Word: astroturfed
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...which often seat no more than 5,000, customers can sit in the top row of the grandstand and still catch snippets of conversations among ballplayers in the batting cage below. Trotting down to the bullpen wall for an autograph is easy. And to the delight of baseball purists, Astroturf has not made it to many minor-league parks...
Douglass Wallop's 1954 novel, The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, reflects that innocent era before AstroTurf, designated hitters and utility infielders with multimillion-dollar contracts. But every middle-aged baseball fan can still appreciate the Faustian temptation at the core of both the novel and the hit Broadway musical it inspired, Damn Yankees. Joe Boyd is a paunchy real estate salesman condemned to root for his hapless hometown team, the now defunct Washington Senators. The devil, who prefers the moniker Applegate, offers to transform Joe into the greatest slugger in the history of the game. Applegate's price...
...best pitches: "God, that was beautiful. What'd I do?" Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) is quite another species of ballplayer, the kind cursed with self-awareness. All that thinking has made him a journeyman catcher with a decade-long career bouncing through the minors like a Baltimore chop on Astroturf. Now Crash must baby-sit Nuke into maturity, teach him to connive a little in the game's moral geometry. "Strikeouts are boring. They're fascist," Crash tells Nuke. "Throw some ground balls; it's more democratic." With professors like Crash and Annie, Nuke can't miss vaulting...
Saturday, Harvard (4-1) suffered its first loss of the season. Pennsylvania (2-2) defeated the Crimson, 15-10, on the Astroturf of Philadelphia's Franklin Field in front of 600 spectators...
SKEPTICS, THOUGH, doubt that such "troubled" teams are justified in threatening these moves. The teams which squawk loudest about the need to move to greener (astroturf) pastures are usually the most ineptly run franchises in professional sports. Owner-weasel-extraordinare Robert Irsay stole his Colts away to Indianapolis even after the city of Baltimore met all his demands. But even the most-loved and best-supported franchises are threatened by the machinations of greedy owners. The Raiders sold out more than 80 consecutive home games in Oakland before Al Davis took them to Los Angeles...