Baseball blog

Dragging a bit after staying up until 2 a.m. to watch Major League Baseball’s All-Star game. Thought about writing a rant on boorish Yankee fan behavior (a.k.a. “morons being morons”) but decided that would just incriminate me for my own boorish Red Sox fan behavior. So instead I’ve chosen to post a few sentences on Rhode Island’s connection to the American pastime. The Providence Grays were an early National League franchise. They won two pennants (in 1879 and 1884) back when pennants meant championships. They also won the first-ever “World Series,” before the American League existed, beating the New York Metropolitans of the rival American Association 3 games to 0 in an arranged series after the 1884 season. (In 1903, the A.L. Boston franchise that we now call the “Sawx” defeated the N.L. champs, the Pittsburgh Pirates, 5 games to 3 in the first modern World Series.) After the major-league Grays disbanded in 1888, a minor league team in Providence kept the name alive for another generation. One of their players was a promising young pitcher and power hitter named Babe Ruth. The Grays have been reinvented as New England’s longest-running vintage baseball team, playing 19th-century rules against competition throughout the Northeast. The “PawSox,” playing at Pawtucket’s gem of a minor league park, McCoy Stadium, were involved in the longest game in baseball history in 1981. Cardines Field in Newport has been a baseball ground since 1908. Negro League ballplayers used to barnstorm there, and there are few more enjoyable summer rituals than quaffing a pint or two in Mudville Pub’s caged-in bar along the right-field foul line during a Newport Gulls game. Rhody has produced hall-of-famers, such as Napoleon Lajoie, and recent all-stars, like Rocco Baldelli. South County-born major leaguers include Guerdon Whiteley of Hopkinton, who broke in with the Cleveland Blues in 1884, Dave Stenhouse of Westerly and a graduate of the University of Rhode Island, (Washington Senators, 1962) and Sean Maloney of South Kingstown, (Milwaukee Brewers, 1997).