at the spot! I’ve never heard of such a thing but when taking points from the Reds, the refs have done some funny things. I think it’s because they all grew up in the 1970’s and 1980’s when Liverpool won every darned thing and I think there is some lingering resentment. Kind of like if I worked the plate at a Yankee game.

To give you an idea of how big these things get (he does different scales), take a look at the Old Comiskey Park. Old Comiskey is my favorite of the 38 ballparks I’ve been to. It was a real timewarp to go there and the place just felt right. They say that Jimmy Foxx hit two homers completely over the roof in left between the two light towers. Double-X was the best hitter no one’s ever heard of.

If the first 10 minutes of Liverpool Chelsea are any indicator, then Chelsea will get the points. They seem a whole gear faster than Liverpool and more confident and more creative. Liverpool look slow and I think it’s only a matter of time. Chelsea’s defense is so fast and shuts everything down so tightly, that I don’t see Kuyt and Crouchy cracking it. What we need is the pace of Fernando Torres.

Well, at least ManU lost their derby to City today. No points for Alex. That’s what you get for ripping your boss, Sir. With United coming away with none…if Chelsea could be beaten…oh stop dreaming. Wake up!  And I have to say: After watching only 25 minutes: Dirk Kuyt shouldn’t be in the first team.  Really.  He looks slow and lost.  Zero confidence.  And his play on the right is atrocious.  He can’t beat his man deep and he can’t do anything on the cut inside–every posession that reaches him, goes awry.  Perhaps he can be productive in the middle, but Crouchy is there now.  Play another midfielder and let them go forward.  Kuyt should come off.  Caragher has more mojo going up the right wing than this guy.  Oy.  Rafa.  Help. (Of course Kuyt till make an a** of me and score the winner but I’ll take it and eat my words if that is so).

Lego My Stadium

While talking to Max, the 94 year old here where I work who attended his first Yankee game in 1926 (Gehrig broke in in 1925), I told him about the little plaster models of stadia that they make and sell.  I have a Polo Grounds model and it is nifty.  I showed it to Max and he told me where he used to sit in the 1930’s and 1940’s.  He was even there the day that Dizzy and Paul Dean beat Hubble and the Giants a double header and then went over to Brooklyn and did it again, this time with Paul throwing a no hitter.  Max was also at the game at the Polo Grounds where a stray bullet, fired up in the air from blocks away, came down and killed a man in the upper deck!  Max saw them take the guy out and the next day, read about it in the papers.  It’s amazing to have baseball discussions with a man who throws Jo Jo Moore at you.

Anyway, Max wanted me to find a similar model of Yankee Stadium for his grandson.  While looking, I turned up this: 

Click here to open the site in a new window

 

These people will build custom architectural models out of legos!  And they are high quality and detailed and not cheap, I imagine, although I had trouble finding a price on the website.  It buoyed me up in another way.  Seeing this makes me more determined than ever to build my business of carving and statues because in America, if you can make money playing with Legos, then I need to redouble my efforts!  –fog 

Joe DiMaggio’s Eyes

That’s Some Heave

This could be my next statue: Walter Johnson, the man on the left in the photo with Ty Cobb. The Big Train. He threw sidearm and didn’t have a curve until the end. Just the fast stuff and never any arm troubles. Over 400 wins and not all of them deadball era. Cobb had a lot of trouble hitting him but Cobb’s team mate, hall of famer, Wahoo Sam Crawford, was good friends with Johnson. If Johnson was coasting, sometimes he’d have his catcher notify Crawford that “…Barney likes you today” (Barney was the nickname his teammates called him after a race driver of the day and based on his bad driving). “Barney likes you today” meant to be ready for a room service fastball down the middle and go ahead and turn on the fan, which Crawford did. And Crawford said, “…it used to get Ty’s goat when I’d hit him and he went oh for four…”

Anyway, Johnson is the most famous, purely Washington-centric player of all time and you know now we’re all about DC and the Nats now. Johnson once participated in a 1930’s style Mythbusters. He threw a silver dollar over the Rappahanock River in Fredericksburg, Virginia–the same place where George Washington is supposed to have done the trick and cemented himself as America’s first pitcher of any note. I was down in Fredericksburg once but didn’t try this. Next time, for sure.

For some reason, I think Johnson always tends to look a little wooden in his old news photos. Why is that? What is that about him? I mean if I carved up a statue looking just like the photo below, people would say, “…it’s looks wooden…not natural” He’s a wooden guy, that Johnson. And when he finally admitted he was washed up, he told his catcher, “…I can’t do it anymore. My arm just feels like and old pump handle.” If I do the piece, I’ll have to use a piece of pump handle.

[Below the photo is an excerpt from the day he threw the coin over the river.]

Back in 1936, Johnson, who at the time had retired from baseball and owned a farm in Maryland, made his famous throw in front of a big crowd of onlookers, including a number of newspaper photographers and a newsreel motion picture cameraman.

He threw from the Ferry Farm side of the river as spectators watched both behind him in Stafford and on the Fredericksburg side of the river near what is now City Dock.

In 1936, Josiah Rowe, then 8 years old, went with his father to watch the great “Big Train” attempt the feat.

“It was a cold day, and ice blocks had mounded up on the riverbank,” remembered Rowe, now the publisher of The Free Lance–Star.

“There was a pretty big crowd, and it wasn’t easy to see when the coin had been tossed,” Rowe recalled. “It didn’t seem to occur to anybody that it might hit a spectator. For quite a while nobody knew where it had landed, and then a man in the back of the crowd called out, ‘I’ve got it.’ ”

The Feb. 22, 1936, edition of The Free Lance–Star reported: “Standing on the east shore of the Rappahannock River, the hurler drew back his famous right arm and let fly a silver dollar that sailed high into the air, spanned the 273-foot stream and plunked on the opposite bank where it was pounced on by a section of the crowd of some 2,000 people who massed in the grounds of the Standard Oil Plant.”

Johnson’s toss reportedly cleared the river with 20 feet to spare, and the coin was retrieved by Pietro Yon, a 30-year-old Italian–American stonemason who lived at the Bunker Hill Inn. He said he planned to sell the silver dollar for $200 and use the money to finance a trip to Italy to visit his mother.

Life Size Babe Ruth Statue Solid Wood

Just the facts.  He’s almost ready for delivery.  It’s down to touching up and a few hard-to-reach stripes and then deck work really.  Not much.  Maybe 20 hours.  Maybe only 10.  I have to call up some people now and get them to see it before he goes permanently to the Gaylord Hotel in Washington DC.  I understand that the Washington Nationals will be having a shindig there and Babe is sure to cause a stir.  I think the new park down in DC needs a life sized Walter Johnson, of Washington Senators fame.  Or Joel Hanrahan even?  Go Nats!