Please tell me your team hasn't embarrassed itself by adopting one of those vulgar-beyond-words, perversely contrived, so-cute-you-want-to-smack-the-mascot, idiot-baiting contemporary knicknames! ...O.K., I admit it, I would still be showing eight inches of stirrup out there on the diamond myself; but give us old schoolers a break anyway.
I used to go to about 32-35 AA Eastern League games a summer, anywhere I could catch one, but mostly at Beehive Field in New Britain, CT. Beehive was... quaint, let's say. It appeared to be lit by gaslight: you might have had some concern about the great grandson of Jack the Ripper waiting for you in the shadows if you were a lady of ill repute and, of course, a Red Sox fan. This was the early '90's, so those would have been the Curse of the Bambino Red Sox -- you knew it wasn't going to end well. Anyway, for Beehive, I would have had to recommend bringing a flatbed truck loaded with arc lights, along with your 300mm. This might have had something to do with the circa .237 team batting averages...
But Red Sox nation, Southern New England chapter, soon had to endure yet another ignominious circumstance -- a new team affiliation with the Minnesota frikkin' Twins (say, what?) and a name change to... the New Britain Rock Cats. Yech! They would have better been rechristened the Stanley Tools! *
But I was really returning to my roots as an ages 2-9 Indians fan (but from then, it was the Pittsburgh Pirates and the rising-to-dominate National League; I did know my baseball all right... and had that gift of Rawlings six-fingered glove, grass stained cowhide, and sweet smelling southern hard ash kind of prescience, even at that tender age). But, yeah, I saw it coming, the better times, after decades of Cleveland jokes, on and off the field: There was also The Curse of Rocky Colavito (traded in late '59 for -- oh, I can hardly bear to even say it -- Harvey Kuenn!). The Tribe finished second in '59, ahead of the hated Yankees... you know the rest.
So, yes, I have the balls to prove it... signed ones, that is, with the names of all those up-'n'-comers and veterans on rehab who became the heroes of the great Indians resurgence in the mid to late '90's -- including, yes, Manny "Just Being Manny" Ramirez. No dreadlocks then, but when a guy born and bred in New York speaks vaguely in the direction of a mic only through an interpreter, you could kinda see it coming...
So the Canton Indians eventually became the Akron Aeros [Ha, ha, the spell checker just changed that to the Akron Zeros! Hmm, speaking of Turing machines...]. O.K., a "meh" kind of name there, and pretty meaningless, unless you associate blimps with "aeros". I don't. But here's what got me off on this reminiscence/micro-rant: I just saw a few days ago that the Aeros, at some point, had undergone yet another name change... to the Akron RubberDucks.
Just shoot me now. -- Fred
P.S. - * Maybe that reference is a bit obscure outside of CT: New Britain is also known (proudly, it seems) as 'Hardware City'... on account of local enterprise, you know who.
Last edited by Kayaker-J; 06-23-2014 at 10:43 PM.
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