A Wrigley Field Intro, a Record Inning, a Scorecard Mess

 IT WAS SCORCHING HOT that day at Chicago's Wrigley Field. 

The game time temperature hovered near 95 degrees with a real feel of about 104. I arrived at my field box seat just past first base adorned in my black New York Mets road jersey and matching cap.

Twenty years ago...

"Man, you look like my roof!" the guy seated next to me said.

It was July 16, 2006, a Sunday. I'd been a Windy City resident for about six weeks and savoring my first chance to see my home town team at the legendary Friendly Confines. This game did not disappoint, though -- truth be told -- I'd gone to the game a day earlier with a new friend from my new job and that one definitely did.

Seated Saturday on the field level, but in the shade of the third base stands, my pal Kevin and I watched the Cubs spank the Mets, 9-2. 

Hall of Fame Mets starter Tom Glavine gave way after six plus, having allowed four hits, three walks, and three runs -- all started with a triple by infielder Ryan "The Riot" Theriot, before being replaced by submariner Chad Bradford, who allowed two more. 

... a weekend at the Friendly Confines.

It was 5-2 Chicago after six, then someone named Henry Owens surrendered four additional runs in the seventh, all he'd ever allow in his Mets career, and that was basically the ballgame. 

Tempestuous Cubs ace Carlos Zambrano got the win, running his record to 9-3. Glavine took the loss, just his third against 11 wins.

Unsatisfied, I returned alone the next day. Sunday's game before a crowd of more than 40,000 would be historic, record-setting even.

Armed and Ready

The 2006 Mets were packed and arguably the most talented team they've fielded in this century. Their roster included Hall-bound center fielder Carlos Beltrán, slugging first baseman Carlos Delgado, all-star third baseman David Wright, all-star shortstop José Reyes and slugging left fielder Cliff Floyd. 

Carlos Delgado

The rotation included Glavine, Hall-bound Pedro Martinez, stolid Steve Trachsel and El Duque, the Cuban veteran Orlando Hernández. In the pen, Hall-bound reliever Billy Wagner.

Beltrán, Reyes, Wright and Delgado finished fourth, seventh, ninth and 12th in National League MVP voting. Wagner finished sixth in the Cy Young race. 

This was a very good ball club. The Cubs, on the other hand, were not, even as they were assembling the pieces for back-to-back playoff appearances in 2007 and 2008. 

As a lifelong National League Mets fan, I wasn't about to change allegiances... at least not for the perennially sorry Cubs. The team across town, however, was the then-defending World Series champion White Sox. I had no problem at all with rooting for them.

Sunday's starters would be Hernández and the rookie left-hander Sean Marshall. And, after the Mets went down meekly in the first, the Cubs made quick work of El Duque. 

Fleet center fielder Juan Pierre led off with a single, stole second and and with one away scored on catcher Michael Barrett's double. Third-sacker Aramis Ramirez doubled Barrett home. Hernández got an out, walked two to load the bases then escaped further damage by getting shortstop Ronny Cedeño looking. 2-0 Chicago.

The Mets went in order in the second and the Cubs resumed pounding New York's starter, starting with Marshall who belted a homer, the only one of his nine-year MLB career.

David Wright

Pierre singled again, stole second again and scored again after an out when Barrett doubled again. Hernández fanned Ramirez for out number two, but then Cubs RF Jacques Jones singled to plate Barrett and El Duque was done, having yielded five runs on seven hits and two walks in just an inning and a third.

New York went down in order again in the top of the third and it looked as though the day would belong to the cruising Marshall and the Cubs.

Lefty Darren Oliver, who'd relieved Hernández, surrendered a single and a double in the bottom of frame, yet somehow avoided allowing a run. Then Mets backup shortstop Chris Woodward crashed a homer to start the fourth, one of just three he'd hit that year, and New York was finally on the board.

Oliver surrendered another double in the bottom of the fourth, the Cubs' fifth of the afternoon, but again kept them at bay. Chicago 5, New York 1.

Detonation

Cliff Floyd opened the fifth with the Mets' second homer off Marshall. Right fielder Xavier Nady singled and it looked like New York might have something going, but the 23-year-old lefty retired the next three men in order. 

The Mets' Pedro Feliciano held the Cubs off the board next and it was 5-2 after five. But things were about to change in a record-setting manner.

Cliff Floyd

It happened like this:

With one out, Beltrán reached on an error. Delgado singled. Then David Wright did too, loading the bases for Floyd, who crashed his second homer of the afternoon -- this one a granny -- putting New York up 7-5 and chasing Marshall from the game in favor of righty Roberto Novoa.

Novoa promptly walked Nady. Catcher Ramon Castro reached on a fielder's choice with Nady safe at second on an error. OF Endy Chavez, batting for Feliciano, singled, scoring Nady and moving Castro to third. 8-5, New York.

Chavez then stole second. 2B José Valentin reached on an infield hit to reload the bases and Woodward's grounder to third forced Castro at home, bringing up Beltrán with the bases loaded again.

And for the second time in the inning a New York hitter unloaded them with a home run. That second slam increased the Mets' lead to 12-5 and they weren't finished.

Delgado doubled off the reeling Novoa, bringing up Wright, who drove a 2-0 pitch over the ivy and into the right field bleachers -- their ninth hit of the inning -- mercifully driving Novoa from the game. 

The Mets' messy record-breaker

It was 13-5. The Mets had homered three times in a single frame, twice with the bases loaded, scoring 11 runs, the biggest inning in their history to that day, bettering a 10-run effort by the lowly 1979 edition against the Cincinnati Reds.

New York got just two more hits the rest of the way. A Phil Nevin two-run homer off the Mets' Aaron Heilman made the score a slightly more cosmetic 13-7 and that's the way it ended. Feliciano -- he of the scoreless fifth inning -- was credited with the win. Marshall took the loss.

The Mets single-inning runs record would stand for nearly a decade before being bested by a 12-run performance against the San Francisco Giants in April 2016.

Post-Script

That Sunday loss dropped the Cubs' record to 35-56. They'd finish 66-96, last in the NL Central, costing manager Dusty Baker his job. Sweet Lou Piniella would take over the next year and bring them home in first.

The Mets' offensive explosion was one highlight of what proved to be a bittersweet year. They ran away with the NL East, rolling up a 97-65 record, finishing 12 games ahead of the second-place the Philadelphia Phillies, their first outright division title since 1988.

Carlos Beltrán

They swept the Los Angeles Dodgers in the Division Series, only to run into a hot, but inferior, St. Louis Cardinals team in the NLCS. The climactic seventh game featured Chavez making one of the all-time greatest catches in post-season history, robbing Cards HoF 3B Scott Rolen of a sure two-run homer and keeping the game knotted 1-1 after six. 

There it stayed until the top of the ninth when Cards catcher Yadier Molina, who'd hit just .216 on the season, drilled a two-run shot off Heilman in the top of the ninth. 

The Mets would load the bases in the bottom of the inning against rookie reliever Adam Wainwright, bringing up Beltrán with two outs. The Mets had signed the outfielder to a seven-year, $119 million deal in 2005 for a moment just like this.

Wainwright quickly got head of Beltrán, 0-2, then broke off an unhittable 12-6 drop curveball that caught the Mets centerfielder looking, the bat frozen on his shoulder, ending their season.

-- Follow me @paperboyarchive on ex-Twitter

Damning Derek Jeter With Faint Praise

AS A BASEBALL FAN, it was easy to admire Derek Jeter's abundant success. As a New York Mets fan, it was hard not to resent it.

The former New York Yankees captain will be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame today and I'd be dead wrong if I said he didn't deserve it. He played for 20 seasons, accruing 3,465 hits, a Rookie of the Year award, more than a dozen All-Star selections, five Gold Gloves, five Silver Slugger awards and played on five championship teams.

From the 2009 season.

But still, the green eyed envy monster would rather not hear about it.

First time I saw Jeter play, he was penciled in as shortstop for the AA Albany-Colonie Yankees, who were playing the New Haven Ravens at the Yale Bowl on July 30, 1994. 

Rocketing through the Yankees farm system, he was batting .363, with 41 hits in just 113 at bats, 11 of which went for extra bases. He'd also walked 15 times, struck out 16, driven in 13 runs and registered a dozen steals. 

Jeter had started the year in Single-A Tampa and would rack up just nine more at bats -- and five more hits -- for the A-C Yanks before being promoted to AAA Columbus. Somehow he'd spend almost all of 1995 there, stuck behind Tony Fernandez and Randy Velarde on the Yankees' first wild card team.

Appearing in 15 big league games, he was briefly teammates with the man he'd spiritually replace and ultimately follow as the Bombers' captain, Don Mattingly, then in his last season as a player.

Jeter took over as starting shortstop in 1996, winning the American League's top rookie honors, while the Yankees won their first World Series since 1978, an almost unimaginable drought for them that coincided with the powerful Mets teams of the 1980s.

15 years earlier, in New Haven, Ct...

In '96, the Mets had promoted their own snazzy shortstop, Rey Ordoñez. And, while the Cuban-born Ordoñez couldn't hit like his crosstown counterpart, he could field his position like few others ever had.

The New York Times interviewed both for a feature titled My Shortstop is Better Than Yours, but the parity didn't last. 

Ordoñez finished just fifth in National League RoTY balloting but gained instant recognition for his defensive acrobatics, winning Gold Gloves in 1997, 1998 and 1999, before being derailed by broken arm sustained in a mid-2000 season collision, after which he was never the same. 

By that time, Jeter was already being kissed by fate, benefiting from Yankee fan Jeffrey Maier's hauling in a deep fly to right, converting it to a home run, kissing up to his manager, whom he respectfully if not obsequiously called "Mr. Torre," -- as dutifully reported by a fawning press -- and literally kissing pop star Mariah Carey, Miss Universe Lara Dutta and others.

...a rising prospect

The Yankees, who were capturing championships while Ordoñez was collecting his singular hardware, faced the Mets in the 2000 series and took the first two games, each by a single run before the Mets broke their momentum with a game 3 win.

Jeter led off the potentially pivotal game 4 by rocketing the first pitch of the night from Mets starter Bobby Jones into Shea Stadium's left field bleachers. The Yankees, who never trailed in the game, won 3-2, and took the series the next night.

The next season saw the Yankee shortstop make perhaps the signature defensive play of his career, in the A.L. Division Series, a maneuver that came to be known as "The Flip." It seemed the shortstop could do little, if anything, wrong. He'd even starting collecting Gold Gloves some say were undeserved, as well as Silver Slugger honors.

In 2003, he was named the franchise's fifteenth captain, putting him in the company of luminaries such as Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Thurman Munson and Mattingly.

From the 2009 game program, a mini poster.

In 2003, the Mets... well, don't ask. In this tale of one city, it was the best of times for Derek Jeter, the worst of times for the team from Queens. The obsequious Bronx mainstay played on, partaking in another Yankees championship and living his charmed life as the Mets' fortunes rose and fell. 

Then his own body betrayed him in game 1 of the 2012 A.L. championship series.

It was a stunning "behold a god who bleeds" moment, and a reminder that for all his exploits, for all the acclaim, for all the objectification, he was only human, exceptionally talented, gifted even and fortunate, but still just flesh and bone. He retired after 2014.

Jeter's Hall election came with 99.7 percent of the vote, the highest ever. He was selected on all but one of 397 ballots cast, a triumph of the hype. Other immortals were at least as deserving. But then why am I writing about him?

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

The Jets, the Pats and Death from the Sky at Halftime

FOR 60 YEARS, the New York Jets and New England Patriots have regarded one another with a wariness befitting Cold War superpowers, using whatever treacherous means necessary to gain competitive advantage. Executives have been pirated, head coaches coaxed away, star players persuaded to defect.

December 9, 1979, at
Shea Stadium in NYC

Largely led by Bill Belichick, New England has dominated on the field of play, rolling up a 67-54-1 all-time record with six Super Bowl championships to the Jets' measly one. Two times Belichick was named head coach of the Jets, only to be demoted in 1997 after the Bill Parcells ploy backfired and only to resign in evident disgust when tabbed again in 2000, all without ever actually coaching a game for them.

There's been the evil of Spygate, the embarrassment of The Butt Fumble.

Twice the Patriots/Jets convergence has had near fatal consequences and once, 40 years ago this weekend, it was actually, literally, deadly.

In 1969, just days after designing the offensive scheme for the Jets' Super Bowl III victory, Clive Rush was hired by the Patriots as their head coach. On Feb. 12, he was given the honor of introducing the team's new general manager, George Sauer Sr. (father of the champion Jets receiver George Jr.).

Rush stepped up to the podium, gripped the microphone and began screaming as electricity from a short circuit coursed through his body, according to the Boston Globe. Were it not for a Patriots board member ripping out the wires running to a wall socket, Rush's coaching career -- and indeed his life -- might have ended right there.

Then, on Sept. 23, 2001, early in Belichick's second season as the Pats' head honcho, Jets linebacker Mo Lewis slammed into New England quarterback Drew Bledsoe as he sought to escape New York's pass rush. Bledsoe suffered a torn blood vessel in his chest. Only a team doctor's prompt decision to rush him to the Mass General emergency room kept the quarterback from dying.

While the quick thinking saved his life, it couldn't save his job as backup QB Tom Brady stepped in to the starting role and hasn't relinquished it to this day.

But in between the Rush Electrocution and the Bledsoe Bleed there was a third incident, during halftime of a game at New York's Shea Stadium, that took the life of not a player or coach but of a Patriots fan. It was an accident so improbable, so tragically bizarre, that even the urban legend detectives at Snopes.com felt compelled to confirm it really did happen.

It happened on Dec. 9, 1979. I was there with my pal, Eddie, my dad and more than 45,000 other people.

Game day souvenir

It was the last home game of the season at the gusty multipurpose stadium near the shore of Flushing Bay, perhaps two miles southeast of LaGuardia Airport. The 6-8 Jets had gone into the locker room with a 17-12 lead over the 8-6 Pats.

Mid-game entertainment would be provided by the Electronic Eagles of The Radio Control Association of New York, an organization of gas-powered remote-controlled model plane enthusiasts. Only these weren't ordinary planes or even the hobby drones now popular across the U.S. They were flying contraptions, one of which was configured to look like a lawnmower.

As the innocent, if ill-conceived stunt flying exhibition got underway, my pal and I had headed off to the souvenir stand in search of swag, leaving my dad holding a pair of high-powered Bushnell binoculars I'd received as a bar-mitzvah gift a year earlier. Our seats were in the upper deck on what would be Shea's first-base side during baseball season.

Dad, now nearly 87, picks it up from there:

"The lawnmower plane was flying clockwise around the playing field at about the height of the top of the grandstand, with an occasional swoop downward and over the seating area. I was standing, following the show with the binoculars. 

After a swoop or two at the seating area across the field the plane swooped in and failed to swoop out again, as was expected. Instead, it crashed into several spectators, who went down. The crowd started to chant "Sue! Sue! Sue! It stopped when the injured party (or parties) didn't get up, when the crowd realized that the injury was more serious than originally thought. 

I don't think anyone anticipated a fatality."

The lawnmower plane crashed into field level seats behind the Patriots' bench, along what would be the third-base side of the stadium, and into a crowd of New England fans who'd made the trip to Queens for the game.

Game day program

Kevin Rourke, 25, of Lynn, Massachusetts sustained a concussion, according to a New York Times report. Another fan, John Bowen, 20, of Nashua, New Hampshire, died from his injuries four days later at a hospital in New York City.

The Queens County District Attorney's Office ruled the incident an accident and declined to bring charges against the pilot of the wayward craft, Brooklyn auto body repairman Philip Cushman.  Bowen's father later filed a $10 million federal lawsuit against the Jets, the Electronic Eagles and Cushman.

But from there the trail goes cold. I could find no official record of the case or how it ended.

In the third quarter, New England rallied for a brief 19-17 lead before the Jets added 10 more points. A late Patriots touchdown brought them to within one but New York held on to win, 27-26.

Just grown men playing a game.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

It Was a Styx Concert. You Got a Problem With That?

"DON'T LOOK NOW, but here come the '80's!"

Reaganomics, big hair, tight jeans and MTV. We'd been warned. By Styx. Driving home their point in a minute and a half, the arena rockers and power ballad pioneers committed a half-dozen rock and roll cliches on side 2, track 1 of their ninth studio album, Cornerstone.

Prog-rock synthesizer intro? Check! Portentous power chords? Check! Segue into Steve Miller-like rhythmic guitar beat?  Check! Check! Shouts of "Yeah! Yeah!"? Double check! And then... that notice of the imminent arrival of a new decade.

80s artifact -- Styx' Cornerstone

Songs that date-drop invariably don't age well. They can't. Think of the line "Now you find yourself in '82," from Asia's Heat of the Moment, or the atypically upbeat Joe Jackson telling us, "It's not so easy. It's '84 now" in Happy Ending.

Date-stamping a song is the ultimate guarantee that the song in years hence will sound... well, dated. And so it is that Styx' song Borrowed Time is rooted in 1979.

By the time Cornerstone was released 40 years ago this month, Chicago-based Styx had already embarked on a tour they'd dubbed The Grand Decathlon. On Oct. 25, the quintet of Dennis DeYoung, Tommy Shaw,  James Young and brothers John and Chuck Panozzo arrived at the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale, Long Island for a two-night stand.

They'd have an opening act called The Good Rats and in the audience on their second night me and my best bud. I was 14, about seven miles from home and seeing my first ever rock concert.

Rock concerts. The very idea seemed dangerous. Would there be sex? Drugs? Violence? Woodstock? Altamont? These reference points were still reasonably current, all within the past 10 years. Of course, this was a Styx concert and at least two sets of suburban parents saw it as safe enough to let their kids go alone.

Alas, they were right. These were Styx, not Stones, although I recall DeYoung wearing a Chicago Cubs jersey.

40 years ago this week, at the Nassau Coliseum

Cornerstone was still so new, so untested that it's possible none of its nine songs even made the set list if the previous night's version --which drew heavily from the band's past two albums -- is any indication. That one included Styx' first hit, Lady, but not their biggest one, Cornerstone's Babe.

Ah, Babe, the schmaltzy, syrupy granddaddy of power ballads, written by DeYoung for his wife Suzanne, recorded as a demo and -- according to legend -- included on the album at the insistence of his bandmates. It topped the Billboard Hot 100 on Dec. 8, 1979 and perched there for two of its 19 weeks on the charts.

And they didn't even play it.

They did work in other crowd pleasers, including Never Say Never, a pop song with a French chorus, ne dites jamais jamais, and the future Eric Cartman tour-de-force, Come Sail Away.

We rocked. We rolled. We waited for a ride home from our parents. Cornerstone soared to number 2 on Billboard's Hot 100 album chart, charted two more singles -- Borrowed Time and  Why Me? -- and ultimately went triple platinum. It even got nominated for a Grammy!

But about Babe...

Babe would almost come to define the band, and not for the better, even as it was typical radio fodder in an era that saw Air Supply score five top five singles in the next year and a half and spawn imitators like Sneaker. Babe wasn't even the only power ballad on Cornerstone.

Five out of Chicago, but bound for where?

But, Styx's prior album, Pieces of Eight, featured a pair of genuine arena rockers, Blue Collar Man and Renegade. Styx wasn't likely to inspire anyone to don a leather jacket, grow their hair long and jump on a Harley, but they were approaching respectability. Borrowed Time was made in that vein.

Babe, the band's only chart-topper ever, overwhelmed all of that, blowing whatever hard rock cred they had and becoming a point of introduction to a different kind of band, one that became increasingly, fatally, theatrical and thematic.

To be sure, Cornerstone's intricate packaging indicated the band harbored deeper, as yet unrealized ambitions, The album cover, suggesting the discovery of a buried artifact, wrapped around another album cover appearing to be that same artifact. Oh so meta.

It was silvery. It was spacey. It showed five beings emanating from North America and headed for the sky. Where were they going? In subsequent albums we'd find out for better and then worse: back to Chicago, for Paradise Theatre and then to the future!

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

A Baptism in Springsteen's Church of Rock & Roll

I'D HEARD ABOUT EVENTS LIKE THIS, the fanaticism, the ecstasy, the rapture and delirium brought on by four hours of pure joy. Yet I still wasn't ready for what I witnessed that night.

Bruce Springsteen, The Boss, live on stage at the Brendan Byrne Arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey. He was midway through a 10-night stand somewhere in the swamps of Jersey, in the middle of the epic Born in the USA Tour, at the peak of his career.

The official tour program.

And then, right in front of everybody, the biggest star in rock and roll -- still a bachelor at age 34 -- danced with his mother.

Just like that.

It was August 12, 1984 and I was seeing Springsteen live for the very first time. Me, Richie, Wayne and Big Ed had driven across New York City from Long Island to the arena New Jersey's favorite son christened with a concert on its opening night just three years before.

Big Ed remembers: Rich Fields was also a big Springsteen fan. He and I became close one winter when he missed a semester at school recovering from a tumor. Born in the USA was out and a huge success on radio and this new thing called MTV. I had just gotten home from a Mets game, crawled into bed, and then my phone rang at around midnight.

It was Rich, with the news that Springsteen tickets were going on sale in the morning. He suggested I pick him up and we go camp out in front of the ticket store. This was before Ticketmaster and the Internet. We got there, and there were only 25 to 30 people in front of us. I thought that was great, but the process was also excruciatingly slow. I could write a whole article about just the ticket experience. We bonded with lot of people, I even went on a lunch date with a hot blonde from North Woodmere with a Datsun 280ZX, whom I never saw again. Finally around 4 p.m., Rich and I had the tickets.

Eddie and Rich slept outside our local Ticketron outlet. There, for $16 a piece they nabbed four seats in the front row of section 211, the upper level near what would be center ice.

Four hours of jubilation for $16.

The stage was to our left. Though we had seats, I don't recall sitting very much. I do recall the entire tier bouncing to the beat, not just the people, mind you, but the stands themselves.

The dance song was, of course, Dancing in the Dark, a smash hit by a guy who wasn't about dance songs. But this was a new Bruce -- Megastar Bruce, MTV star Bruce -- and he could get away with doing pretty much whatever the hell he damned wanted to do.

"That's my mom!" he shouted.

Big Ed: It was more than a decade before Friends premiered on TV, but half the male Springsteen fans were already in love with Courteney Cox, Bruce's dance partner in the DitD video. Well, I was expecting there to be some hot chick that would come up on stage and dance with Bruce. Instead he pulled his mother Adele on stage for that song.

In June Springsteen released Born in the USA, his seventh LP. Though the name evoked his breakthrough album Born to Run, issued nine years earlier, this was no sequel. The nation had changed and so had The Boss.

The Interval

Between those recordings, Springsteen had an all-out legal war with his original manager that kept him out of the studio and on the road for more than a year. He'd written a surfeit of songs out of which emerged Darkness on the Edge of Town, a searing blue collar crie-de-coeur.

This was a bitter album for post-Watergate, post-Vietnam America, a time of double-digit inflation, gasoline shortages and the national malaise President Jimmy Carter later labeled "a crisis of confidence."

Two years later, Bruce and the E Street Band released The River, a two-disc mix of rock-and-roll rowdiness and melancholy story songs about accidental pregnancy, metaphorical adultery and despair. Among those 20 tracks was a song about a man who'd walked out on his wife and kids, set to a party beat.

Clocking in at a radio-friendly 3:19, the song -- Hungry Heart -- spent 18 weeks on Billboard Hot 100. Topping out at number five, it was Springsteen's first bona fide radio hit. The River LP went to number one on the Billboard 200. [Ridiculously, improbably, 14-year-old me had been offered a ticket to a River tour concert and turned it down, a mistake I'd not make again.]

The original vinyl release.

Most artists would have looked at that hard won success and ordered up more of the same. Bruce Springsteen isn't most artists. What carried over into the next album wasn't the hootenanny of Hungry Heart, Sherry Darling or Cadillac Ranch, but the loneliness of Stolen Car, Drive All Night and the album closer, Wreck on the Highway.

Titled Nebraska, Bruce's 1982 release was bleak, stark and spare, a collection of vinyl-pressed demo tapes featuring The Boss alone on acoustic guitar and harmonica.

The title track was based on the 1958 midwestern killing spree of 19-year-old Charlie Starkweather, accompanied by his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Fugate. Her parents were his first victims.

What to expect after that?

The Boss Goes Boom

The answer came in the stadium scale heartland rock of Born in the USA, an LP containing a dozen songs. Seven of them reached the Top 10, including Dancing..., Glory Days, I'm on Fire and My Home Town.

Ronald Reagan was president, the national mood was different, and crowding into Springsteen's genre were rockers John Mellencamp and Bob Seger plus Canadian counterpart Bryan Adams.

The Boss's sound was now bigger and bolder, right from the opening title track.

If one ignores the lyrics, Born in the USA the song can easily be mistaken for a patriotic anthem. It's really an indictment of a nation indifferent to a generation of people it sent to fight an ultimately pointless foreign war. It was precursor to the more overtly political music Springsteen would make in the ensuing decades.

Glory Days -- Me and college friend Laura K.
circa 1985. I still have that shirt somewhere.

It opened his show on that August night, a four-hour marathon punctuated by The Boss's trademark stage stories and banter. There were three songs from Nebraska, though not the one about Starkweather, five from the double-album River, four from the first Born and eight from the new Born.

Among the most memorable: Tenth Avenue Freeze Out, the Hungry Heart sing-along and show closing covers Twist and Shout and Do You Love Me?

Big Ed: I am finally at a Springsteen concert and my first event at this new arena named after the former Governor of New Jersey in what Springsteen would refer to as The swamps of Jersey. My memories of the set list are fuzzy, partially because it was a lifetime ago and partially because I would go on to see Springsteen another 13 times over the years.

To me, it was the equivalent of a Jew's Birthright trip to the Holy Land or a Muslim's Hajj to Mecca. I never saw a more enthusiastic crowd in an arena as I did when the band played Born in the USA.

The four of us -- really the 20,000 of us -- danced and sang all night. I've no idea how Bruce and company did that night in and night out. I was exhausted well before he introduced his bandmates during the rousing Rosalita (Come Out Tonight). Little did we know (and who knows if he did) that the newly-added Patti Scialfa would one day be his wife.

Big Ed: It was also our first sighting of Nils Lofgren, who'd replaced Miami Steve Van Zandt. He'd appeared on the Born in the USA album, then left to reinvent himself as Little Steven, fronting a band called The Disciples of Soul. Later he'd return to the E Street Band before reinventing himself again as Silvo on HBO's The Sopranos.

Thirty-five years and a couple of dozen concerts later, some starring The Boss and some not, this first time seeing him live on that summer night remains the best time. It made me a believer in Bruce almighty and the power of his music.
________________________

Thanks to Eddie and Wayne for helping to reconstruct our memories. This entry is dedicated to our friend and fellow concert-goer Richard Fields, who died on Aug. 22 of last year. He was just 54.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

From Rectitude to Rapscallion with Patrick Stewart

"TEA. EARL GREY HOT!" Jean Luc Picard is coming back!

The always engaging Patrick Stewart
live on Broadway, circa Spring 2000

Sir Patrick Stewart will reprise his role as the iconic Star Trek: The Next Generation character, he and CBS announced last weekend. But it's not for a Star Trek: The Next Generation project. It's for something... beyond.

Word is that a new CBS All Access program will fast forward to Picard's life years after his epic seven-year voyage as captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise, NCC 1701-D, a sort of a Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Next Generation, and hopefully not one in which he's an elderly man stricken with Irumodic Syndrome.

The prospect of Picard: The Sequel, (eat your heart out William Shatner) is all the more breathtaking when looking back at how far we've come from the prospect of some unknown balding, British, Shakespearean actor becoming the most respected and, arguably, the most beloved of all the captains in Trekdom (and arguably, the best actor to ever regularly grace a Star Trek series.)*

Larger than life, Jean Luc Picard has eclipsed pretty much everything else Stewart has every done. And he's done quite a lot. Here's a look back at some of his other career highlights:

• Vladimir Lenin in the TV mini-series, The Fall of Eagles, in 1974
• Oedipus Rex in a made for television Oedipus Tyrannus, in 1977
• Narrator of a one-man rendition of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, seasonally on Broadway from 1991-1995 and again in 2001, with a movie version in between
• Richard I in Robinhood, Men in Tights, the motion picture, 1993
• Professor Charles Xavier in the Marvel X-Men movies starting in 1995
• MacBeth, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 2008
• A totally different Vladimir -- opposite Sir Ian McKellen's Estragon -- in Samuel Becket's Waiting for Godot,
• More than 60 Royal Shakespeare Company productions; and
• The voice of Poop, in The Emoji Movie last year.

Plus, for about 145 Broadway performances in the Spring and Summer of 2000, he was the libidinous Lyman Felt, in Arthur Miller's The Ride Down Mt. Morgan.

Who?

Well, if Jean Luc Picard was the moral north star of the ST:TNG universe, Felt was his polar opposite. Felt was so un-Picard that if the two characters ever met and shook hands, the energy released by their mutual annihilation might power a starship. Really.

A ticket to 'Ride"

Miller's play opens with Felt, an insurance agent and bigamist, hospitalized after crashing his Porsche on the snowy, titular mountain. He awakens to find Theo, his wife of 30 years, has arrived from New York City.

Leah, his younger, prettier wife from Elmira, is there too.

This from a playwright who had three wives over his 89 years, leaving the first one for Marilyn Monroe.

Now conscious -- and cornered -- Lyman must account for his behavior to the icy, waspish old spouse played by Frances Conroy, and to her passionate rival played by Katy Selverstone.

“A man can be faithful to himself or to other people, but not to both,” he declared, according to a contemporaneous Variety review. Later, according to the same article, Felt likens a man to a 14-room house. “In the bedroom he’s asleep with his intelligent wife, in his living room he’s rolling around with some bare-ass girl, in the library he’s paying his taxes, in the yard he’s raising tomatoes and in the cellar he’s making a bomb to blow it all up.”

Top billing

Unrepentant, he wrings admissions and concessions from those around him. By play's end, Felt's not the only one who's morally compromised.

Refreshing as it was to see Steward playing against Picard-type, shifting from rectitude to rapscallion, the critics were somewhat divided. The New York Times liked it. New York Magazine? Not. After 23 previews and 121 performances, it closed on July 23, 2000, the day after I saw it.

Two months earlier, after shedding his Felt persona for a curtain call, Stewart went full Picard and staged an insurrection.

He called out the show's producers -- including the powerful Shubert Organization -- questioning their commitment to the production.

"There are many elements that go into making a Broadway play a success. The casting, the direction, the design, the acting, the play. And in The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, we know we have an extraordinary, provocative and vastly entertaining play," the actor said.  "What is also needed is promotion and publicity. People need to be told that a play is out there. Arthur Miller and I no longer have confidence in our producers commitment to this production (especially the Shubert organization) or their willingness to promote and publicize it." 

Their backers were not amused and issued a statement asserting their commitment, "could not be stronger." Dragged before Actor's Equity, our captain, oh captain, apologized, later explaining it was the right thing to do.

* Honorable mentions to Leonard Nimoy, Avery Brooks and Michelle Yeoh.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

Manny Being Manly - A Minor League Excursion

HE STOOD OUT LIKE a teenager playing tee-ball, a rock-solid minor league slugger who had "can't miss" written all over him.

Independence Day

He was 21-year-old Manny Ramirez and before he was "Manny being Manny," he was Manny being manly. Not just "can't miss," he was impossible to miss.

It was July 4, 1993 -- 25 years ago today -- and I was in Binghamton, New York with my pal Jeff at the second stop of an upstate minor league excursion. A day earlier we'd been at historic Dunn Field in Elmira for some Class A NY-Penn League action.

Now we'd moved up to the AA Eastern League affiliate of the New York Mets. On the B-Mets roster were outfielder Butch Huskey, infielders Aaron Ledesma and Quilvio Veras, plus pitchers Jason Jacome and Pete Walker, prospects all, but none could hold a figurative candle to the big kid on the opposing Canton-Akron Indians.

Long mired in the nether regions of the American League's Eastern Division, the parent Cleveland Indians were on the cusp of a renaissance. Among Ramirez's teammates were future big leaguers David Bell, Brian Giles and Herbert Perry. But that big kid, he stood out.

Two years earlier Manny had been drafted out of George Washington High School, in the Washington Heights section of upper Manhattan. Emblematic of the changing mosaic of the city, the same school had produced Hall of Famer Rod Carew and in an earlier era, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.

Ninety feet and a cloud of dust: Ryan Martindale beats the tag of
Andy Dziadkowiec as Julio Peguero and Brian Giles look on.

Ramirez had been a first round pick, 13th overall. The hometown New York Yankees, picking first, selected pitcher Brien Taylor, who injured his arm in a bar fight and never made the majors. Taken right behind Ramirez by the Montreal Expos, slugging Chicagoan Cliff Floyd.

At roughly the halfway point of the Eastern League season, Ramirez was batting a robust .339, pounding out 102 hits in 301 at bats over 77 games. He'd belted 15 homers, driven in 68 runs and even stole two bases.

Giles too was a comer, but his .303 average came with just five dingers and 36 ribbies.

Huskey, 22, a projected slugger for the Mets, had hit 13 homers and driven in 55 runs, while batting just .248. Over the summer he added a dozen circuit clouts and 43 more RBI's, meriting a September call up to The Show.

The numbers, through July 3, 1993

So too did Manny. He'd play just just a dozen more games for the C-A tribe -- hitting two more taters and knocking in 11 -- before being moved up to AAA Charlotte and then the big club, where he took his place among Jim Thome, Albert Belle, Carlos Baerga and Kenny Lofton.

Two years later, the Indians, now in the AL Central, went to the World Series for the first time since 1954, starting a run of six first place finishes in seven seasons with a second pennant in 1997.

Ramirez finished runner-up for the 1994 AL Rookie of the Year award, behind the Kansas City Royals' Bob Hamelin and blossom into a perennial all star and most valuable player candidate.

He'd play for two World Series winners too, albeit for the Boston Red Sox, not the Indians and be suspended -- twice -- for using performance-enhancing drugs, the second time ending his career.

That punishment likely killed his Hall of Fame prospects, despite a lifetime batting average of .312, 555 home runs and 1831 RBIs. The drug in question: human chorionic gonadtropin, a not-so-manly female fertility drug also known as HCG, which can also boost testosterone production in men.

Just Manny being Manny.

But about Elmira

An hour's drive west of Binghamton, but a world away, Elmira's Dunn Field Municipal Stadium exists almost out of time, a pre-World War II relic that stands in stark contrast to the B-Mets' utilitarian Binghamton Municipal Stadium, which opened in 1992.

New Marlins and old Pioneers

The old ballpark is nestled alongside the Chemung River. Peering out from the grandstand, past the outfield fence. all one sees are trees and rolling hills. It's as picturesque a place to see a ballgame as exists in this world.

For decades it served as a NY-Penn League or Eastern League outpost, the Elmira Pioneers affiliating with teams including the St. Louis Cardinals and Browns, the Philadelphia Athletics and Phillies and, for one magical season, 1969, for the expansion San Diego Padres and Seattle Pilots.

Don Zimmer once played there. The legendary Steve Dalkowski too. So did Rabbit Maranville, Davey Johnson, Wade Boggs and Oil Can Boyd.

The Pioneers and their MLB affiliates,
from the '93 program/yearbook

Nowadays they're mostly remembered as a Boston Red Sox farm club, a relationship that lasted from 1973 to 1992, after which they affiliated with the expansion Florida Marlins, when I saw them take on the Geneva Cubs.

Like a lot of small northern cities, Elmira's population is declining, and with it, its baseball fortunes. After the 1995 season, the team moved to Massachusetts, re-affiliating with the Red Sox as the Lowell Spinners. Subsequent editions of the Pioneers played in the independent Northeast, Northern and CanAm Leagues.

Now they're part of the Perfect Game Collegiate Baseball League, which sounds, well, perfect.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

Before Bull Durham, There Were The Durham Bulls

WHEN THE LEGEND BECOMES FACT, print the legend -- baseball edition.

"... about America's other favorite pastime."

Bull Durham, a fictional story about the minor league Durham Bulls, opened in U.S. theaters 30 years ago this week and immediately took its place in the pantheon of great baseball movies alongside The Babe Ruth Story, Pride of the Yankees and The Natural.

Within the next five years came Eight Men Out, Field of Dreams, Major League, A League of Their Own and The Sandlot. Baseball was boffo at the box office and Bull Durham led the charge.

Directed by one-time minor leaguer Ron Shelton, the film got a great many things right about the low rent, high fun MiLB universe: its rites, rituals, goofy mascots and promotions and the fans who took their transient players to heart and sometimes to bed.

In it Kevin Costner played Crash Davis, a career minor league slugger and sage acquired by the Bulls to tutor idiot bonus baby, pitcher Ebby Calvin "Nuke" LaLoosh, played by Tim Robbins. Susan Sarandon was their sensuous bohemian mutual love interest, Annie Savoy. Costing $7 million to make, it grossed more than $50 million at the box office and embedded itself in pop culture history.

The movie's anniversary will be feted this season in diverse places such as Helena, Montana and Framingham, Massachusetts and at minor league ballparks in Fargo, North Dakota, St. Paul, Minnesota, Asheville, North Carolina and Woodbridge, Virginia.

Dirty Al Gallagher, 1981 program coverboy

It's almost enough to make one forget the Durham Bulls were and are a real baseball team, one that existed long before the movie that made them so well known. Among their alumni, hall of famer Joe Morgan, sluggers Rusty Staub, Ken Singleton and Greg Luzinski plus 1972 National League Rookie of the Year Jon Matlack.

But, nine years before the movie, they didn't exist at all.

The Bulls, for all intents and purposes, had gone extinct after the 1971 season, having spent their last two years without a major league affiliation. Before that, they'd been the Carolina League farm club of the Philadelphia Phillies, New York Mets and Houston Colt 45's. Their once and future home, the Durham Athletic Park, had gone to seed.

Enter entrepreneur Miles Wolff, a man who would go on to found and/or lead entire minor leagues. In the dilapidated DAP , he had a vision. It would ultimately entail sod, paint, elbow grease and a manager named Alan Mitchell Edward George Patrick Henry Gallagher, also known as Dirty Al.

Resurrected for the 1980 season as a Class A affiliate of the Atlanta Braves, they took the field  before 4,591 fans, wearing spandex uniforms designed by Universal Studios and boasting a roster studded with future big league players including Brett Butler, Gerald Perry, Milt Thompson, Albert Hall, Rick Behenna and Joe Cowley.

The Greatest Show on Dirt

Also present, a struggling 24-year-old catcher/first baseman named Brian Snitker, who would soon hang up his spikes and turn to coaching. In 2016 -- at the age of 61 -- he became the Braves' manager.

The Bulls endured the theft of their home uniforms and their bus getting stuck in the mud, but ultimately drew 176,000 fans to the gussied up old ballpark built in 1926 and compiled an 84-56 record, good for a spot in the Carolina League championship series, which they lost to the Phillies' Peninsula Pilots, three games to none.

The Bulls were boffo in Durham. For their efforts, they were awarded the 1981 Carolina League All Star Game and more Braves prospects, among them pitcher Jeff Dedmon and outfielder Brad Komminsk, the fourth overall pick in the 1979 amateur draft. He would bat .322 that year with 33 homers and 104 runs batted in. He even swiped 35 bases.

The prospects, courtesy of Chick-Fil-A.

Despite his heroics, the Bulls slipped to fourth place in the composite standings. Dirty Al's second season at the helm in Durham would be his last, though he'd spend the better part of the next two decades managing minor league teams in far flung places including Chattanooga and Bend, Oregon, San Jose, Duluth and Kansas City, Kansas.

The Bulls' popularity would only grow. Wolff, in a 2017 interview, recounted his team's early support from former Universal Pictures president Thom Mount, a Durham native. Upon visiting the ballpark, Mount told Wolff, "some day we'll make a movie," a remark the entrepreneur said he'd dismissed as "Hollywood talk."

Six years later, Mount dispatched Shelton to the Durham Athletic Park to soak up the atmosphere.

When the stars came out the DAP

"We were sure it was going to be a huge flop," Wolff said. It wasn't and ever since, the Bulls have been boffo everywhere. In 1990, they became the first Class A team to draw more than 300,000 fans in a season. Then Wolff cashed out, selling his team to the local Capitol Broadcasting Company.

Five years later, the club moved into a new stadium, the 10,000-seat Durham Bulls Athletic Park. In 1998, they were elevated to the Triple-A International League as the top farm club of the then-expansion Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

In a move that can only be described as life imitating art imitating life, on June 15, the Bulls will wear Bull Durham throw back jerseys for their own 30th Anniversary celebration of the movie they made possible, which in turn made them famous.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

Come to See Herschel Walker and Stay for the Beer War -- One Night Out With the United States Football League

WHAT I REMEMBER MOST is the beer fight.

It happened to just our left and I've no idea what started it. Suds and cups flying across rows of the upper deck section 313, accompanied by angry words and then by fisticuffs. That last component attracted what seemed to be every security guard on duty at Giants Stadium that evening. They appeared to be old policemen wearing yellow rain coats.

Monday night football, USFL style

Somehow they restored order, allowing me, Ed, Lonny and the rest of the fans in the neighboring sections to turn their attention back to the matter at hand: the New Jersey General vs. the Birmingham Stallions, a contest capping week 10 of the United States Football League's inaugural season.

It was Monday night, May 9, 1983. Earlier that evening, me and my buddies had set out from Long Island, driven across New York City and to the New Jersey Meadowlands to bear witness. To what, we didn't really know.

It was really baseball season, but the Mets were at the Astrodome and the Yankees were off, so... it was springtime... for football... in East Rutherford. Newfangled football, starring Herschel Walker, a precocious 21-year-old Heisman Trophy winner who'd turned pro after completing his junior year at the University of Georgia.

Though a year too young for the National Football League draft, he was just what the Generals and the nascent USFL needed. Signed to a $5 million three-year contract, his job wasn't merely to carry the ball, rather it was to carry the league.

Pssst.... they're from New Jersey.

Not yet on the scene, New York real estate mogul and entrepreneur Donald Trump -- yes that Donald Trump -- who later bought the team from its original owner, Oklahoma oil baron J. Walter Duncan, then fatefully decided to take on the far wealthier and entrenched NFL.

Walker held up his end of his deal, entering the game as the league's leading rusher. He was aided by fullback Maurice Carthon, who would later play for the NFL's New York Giants at the same address, receiver Mike Friede who had played for the Giants and center Kent Hull, who would play in four Super Bowls with the Buffalo Bills.

But that was pretty much it.

The General's field general was 34-year-old Bobby Scott, who spent nine years with the New Orleans Saints, backing up star quarterback Archie Manning while starting only 14 games himself.

The Stallions' signal callers, Bob Lane and Reggie Collier, weren't significantly better, but on this night they wouldn't have to be.

The $5 million man

Though Scott connected with receiver Tom McConnaughey for a first quarter touchdown and a 7-0 lead, Birmingham's running game quickly got the equalizer. Then, the visitors turned the game over to their stout defense and a place kicker named Scott Norwood -- yes, that Scott Norwood -- who booted five field goals, while missing a sixth.

The Birmingham D stifled the General's star running back, holding him just 28 yards. New Jersey's offense fell silent, somewhat justifying the attendant excitement of watching grown men throw cups of beer at each other. The final score, Stallions 22, Generals 7.

Paid attendance: 38,734 in a stadium that held about 80,000, so half empty or half full, depending on your outlook.

Walker earned his keep, rushing for 1,812 yards on the season to lead the league, but the Generals failed to live up to their five-star billing, finishing just 6-12, among the worst in the league. That would change under Trump, who lured Cleveland Browns star quarterback Brian Sipe for season two and then Heisman winner Doug Flutie for season three, also known as season last.

The league's quality of play was generally considered good, though its top tier of talent was thin, but launching a league to rival the NFL was a daunting task. The under-capitalized World Football League had tried to do so a decade earlier and didn't survive its second year before collapsing.

Not Gatorade, but still available today

The USFL lasted twice as long before a pyrrhic victory in its antitrust lawsuit against the established league that left them with $3 in damages when they were counting on substantially bigger award to endow their shift to a fall schedule and head-to-head competition.

For the new league, it wasn't just about securing talented players like future NFL star quarterbacks Jim Kelly, who played for the Houston Gamblers and Steve Young of the Los Angeles Express or even running backs Mike Rozier of the Pittsburgh Maulers or Marcus Dupree of the New Orleans -- and later Portland -- Breakers. It was also about securing sponsors, and like the players, most of the best were already committed to the established league.

Still, the upstarts had 12 franchises arrayed from coast to coast -- including the Tampa Bay Bandits part owned by movie star Burt Reynolds, the Chicago Blitz led by longtime NFL head coach George Allen and the Denver Gold led by Super Bowl XII Denver Broncos coach Red Miller -- and there were sponsors eager to get in on the ground floor with the new venture.

Their presence, backing a league also comprised of the Arizona Wranglers,  Michigan Panthers, Philadelphia Stars, Oakland Invaders and Washington Federals gave the enterprise an off-kilter, parallel universe kind of charm.

That wasn't nearly enough to sustain it, but it gave the USFL a look and style all its own.

Lots of red, white and blue, but..

... none for the Washington Federals.

Special thanks to www.usflsite.com for filing in some of the blank spots in this 35-year-old memory.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive