As of 5 PM yesterday, I had made a decision that because of Bud Selig’s outrageous ruling that we must play with the roof open, which the team doesn’t like and the fans hate, in order to remove any vestige of home field advantage, I was going to refuse to watch, listen to or read about the remainder of the Series.
In 1919, the Sox threw the Series for money. I have no idea what Bud Selig’s motive in trying to make sure the Astros lose, but I know that he will most likely never be investigated of forced to account for his treachery. I doubt it’s gamblers like Arnold Rothstein type stuff, but I’d bet it has to do with payback and favors, stuff like that. And I think the umps in on it too.
So when my Husband and Brotherman walked in the door, I told them that I refuse to have anything more with this fixed Series and refused to even watch or listen and that after dinner, they could watch if they wanted to but I was taking Da Bull, our 2 year old, who is getting too big for his britches (hahahaha) over to my friend Tamesha’s because she had a bunch of stuff her boy too big for.
Husband and Brotherman exchanged looks.
I said, I’m not kidding and Ida wanna talk about it one more second. And why were they home early anyhow?
Husband and Brotherman exchanged looks again.
I said I been thinking about this all day and I’m NOT kidding. We should just give Bud the finger and shut the roof, like the players want – Roy all upset and he not gonna pitch worth #### and the players are all angry too.
Yall do what you wanna do but my mind made up. And dinner won’t be ready for a while.
Husband and Brotherman exchanged looks again.
Husband cleared his throat. Um, Baby, he sez, you can’t be talkin like that when your Daddy comes by. Um, it’s supposed to be a surprise, but he got you a ticket and, um
I stopped dead. My Daddy HATES sports, has argued with my Mama since I can remember about her love of all that baseball **** and has scolded me for wasting time with that stuff. And here he’s bought his Baby Girl a ticket to the WS – what he is sure I would LUUUVVV as a present more than anything else he can think of. I have NO freaking idea what it cost him – I know what they are going for on ebay. I can’t tell him after what it must have cost him in money and pride to tell him that the game has been rigged and we’ve been set up to lose.
So when Daddy comes over with his “surprise” 10 minutes later, I give an Oscar winning performance (fortunately, I’m a MUCH better actor than Husband…) and set off for the ballpark.
I’ve checked the weather – it’s gonna be in the mid 50s, so I put on thick heavy pants, 2 sweaters and a hooded sweatshirt, warm socks and shoes.
I get to the Box around 6:15 – the crowd is almost all Astros fans, although I see a few people wearing other teams colors. I see a few White Sox fans, all males. I wonder if the female White Sox fans worried that Astros fans gonna punch her out, like a White Sox fan did to Patty Biggio – but we don’t do that here.
The crowd is very quiet going in and quiet in the lines waiting to get in. We KNOW that Bud Selig is trying to make us lose and it’s working with the crowd. LOTS of grumbling, very little Buzz like there was with the playoffs. A LOT of grumbling about how much the tickets cost for this and how it’s gonna be a waste of money. A lot of people said they bought the tickets from season holders they know – the season holders felt it was silly to go and the buyers wanted the “experience.” Almost everyone is wearing heavy sweaters and jackets – down here, we think that having to be outside in 50 degree weather is something horrible.
I don’t know what the lies and spin are that will be printed, but I’ve brought a thermometer – when I get to my seat in the upper deck at 7 PM, it’s 60. By 8, it’s 57 and it was 51 when the game finally ended. I spent some time checking game logs for the past few years. Not once have we played a game in 50 degree weather.
One more thing. NOBODY pays me what to say. I don’t have to worry about spin and putting myself in a good light with MLB, or the Astros Organization or anyone else. So I’m going to say that it was, from the very beginning, one of the most quiet and apathetic crowds I’ve ever been in, ESPECIALLY considering it was a full stadium.
From the very beginning, the faces in the stands were for the most past, quiet and glum. We KNEW we were gonna lose from the beginning. In fact, a LOT of people in the lines were complaining about the fix. Totally different from the excitement and cheers and buzz that I experienced in playoff games. A lot of people were calling Bud Selig names I won’t repeat. I’ve heard a LOT of lies from media about how there was all this noise – well, I could hear White Sox fans, all 50 of them, screaming Go White Sox from the lower decks. The noise was about the same amount of noise you get in an weekday afternoon game with the 15000 fans who show up. I don’t know or care how Fox manipulates TV stuff to get “crowd noise” that wasn’t there.
The fans were apathetic at best. A little bit of stirring after Jason Lane hit his double, but that was about it.
Even the beer vendors didn’t bother to show up. Or were they banned cuz Bud Selig was afraid the crowd would get drunk and ugly and start a riot and come lookin for him?
Do I think that the roof shut would have made a difference?
(check the comments section for my reply to Mike Q)
Of course, and so did the other fans and so did the players. And most important, so did Selig.
- as Rich Campbell says (and he’s a PADRES fan)
“It’s all smoke and mirrors. The roof was ordered opened to “make it
fair”. Sez me…removing one team’s home fireld advantage is very
unfair. It had NOTHING to do with temperature. It had everything to do with
noise. Sure, there may have been some other factors. But the why is the
noise. And that noise is generated because of a love affair between a team
and it’s fans and the roof should have been closed. period. Selig did
it wrong.”
The ratings are down. Could it be the terrible job Fox does of broadcasting? The best part of the night, by the way, was the fact that Joe Buck got the loudest BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOS from the crowd – it was the only thing that woke us up.
Could it be that the audience has NO interest in a rigged series?
You watched the game.
The HP ump didn’t call balls and strikes the same for both teams.
Oh yes.
Roy pitched like crap.
The guys hit like crap.
Phil managed like crap.
Who cares.
A few last things -
1 – for those of yall who say I am “whining” about having to be a spectator in unpleasant conditions, well, too bad
2 – for those of yall who say that MY team has no right to HF advantage, which, by the way, IS having the roof closed, well, then play the entire WS on neutral turf, just like (yawn) football. Heck, play in a football stadium that neither team has ever been to – how about in Green Bay or something so they will have to play in snow. Yeah, that would show them wussies. Or better yet, how about having the whole thing in some other country? Like, say, Yugoslavia?
3 – for those of you who say there isn’t cold weather in Chicago that the Chicago players have to play in any other time of the year, well, I have a nice bridge to sell you
4 – for those of yall who say that baseball was “meant” to be played without a roof, I say, first, “meant” is just your opinion, not a rule. If you want it different, write it in the rulebook and ban all domes and forbid the roofs of stadiums to be closed under ANY conditions since it will be different than stadiums with no roofs. Force every stadium to be built exactly alike, like a basketball court.
5 – for those of you who think 50 degrees is a wonderful temperature, well, goody good gumdrops for you. It’s like the sexual attractiveness of people – one person’s ugly dog is another person’s hottest hottie. And the vast majority of Houstonians, who are the vast majority of Astros fans, think temperatures under 70 degrees are cold.
6 – for those of yall who think that teams should not be superstitious or be influenced by the crowd, well, isn’t that special. Go play with your strat cards – statistics don’t lie. And the strat cards don’t care about nothing.
If you don’t believe in home field advantage because of the crowd, explain why there is a home court advantage in basketball or football, where the playing fields are exactly alike in every way.
and last but not least,
- guess Jimy Williams was right after all about Geoff Blum being a better player than Morgan Ensberg.
Tags: 2005 World Series, Chicago White Sox, Houston Astros, MLB, White Sox
Somehow, Roy wasn’t in top shape last night, but he battled.
However, the umpire was crap. There were strikes that was definitely strikes that didn’t get called.
Would having the roof closed have helped? I don’t know but Selig was crap for making that call.
Biggio looking at strikes 3 without swinging was terrible. Phil not warming up the pen after Roy was in trouble was stupid.
Go BACKE tonight!
I still don’t get why the Astros fans weren’t able to make any noise for the first home World Series game in their entire existence. I mean, almost every major league team has an open-air stadium (like the Astros did last night) and they all seem to have a home-field advantage. The White Sox fans at Sunday’s game made a ton of noise in weather that was much worse than anything in Houston last night. And on TV the White Sox fans at Minute Maid last night were clearly audible. So what’s the problem? The way I see it, you’re just complaining about the stadium not being extra-loud, but the Astros fans couldn’t even make it remotely loud anyways. Stop blaming Bud Selig for a) your team’s failure to play well and b) your fans’ failure to make any noise.
I heard the same complaints about the lack of noise at Minute Maid Park for Game 3, but let’s remember that the crowd at that game is VERY different from that type that is usually in place for regular season games and the early playoff rounds.
World Series tickets are passed to “corporate types”, much more so than regular games, so you have a lot of “fans” that are really there to enjoy the experience and be seen as opposed to being those lifelong fans that will scream their faces off for the home team. They may not have attended a single game, nor even be Houston fans for that matter.
Let me qualify this: I’m not using this as an excuse – but perhaps as a partial explanation as to why we don’t hear the jet engine roar we’re accustomed to when the average Joe Blow baseball fan is allowed to buy all the tickets available.
Wild card, divisional, and league championship games will ALWAYS be more fun to attend than world championship games.. that goes for baseball and football. It’s well known that the Super Bowl is just that.. a corporate thank you from the NFL.
I have tickets for tonights game and I’ll be there yelling for the Stros to take this game in the hopes that it will allow us to get to our “Power 3″ in Clemens, Pettitte, and Oswalt to turn the sweep around in our favor.
It ain’t over yet.. the Fat Lady may be warming up in the orchestra pit, but someone toss her a donut and let’s get some hits tonight.
Kurt
Disclosure: I’m a Sox fan
Just a few couple things to say…
1) The poor record of the Astros with the roof open. Now, from my understanding the majority of roof-open games you guys played were early in the season when a) Your entire team was playing poorly both home and away and b)Lance Berkman was on the DL or struggling in the first few weeks off the DL. These are more practical explanations than the roof being responsible for that discrepency in records.
2) The World Series is an MLB event, not a Houston Astros or Chicago White Sox event. That’s why there are so few tickets available for the fans (they go to corporate sponsors and the other MLB teams), why the official programs are not stadium or team specific, why the majority of tickets look like they do, why the singers and ceremonial first pitchers are who they are (my understanding is the teams submit lists of people they’d like to use, and MLB chooses them). Basically MLB is hosting the game using the home team’s facilities. Therefore, if MLB has decided they want the roof open, they can open the roof…it is not the Astros decision.
3) As for whether it’s the right decision, well that’s Selig. If he wanted the roofs of such stadiums open during the playoffs, it would have helped to issue that decree before this started. It would have behooved him to be consistent and insist the roof was open during the NLCS. But as has been stated before, this did occur in Arizona a few years back.
4) Opening the roof doesn’t remove home field advantage, it alters it slightly. Crowd noise is amplified with a closed roof…that doesn’t mean crowd noise is non-existant with an open roof…a crowd can be plenty loud without a roof over its head (see ballparks across the country including US Cellular in Games 1 & 2). The hill & flagpole are still in center, the shortporch is still in left, it’s still a stadium your team has played 81+ games in. That’s what home field advantage is…familiarity with the surroundings…awareness of a ballpark’s quirks. You got a fabulous example of home field advantage in Game 3 – Lane’s hit which landed close enough to the yellow home run demarcation line to be incorrectly ruled a homer by the umps. Umpire mistake yes, but it’s only made possible because Minute Maid has that quirk of a yellow line that changes direction. That’s home field advantage.
5) You suggest that Astros fans were already dejected & pessimistic when walking into tonights game simply because the roof was open…and apparently therefore, unable to cheer loudly. C’mon…anything like that would have been wiped clean by the pregame festivities, the player introductions, the ceremonial first pitch, the early lead being taken in the first inning. And they were loud through the first 5 innings. Standing up for the third outs of innings, cheering loudly during 3-2 big pitches. After the Sox took the lead, the crowd got quiet…not surprising. What was surprising was that they never really got loud again. Especially in extra innings. A roof can’t amplify silence.
6) The game is played by the players, within the foul lines. I’m fairly confident in stating that the roof’s status is not why the Astros lost and Sox won. And I can pretty much assure you that the White Sox couldn’t have cared less if they played with the roof open or closed.
Now I don’t want to put too much of a crimp into your Oliver Stone story here, but…
Were the umps still on the take when they called Lane’s double a HR, or was that just to through the rest of the media off the scent?
My main thing about Selig’s decision wasn’t that he made it, it was the timing. For some reason, he had no beef with the roof being closed against Atlanta and St. Louis, but suddenly it’s a fairness issue? The thing I’ve been asking that nobody else has is, fair for whom? How is the roof being close unfair for anyone?
Another thing about the timing is that this decision wasn’t made at the start of the series. Like you said, Lisa, the fans were grumbling going in. They wouldn’t have if they’d known for three days that the roof would be open, but for some reason, Selig didn’t see the need to issue his decision until 5:00 pm, just two and a half hours before the game.
I’ll tell you waht I’ve been telling everyone – I’m not conspiracy theorist, not by any stretch. But with the Sox winning five of their last seven games on, not just bad or blown calls, but horrendously awful, pathetic calls, you start to wonder. Put that with Selig’s edict, and you start to wonder more.
adrian
1- the open roof record
it isn’t just this year, it’s every year.
the losses with the roof shut were mostly in MAY – the month we couldn’t buy a win
and like i keep saying, we play the vast majority of the games with the roof (thankfully) shut like it should be.
2 – lemme explain about ws tickets
there are a little over 20,000 season tickets
all season ticket holders are offered ws tickets. and that’s half of all the tickets.
and almost all the fans who were there, in the field seats and the stands, were astros fans. i would guess that at LEAST 90% of fans there had astros stuff on. and almost all astros fans are from houston and the rest are from texas. it’s not like the cubs or yanks or sox or dodgers. or even cards. so you talking mostly local people at the game.
it is NOT like football.
of course i don’t know/care who was in the suites where they were from or what they did. i went to a game in a suite once and i was the ONLY one there who actually watched the game, instead of glancing at the tv every now and then and talking about something else
3 – the complaint is that mlb “hosting” is changing the character of the venue. it is a valid complaint.
like i said, otherwise they should choose a neutral site, like vegas or something and auction tickets to the highest bidder and to hell with the fans
4 – i’m gonna try this one more time. i was THERE at the game. the crowd was NEVER loud. not EVER. you are just flat out WRONG. the first few innings were about as loud as an afternoon game with the 5th starter and 15 thousand folks in the stands.
after the 5th, it was like a cemetary. the pregame stuff only produced any emotion wth booing joe buck. even podsednik only got a few half hearted boos. i’m sorry, i was there and you weren’t and you are just wrong. just about to a person, the fans were glum and cold and very few bothered to even stand up and hi five when we scored runs. i was freaking THERE i know what i saw.
5 – i’m gonna try one more time. our REAL home field advantage is ONLY the belief, whether reasonable or not, that we can win with the roof shut and not with it open. not some field BS. the yellow line and the crawford boxes and tal’s hill are there for BOTH teams.
if you don’t think that a psychological factor is an advantage, then why does every single ballplayer talk about “confidence”
let’s put it like this -
if you go into anything feeling like you gonna lose, you think you got much chance to win?
The last game Houston Astros game EVER played with the roof open will be in this World Series. At least it would be if I were in charge, beer sales be damned.
Lisa, I don’t know how well you could see Roy-O from where you sat, or if you taped/watched the game, but he looked seriously P.O.’ed to me, like something was not quite right. Maybe he wasn’t feeling well, maybe it was the roof, but he didn’t look calm until he got the lead. Then came the 5th, and, well, he was annoyed again. I couldn’t figure out then, and still can’t, why Ausmus, Hickey, even Garner didn’t once go out there and try to settle him down, or channel his anger/nervousness in a more constructive way.
I can’t believe the Astros players want any part of this roof thing. Do they really want to be thinking CAN’T win unless they play indoors?
By extension, I guess they will have somehow convinced themselves Philadelphia should be in the playoffs, since the Phillies finished only a game back.
Not a ticket to success.
I hope they spend the off-season dealing with real baseball issues, like hitting and plugging the hole in the starting rotation that the Rocket will leave.
1) Do you have the records for previous years? I haven’t seen this information anywhere, and it would be nice to look at.
2) My point wasn’t about the crowd, it was that since it is an MLB event, and not the individual team, that’s why Selig/MLB is able to make the decision to open the roof. (But yes, it definitely sucks that it’s become a corporate event and that so many tickets go to MLB & its corporate sponsors, forcing the true fans then have to spend huge sums of money via scalpers in order to get to the game. And I’m sure no one wants MLB to turn into the NFL)
3) I think just about everyone would agree that opening the roof changes the venue conditions by making it less loud…how much so is something we’d need a decibel meter to know. The point is that this shouldn’t be a major effect, realistically or psychologically. The crowd can still make plenty of noise…an open roof does not preclude them from doing so.
4) I can only judge from the TV…it sure seemed like the crowd was into it in the first 5 innings and making a good amount of noise. There were plenty of shots of standing fans clapping and cheering during big moments in the first 5 innings, and the audio feed seemed to back it up. Would love to hear other viewers impressions of this…
5) Home field advantage is not just the crowd. Yes the field is the same for both teams…but the familiarity with that field from having played 81+ games on it is a definite advantage for the home team. Knowing how to navigate Tal’s Hill, being familiar with the ground rules, and with the bounces the ball takes off the walls and corners, etc. The crowd helps…of course it does…and the louder the better. But if the players truly believe they can’t win with the roof open, then I really don’t know what to say. They’ve played through 162 games and two playoff series in all sorts of stadiums and conditions, and they should feel like they can beat anyone anywhere…the team should be going into every game believing it can win.
I can understand that the fans were a bit glum coming into the game…over being down 0-2, over the way the previous loss occured, hell even over the roof issue, and it being a bit colder than normal inside. But if there’s a single Astro fan in that stadium that didn’t believe the Astros would win once you went up 4-0 in the bottom of the 4th, well, they should be ashamed of themselves. The roof should have been long forgotten by the fans at that point (it should have been forgotten by the players before the first inning if they were even thinking about it at all) I thought the Astros were gonna win then, and I’m sure I’m not the only Sox fan with that thought. Minute Maid should have been rocking then, and I can understand your dissapointment at the fans lack of emotion.
——
Anyways, that’s enough from me. Let me just end by saying that it’s a shame to see you follow your team this far and then let Selig’s roof decision ruin your perception of the Astros season, playoffs and World Series. Regardless of the outcomes, these have been 3 exciting games with tons of tension, lead changes, momemtum swings, and unlikely heroes/goats. The fans not watching due to lack of Red Sox or Yankees are missing out…I hope you don’t miss out on a potentially great Game 4 (and beyond) too.
Tom, I agree that Roy seemed PO’d. I think part of it was the strike zone. He could see what the White Sox were getting from the dugout and what he wasn’t getting when he was on the mound. Bad calls went both ways, but the strike zone, as it has been the whole series, was definitely wider when the Astros were batting. Roy-O has plenty to roll his eyes about that night.
But I gotta say, this series certainly ended fittingly. 20 runners stranded, Backe pulled for a pinch hitter that hasn’t hit any better than he did this year, Lidge blowing another one WITH two outs. And, of course, my favorite numbers: Ensberg, 4, 0, 2, 6; that’s 4 ABs, 0 hits, 2 strikeouts and 6 LOB.
Brewers playing with a closed roof tonight. 58 degrees, only 3 cooler than when Houston was forced to keep its roof open because it was relatively comfortable. How convenient that 60 degrees is comfy in Houston but cold in Milwaukee.
but austin,
what does bud have to do with milwaukee and he
oh
oops
nevermind