Epic Drop: Top 10 Things I Will Miss About The Old Spectrum

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Crap Holes We Have Known: Milwaukee's County Stadium

Ed. Note: Part of a continuing series where FTT throws dirt on the graves of dead stadiums to show that yes, we are freaking old. Enjoy!

Once upon a time, my children, the Milwaukee Brewers were a team that you could root for, even if you weren't from there.

They had Robin Yount, a great little Hall of Fame player who wasn't really what you think of as Hall of Fame player, but he was really very good all the same. On his way to battling Cal Ripken for the title of Best American League Shortstop of the '80s, Yount suffered horrific injuries and eventually relocated to cener field, where he picked up as if immortality had not been denied him. In the long run, it wasn't.

They also had Paul Molitor, another Hall of Famer with injury issues. Molly hit like a machine, ran with abandon before he got hurt, and was to George Brett as Yount was to Ripken. He wound up at first base and DH, rather than center field, and did much the same thing.

The town loved both of them, along with their freakish '82 AL Championship team, which had Yount, Molitor, the supernova that was Storming Gorman Thomas, Rollie Fingers, and a lot of guys that looked bad in uniforms. They set the unofficial record of most jock scratches on camera during their '82 Series loss to Whitey Herzog's Cardinals, and then they more or less went to .500 seed for a long time after that. (Fun fact: the Game 7 winner was noted maniac Joacquin Andujar. He was kind of all or nothing when it came to Game Sevens.)

The Brewers, the little team that you could always feel good about rooting for, would get more or less the same results as the Yankees of their era, and for about 20% of the payroll. Their superstars were likable, their fans were cheerfully drunk, and hating on Milwaukee is like hating on Green Bay. You can do it, especially if you are lactose intolerant, but it's hard to imagine anyone making a diet of it. In their 37 years of existence, I doubt that the Brewers were ever involved in anything close to a long-term heated rivalry.

Then, Bud Selig worked his special magic. The man with the toxic touch turned the Brewers into something for which everyone could root against. Everything Bud did -- from inequal revenue cap sharing to encouraging local teams to engage in corporate welfare schemes for new stadiums, to cancelling the World Series and his fondness for eating live puppies -- could be seen as a particularly ham-handed move to benefit his wretched Brewers. Yount retired, Molitor moved on to World Series rings with the Jays and Twins, and the Brewers went to NL Comedy Central, where they have spent most of their existence fighting the Pirates to see which team could be less relevant.

So it is with a mixed heart that I approach this Craphole Entry, because Milwaukee's County Stadium really wasn't all that bad... and, I suspect, a place that I'd like better than the current budget Beer Palace they are occupying.

When we visited, it was a warm summer night in the late '80s. We were on a one-day road trip from Chicago, dragging a North Side native with us to the first and only Wisconsin Run of his life. (Asking people from Chicago if they've been to Wisconsin is like asking people from New York if they've been to Scranton.)

The Brewers lost in a run of the mill affair. The stadium was drab and featureless on the field, with ample concessions and the same cheesy Baseball Activities that you see everyone else. 10,000 fat and happy Wisconsinites ate cheese, drank beer, cheered for Robin Yount, groaned at Chris Bosio, and generally didn't let the game get in the way of their good time. It had a timeless feel to it, like the game didn't really count in the standings, because nothing the Brewers did impacted the standings, really.

My only memory of the place was getting a fake baseball card made of myself, which actually worked as ID in my college days. The bouncer someohow bought the idea that even though the stats on the back of the card showed I was a .367 hitter with 28 triples for the year, the birth date would be accurate. Or maybe they really just wanted to sell me beer. In any event, Milwaukee made me proud.

It was a place like many others. My Chicago friend never went back, but I don't think he's gone to the new yard, either. It didn't help the Brewers; it didn't hurt them, either. And if Bud Selig didn't ruin the world with his presence, they'd probably still be playing there today, and it would all seem like nothing has changed.

As always on Crap Holes We Have Known, if you’ve got a different view, we’re eager to hear it, so that we can get what people in pro wrestling call Cheap Heat. Post your impassioned defense, or pile on the corpse, in the comments below.

Coming Up Next Time on A Very Special Crap Holes We Have Known: Roasting a Sacred Cow. Only on FTT!

Crap Holes We Have Known: Pittsburgh, Three Rivers Stadium, and Cincinnati, Riverfront Stadium

Ed. Note: Part of a continuing series where FTT throws dirt on the graves of dead stadiums to show that yes, we are freaking old. Enjoy!

Every generation goes through waves of nostalgia, and as the speed of media increases, the cycle gets faster.

In the late 1970s of my childhood, the country yearned for the more innocent ‘50s of the Fonz and “Grease.” In the 80s, there were Doors revivals and hippie moments until AIDS made everyone stop having casual sex for, like, ever. (At least, that is what the women kept telling me.) In the 90s, we so wanted a new ‘70s Watergate so much, we had one when the President lied about blow jobs.

In the Aughts, we’ve paid actual U.S. money to see movies about TV shows from the ‘80s, and insisted on getting and watching new “Star Wars” movies, no matter how bad they were. Keep an eye out for the coming Grunge Revival, especially if it means that Frances Bean Cobain is finally ready to take her rightful place as the world’s angriest rock and roll bandleader. (Just to make you feel really old, Wikipedia says she’s 14 now. Though if she really wanted to get back at both of them, she’d become an actuary.)

Nostalgia like this also has its place in the construction of baseball stadiums… with the notable exception of the ‘60s/’70s era of multi-purpose places.

Let me, then, be the only person in the history of North America to express longing for the simple civic virtue of one place that covers the needs of 89 (81 baseball, 8 football) regular season games a year, plus pre-season and playoffs. The idea that football teams need their own yard for 8 out of 365 days a year is just kind of baffling – along with the idea that people will pay 2x to 3x more to see the same game in a newer and/or ritzier yard, especially because it has nicer facilities for corporate types.

So long as I’m not in that group, screw those people.

When I was a kid, the only thing I wanted more than a local championship team was the ability to have my own seat for *all* of the games that happened in that most magical of places, those hallowed grounds of triumph and pain – Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium and Spectrum. In these state of the art facilities, there was a 5 to 10-year run of constant title contention for all four teams (yes, I even cared about hockey then). Only the Phillies and Sixers broke through, but no team was without its giddy joys. Eventually, a local cable channel (“Prism”) took root, giving suburban kids like me a pipeline into everything that happened in those buildings. Oh, if only the walls could talk.

They were, I am sure, crap holes. But they were *my* crapholes. Yours sucked much worse.

So it was that on a low rent baseball road trip in the late ‘80s, I found myself, on back to back nights, in Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium and Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium – the carbon-copy cutouts, along with Busch Stadium in St. Louis and the Coliseum in Oakland, from the time of civic virtues and shared resources.

Pittsburgh was a spooky ghost town that was a logistical nightmare. First, there is the simple and painful ride through Pennsylvania – so small on the map, so long in the car. It takes about seven hours to make it from Philadelphia, with big rigs and pickups taking turns in shaking you down, on a state turnpike that’s lump-riffic.

Once you do get to Pittsburgh, you go through something like six bridges and tunnels, have your ears pop from sudden elevation changes, and then answer three riddles from a troll (it’s OK – all of the answers are ‘The Steelers’). Once you’ve become convinced that there is no way there’s a stadium here, and you might actually be in West Virginia, you’d find your final destination… a large concrete ashtray.

A hot, sticky ashtray where the only people showing any kind of enthusiasm were hawking credit cards with the Pirates logo on it. (I’ve always wondered if those would work at high-end establishments. A Yankees card, that probably gets accepted anywhere, but a Pirates card… you might also want to bring cash, as a backup.)

The game wasn’t competitive, the crowd didn’t care or notice, and it was a lot like Montreal, only with a view of the sky. We hurried on to our next destination and felt a great sense of accomplishment at no longer being in Pennsylvania.

Cincinnati, the next night, was better... but only because the mid-‘80s Reds teams had exciting players like Eric Davis, Kal Daniels and Barry Larkin, along with some hard throwers in the pen. The actual park seemed worse – filled with a hog-rendering stench, and in an area that seemed like it was all highways and pedestrian death.

Here’s a fun fact about the Queen City – it was known, back in the day, as Porkopolis. The fact that you are within spitting distance, and yes, there will be spitting, of Kentucky, which is where the natives go for fun… well, it did achieve a feeling of difference from the previous stadium. We’ll give it that.

But if you shut off the crowd noise and looked about, it was clearly the exact same park, just decked out in different colors. Good sight lines, tons of room for foul ground, same concrete metal pipe fencing that always managed to be in the way for something you wanted to see.

All things run in cycles. We are sure that, in our lifetime, there will be a contracting of interest in sports, a backlash against the bubble economies that fuel stadium construction and pricing, a drop in attendance, an end to the civic insecurities and next town bargaining power that creates the modern pleasure palace. It’s all going to UFC, and a dystopian leathers-and-feathers MadMax world where fantasy league nerds congregate in secret safe rooms to hunch over Excel spreadsheets and diecast figurines. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

But when that day of austerity comes, we doubt anyone’s going to go all the way back to Astroturf, front row seats that are 100 feet from the game, and the creepy sense of déjà vu that can only come from being in a place that could easily be some other place.

As always on Crap Holes We Have Known, if you’ve got a different view, we’re eager to hear it, so that we can get what people in pro wrestling call Cheap Heat. Post your impassioned defense, or pile on the corpse, in the comments below.

Coming Up Next Time on Crap Holes We Have Known: Milwaukee!

Crap Holes We Have Known: Old Tiger Stadium, Detroit

Ed. Note: Part of a continuing series where FTT throws dirt on the graves of dead stadiums to show that yes, we are freaking old. Enjoy!

Old baseball stadiums. Ah, the memories. The history. The knowledge that, why, in this very field, on that very spot right over there, Ty Cobb once attacked a guy in a wheelchair for calling him a racial slur, and his teammates were behind him. Or to be able to look up and say, my Lord, Reggie Jackson sure hit the ball a long way.

Of course, it’s easier to say these things when you can actually see the field. Many times in Ye Olde Tiger Stadium, that wasn’t going to happen for you.

Your enemy in that place was The Pillar, silent bane to baseball fans for untold decades, just waiting to ensnare out of town fans who come to your yard just to knock another field off the list of Ones We’ve Been To. Tiger Stadium had, basically, one for every three fans, at least in our experience, which left us picking innings for who got to see what.

Who won? Who lost? Who remembers? All I can see when I close my eyes and think of Tiger Stadium is a giant steel phallus, laughing at me. Admittedly, this occurs most nights, especially since The Incident, but that’s a whole ‘nother meeting.

Why didn’t, you may ask, we get up and go somewhere else? Because, well, we were more or less Afraid For Our Lives. While the quality of our asses may not be rock hard, they certainly aren’t completely confectionary, either – we’ve lived in some bad neighborhoods and gotten through some rough nights. But in the mid-80s, with the natives having a rough year and the Stadium being located in America’s third-finger answer to Beirut, we were not, how shall we say, looking to annoy a native. Or stay late.

Old stadiums are wonderful. We love Fenway, despite our Simmons-fueled hate for the Sox. Wrigley is almost 20% as nice as Cubs Fans claim it is. Yankee Stadium is one of our favorite places to see a game, once again, despite the general antipathy towards the home team.

But not all old stadiums are wonderful, and you don’t hear too many Tiger Fans pining for the good old days in the old yard. Rest in an obstructed view plot, you hole.

As always on Crap Holes We Have Known, if you’ve got a different view, we’re eager to hear it, so that we can get what people in pro wrestling call Cheap Heat. Post your impassioned defense, or pile on the corpse, in the comments below.

Coming Up Next Time on Crap Holes We Have Known: Pittsburgh! Or Cincinnati! See if you can tell the difference!

Crap Holes We Have Known: Stade Olympique

Ed. Note: Part of a continuing series where FTT throws dirt on the graves of dead stadiums to show that yes, we are freaking old. Enjoy!

Here’s a fun fact. Montreal lead the National League in attendance in 1980. Over 2.5 million came through the turnstiles. You can, as Yogi Berra says, look it up, before I rip your nosehairs out with my bare hands, because I’m not as lovable as people think I am.

Ok, the Mets were terrible that year, and it was a down year for the Dodgers and Reds, the usual attendance powerhouses. The Phillies had exhausted their fan base with playoff failures in ’76, ’77 and ’78, and then crapped the bed entirely in the Pirate’s "We Are Family" year.

But there it is, in black and white, the fact that baseball did work in Quebec, for a good long while. It might not have been the most prosperous market, but it worked well enough until the strike and Expos owner/despot Jeffrey Loria poisoned the well.

After that, Loria put barbed wire around the well, and land mines around the barbed wire, and then released wild dogs that were also carrying land mines, just to be sure. For this, Bud Selig gave him the Commissioner’s Medal of Freedom award, the Florida Marlins, and the 2003 World Series Championship over the Cubs and Yankees, further cementing my belief in the Beavis God.

So by the spring of 1999, that hard 1980 ticket was not, really, much of a problem for a younger DMtShooter (ah, we were all so much younger then) and the patient and kind Mrs. Shooter. We were on our honeymoon in Montreal, also known as The Much More Reasonable And Easier To Get To Quasi-Europe. I highly recommend it.

For seven strong and true days, we wandered the streets loose and unencumbered. We ate succulent meals of aged beef and chateaubriand, filled our goblets (oh, yes, we had goblets) with port and icewine, and engaged in pre-kid honeymoon rutting. We ordered Vietnamese food in French, took to the subways like natives, hit the Napoleon Museum and the ancient cathedrals, rode horse-drawn carriages and tandem bicycles while singing (well, OK, just me), and were, in short, people you’d really want to smack.

We had no cares. It was bliss.

And then a baseball game broke out.

It was a fine Tuesday, about halfway through our trip. We were walking through Montreal’s Botanical Gardens, sampling the full spring fury of late May blooms, as the sun started to set. Slowly, we headed back towards the subway, and a trip back to the hotel area, where dinner at a restaurant to be determined awaited.

That’s when I noticed the Big O. It turned out to be our subway stop. And hey, there’s a baseball game starting. Hey, hon, wanna go? Mrs. Shooter, who was probably drunk on icewine, said sure. I walked up to the counter – wow, no line! -- and asked for their best. After all, what the hell, we're on our honeymoon!

We wound up in the front row for $40 Canadian, or about $8 US at the time. The game turned out to be the Phillies vs. the Expos, the town team that I no longer cared about, against the team that no one cared about. The crowd, counting players, ushers, umpires, clubhouse attendants, broadcast personnel and us, might have been about 2,000 people, though the box score claimed 4,400. The box score is full of crap. I’ve been on planes with more people.

It was spooky and unpleasant. Despite the choice seats, we were still a considerable distance from the field, and the utter lack of crowd noise or outside light made it seem like a baseball snuff film.

Seeing as we were High Rollers, we had the more or less constant attention of a comely waitperson who was clearly just dying for something to do. If this was a Penthouse Forum blog, we’d have given her something to do. But since it’s not, we just kept asking her to bring us Smoked Meat sandwiches (hey now).

The game was notable for the plaintive honking of bored children in the upper decks sounding their plastic Expo horns. Everything was broadcast in both French and English. Sounds echoed for minutes. Even the home plate umpire sounded depressed in his ball and strike calls.

My only strong memory of the actual game was reacting to a blown call at first by starting to yell at the umpire. With decades of training of yelling at tiny specks that were hundreds of feet away in a loud stadium, I started with the time-honored observation about his weight. Mr. Umpire then stared me down, and started heading my way. Mrs. Shooter thoughtfully used the international hand motions of "Hey, it was him, not me," and I hid under the seats until the mean man went away.

What can I tell you – heckling is a whole different ball game in a vacuum. Also, I'm a wuss.

For the record, the Expos won 7-4, as part of their magical 68-94 campaign (the Phils would finish 77-85). I can say that I’ve watched the Phillies lose in two countries and three languages (South Philadelphia Italian is something I love, but it is not English).

We walked out into the perfect Montreal night, never to return.

As always on Crap Holes We Have Known, if you’ve got a different view, we’re eager to hear it, so that we can get what people in pro wrestling call Cheap Heat. Post your impassioned defense, or pile on the corpse, in the comments below.

Coming Up Next Time on Crap Holes We Have Known: Detroit!

Crap Holes We Have Known: Cleveland Municipal

Ed. Note: This is the first in a continuing series of episodes in which FTT throws dirt on the graves of old ballparks, and shows the world just how freaking old we are.

Cleveland Municipal

It might have been OK for football, because frankly, you can endure a lot for football. Eight games a year, four hours a game, you are just not there that much.

For baseball? Oh dear God.

The old Mistake By The Lake was a giant round toilet, built in 1948, for two expressed purposes:

1) Match and mirror the dimensions of the dominant franchise (New York Yankees), of the age, because clearly, it was these dimensions that made them great, not the players in the uniforms, and

2) Make sure that the home team could take advantage of their strong, year-in and year-out winning ways by fitting up to 60,000 people in the park.

Then the American League stepped in and told them that the dimensions were not going to be that way. At which point the team decided to throw a 50-year hissy fit and have 80 to 100 feet of dead space in the outfield, between the fences and the bleachers. They parked cars there. No, seriously.

Next, the team stopped winning, following the monumentally bad ‘50s trade of Colavito for Kuenn. It was the kind of deal you would expect from a team that made stadium dimensions without checking to see if the league would allow them first. Or from people who would turn their best outfield seat locations into parking spaces.

Next, the people in the outfield decided that they had better things to do then watch a terrible franchise from very far away, while being eaten alive by the tens of thousands of insects that liked living next to a big damn lake. (There was a game that was called there due to insects once. We shit you not.) This was soon followed suit by the people who were watching the team from closer in.

In July 1990 the Tribe faced the dominant Bash Brothers Oakland A’s. A group of friends and I went across the country for a two week baseball road trip. Our pitching matchup was NBX’s own Dave Stewart vs. Al Nipper, a 103-win A’s team vs. a 85-loss collection of aimless Tribesmen, and about as much of a lead-pipe lock of a contest as you can get outside of a homecoming game in college football.

Nipper, for those of you who did not have the pleasure of first hand experience, was a “bulldog” kind of pitcher, which meant that he was ugly, drooled, and smelled of urine. He’d mix, match, and get mauled whenever he fell behind in a count to a good hitter. Originally with the Red Sox, he had bounced to the Cubs and Tribe. By 1990, he was completely spent, and the night we saw him, he was in his last week in the majors. (The Tribe, in their finite wisdom, gave him *five* starts.

Here’s the box score, if you have no life.

The A’s went up early. Stewart treated the Tribe like disobedient children. The 30,000 people in attendance, in a stadium that fit 60,000, still made it feel empty, except when they decided to make Jose Canseco, then the best player in baseball, mad with Super Roiding Power.

The Tribe yanked Nipper and brought in Tom Candiotti. Jose responded with an absolute moon shot to left that almost made it to the seats, clearing the parked cars and open spaces that had been lying fallow since 1948. The ball went about 480 feet, and took about 10 seconds to land. It was if someone shut off the gravity.

The crowd shut up. The A’s won in a game that should have been stopped on cuts. We ate at a Subway after the game, because there was not anything better near the park, and got out of town as fast as we could.

I’m certain that someone reading this blog has something good to say about that place, in that this is the Internet, and you can find someone with something good to say about furries and toad lickers.

If you are that person, please post in the comments.

And also, get some help.

Next up: Montreal!