off the leash

A Baseball Fan Memoir Chapter 2 – Coming of Age

Posted on September 16, 2014 by Ken Dowell

As the 1960’s started I was a 10-year old in 5^th grade. At the end of the decade I was in my freshman year of college.

In 1960, the New York Mets existed only as a business plan on the desk of New York attorney William Shea. In the fall of 1969 as the decade was coming to a close they became the most unlikely of World Series champions.

I think we came of age together.

The years following the departure from New York of the Dodgers and Giants were tough years for New York baseball fans, especially those of the National League variety. The rivalry/animosity built up over the previous ten years when there were seven subway series between the Yankees and either the Giants or Dodgers precluded most of those teams’ fans from moving up to the Bronx. My own family attended games in Philadelphia when the Giants were in town rather than go to Yankee Stadium.

The Mets came along in 1962 as basically a nostalgia team. Former Dodgers Charlie Neal, Gil Hodges and Clem Labine played a final year or two in a Mets uniform. The great Phillies center fielder Richie Ashburn did one last year as a Met in ’62. They even brought in a veteran St. Louis Cardinals pitcher by the unlikely name of Vinegar Bend Mizell. He lasted a couple months. Our staff ace was another former Dodger Roger Craig. Amazingly he lost 24 games in one season. Even more amazingly he won ten.

This was truly a collection of has beens and they posted a won-lost record of 40-120. Nevermind, we were happy to have them.

And things got even better in 1964 when Shea Stadium opened its doors at the same time that the New York World’s Fair came to Flushing Meadows. A boardwalk was erected between the new stadium and the fairgrounds with the Willets Point subway stop between the two. My family made 3 or 4 trips in each of the two years of the World’s Fair, with each trip ending at Shea Stadium. It was one of the few family activities that we all enjoyed together that I can remember. It also involved the only time I ever remember us taking public transportation as a family.

The Unisphere is a remnant of the 1964 World’s Fair. To the left of the Unisphere is a tower that was the New York State Pavillion.

Since my parents showed me how to take the 7 train to Shea, I was set up to make some more clandestine visits with my friends in future years. I remember cutting high school to go to opening day at least twice.

I loved Shea. It was not a great looking stadium and as it aged the orange and blue panels on the outside made it look something of a dump. But it was a baseball stadium built in the shape of a baseball field and the stands were close to the action. It wasn’t too big. It was a much better place to watch a ballgame than at the next generation of stadiums which were the giant all-purpose oval stadiums like Veterans and Three Rivers.

The boardwalk that was originally built to connect Shea Stadium and the World’s Fair, now connects Citi Field and the National Tennis Center.

From 1962 until 1968 the Mets finished last every year except two when they finished next-to-last. In the 60’s the National League East had 10 teams, not five like it has now, so it was no mean trick to finish last year after year after year. On those rare occasions when they slipped up one spot it was at the expense of the Houston Colt 45’s/Astros.

I graduated from high school in the spring of 1969 and headed to college in Ohio that September. That is when strange things started happening at Shea. On Sept. 10 of that year, the Mets moved to the top of the standings for the first time in their history. Then they won their first pennant, played their first post season game, won their first National League championship and on Oct. 16, 1969 won the World Series.

No longer in New York I joined the numerous other New York and New Jersey students at Kent State, filling the lounges of the on-campus dorms. We saw some strange happenings. Ron Swoboda, a guy who played right field as if he had two left feet, started making diving catches robbing the Orioles of hits. Al Weis, a light hitting shortstop who had only two homers in 103 games that year, knocked one out in the deciding game.

But with Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, Nolan Ryan and Tug McGraw we had a major league pitching staff. The Mets had come of age. So had I.

Next week’s post will be about how I learned to love the Indians at the “Mistake By the Lake.”

See also Chapter 1 – Childhood Heroes.

Posted in Baseball, Sports | Tagged 60's, baseball, history, MLB, New York Mets, sports, stadiums, World's Fair | 2 Comments

Digital Deception: Catfish

Posted on September 11, 2014 by Ken Dowell

So far in my Digital Deception series I’ve encountered phonies who used their fake identities to promote their products or business, to trash their competitors, to catch criminals or spy on ideological enemies, to spread propaganda or to enhance their reputation. What about those who use fake identities to make romantic connections, either real or online/fantasy?

I think we probably all expect a little creative license in the profiles we see on dating sites. Maybe they’ve added a couple inches of height, underestimated their weight by a dozen or so pounds, lopped a decade or two off their age, or maybe just forgot to mention that not a single hair has grown on their head for a good 10 years now. (A friend of mine writes a blog Not So Smitten with some pretty funny stories about what she found when she came face to face with some online dates.) But these are just sort of the little white lies of dating sites. There are a lot worse.

The term catfish is a pretty appropriate one. If you go to a restaurant and order say Cajun Crusted Fried Catfish you may get a pretty nice looking plate. If you look at the creature your meal was derived from you see a butt-ugly bottom feeder, the human version of which is what you’ll likely find behind a fake dating site profile. I like to turn to the Urban Dictionary for colorful definitions of terms like this. One of the authors demonstrated how to use catfish as a verb: “Did you hear how Dave got catfished last month? The fox he thought he was talking to turned out to be a pervy guy from San Diego.”

Catfish as a moniker for online date phonies can be traced back to a 2010 documentary movie of that name which follows 20-something Nev Schulman as he was in fact smitten by a 19-year old singer dancer who instead turned out to be a 40-year old Michigan housewife. Schulman followed that up with an MTV show by the same name in which he and a partner expose catfish.

One very high profile catfish incident is the curious case of Manti Te’o. Te’o was a football player at Notre Dame and during the 2012 season he very publicly disclosed that he had been playing with the burden of mourning for his girlfriend Lennay Kekua who had passed away from leukemia in September of that year. Turns out, however, that Te’o never met Kekua and that she was in fact the creation of a man named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, who apparently was an acquaintance of Te’o. The whole story was headline news on the sports pages and on ESPN for weeks.

What motivates the creators of catfish? In a story last year in the U.K. Daily Mail, author Hayley Peterson suggests “the fabricated life stories and photographs that they cobble together online often contain the experiences, friends, resumes and job titles they wish they had.”

Some are more sinister than that. Catfish may represent more than a bad date, they may be thieves, con artists or stalkers. A story in the Guardian from 2011 estimated that 200,000 Brits had been tricked into turning over some money or bank account details through connections they made on online date sites. The usual pattern is the catfish spends some time developing a relationship online then asks for money to deal with some financial hardship or family illness.

The U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command issued a warning about scammers on online dating sites who claim to be soldiers in Afghanistan. They initiate a relationship and then at some point ask for money for transportation or medical supplies.

Digital Trends carried a story in January of this year about a 66-year old divorced woman in San Jose who was scammed out of $300,000. She met a guy on the dating site Christian Mingle who claimed to be an Irishman working on an oil rig. He was really in Nigeria. He sent flowers, he made phone calls and then he asked for help with his daughter’s tuition. And then he asked for money for his oil rig business which the victim raised by withdrawing from her retirement account and refinancing her home.

Not all of the frauds are coming from the users of online dating sites. A story in the Telegraph of London from July of last year describes how some online dating services use stolen data to create fake profiles as a way to attract customers. The author, Hayley Dixon, quotes a former employee of Global Personals who acknowledges creating fake profiles.

Almost incredulously I found a site where at the click of a button you can create a false identity. www.fakenamegenerator.com asks the gender and country you want to use and then generates a full fake profile with name, address, age and email address as well as details like mother’s maiden name and blood type. You can also use their Sims Family Generator and create as entire fake family. (Tech developers are not always up to snuff on their ethics.) The site is free and supported by advertising. I found ads for Hitachi, Target and Renaissance Hotels. Those companies are undoubtedly using automated ad networks and have no idea their ads are being placed on a site like this.

I also found a site where you can buy online dating profiles. www.usdate.org offers 10,000 profiles for $18. Not much of a barrier to enter the online dating business. In the story in the Telegraph it is reported that the BBC bought 10,000 profiles from usdate and in those profiles found photos of Brad Pitt and Michael Caine.

DISCLOSURE – I’m way too old to have had extensive experience with online dating sites. My generation used bars. It was harder to manipulate your appearance in a bar, even a dark one, although we often suspected the guy who never took his baseball cap off might be balding. The unattractive often relied on the beer goggle effect. We still created fake profiles but they usually took the form of bullshitting about having a job or offering an enhanced view of your high school sports prowess.

Posted in Digital Deception | Tagged catfish, dating sites, Digital Deception, Manti Te'o, Nev Schulman, online profiles | 21 Comments

A Baseball Fan Memoir Chapter 1 – Childhood Heroes

Posted on September 9, 2014 by Ken Dowell

The first seven years of my life coincided with the heyday of New York baseball. The Dodgers were in Brooklyn, the Giants in Upper Manhattan and across the river the Yankees were in the Bronx.

All three won a World Series during that time. In fact, a New York team won every World Series between 1950 and 1956. In all but two of those seven years there was a subway series. The streak was broken in 1957 for two reasons. The Milwaukee Braves beat the Yankees in the World Series that year and after that season the Giants and Dodgers migrated west.

When families in other parts of the country would get together and talk baseball, it was about one team, the one and only home team that everyone who cared about baseball rooted for. But like many families in the New York area, I grew up in a split fan environment. My father’s family, all baseball fans, were strictly a National League group. My grandmother was the matriarch of Dodger fans while my father , as first born son, headed up the Giants contingent. My mother’s family had a couple Yankee fans. Being my father’s son, I went with the Giants.

While I was only seven when the National League clubs split but I was fortunate to have seen games in all three of the New York stadiums at the time, Ebbets Field, the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium. These trips made such an impression on me that to this day I remember details of those games and more specifically the players who participated. When I saw the Redlegs at Ebbets Field, Ted Kluszewski played first base for the visitors. Third baseman Eddie Yost was the best player on the Washington Senators team that I saw in Yankee Stadium. Ernie Banks was the Cubs first baseman when I saw the Chicago infield make two errors on the same play and allow Willie Mays to go all around the bases on a ground ball. I saw the Cubs play the Mets a few weeks ago and I have no idea who played first base.

In fact none of the players I have watched in the five decades that followed ever achieved the heroic stature of the players in the 50’s in my mind. Ask me who was the best centerfielder in the history of baseball and I still think the choices are Duke Snider, Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays. The news media at the time wrote about baseball in terms of who won, who had the winning hits and who was the winning pitcher. We didn’t necessarily know about who took drugs, who cheated on their wife or who defaulted on their taxes. No doubt the players in the 50’s weren’t actually better people than modern day players, but we had the luxury of picking our favorites based only on their on-field performance.

Baseball itself was a lot more child friendly than it is now. Big games, including the World Series and the All-Star Game were played during the day. I remember watching World Series games on a TV set up in front of my 5^th or 6^th grade classroom. Saturday and Sunday games were always played during the day and most Sundays had doubleheaders. Not the kind of doubleheaders they have today where they try to squeeze you for two admissions, but rather back to back nine inning games with a 20 minute or so break in between.

As long as you could get to the stadium, you could get in. The bleacher seats I sat in to see the Yankees and the Senators cost $1. The leagues had a system of indentured servitude at that time which prevented free agency, so you generally got to see the same players year after year and usually didn’t have to face the emotional conflict of seeing a former favorite player in the uniform of the team you hated most.

Their records have been broken. Their accomplishments surpassed. Yet I never quite got over the thought that no one could smack home runs like Mickey Mantle, patrol centerfield like Willie Mays, hit like Stan Musial or strike batters out like Don Newcombe.

Next week’s post will be about coming of age, something that me and the Mets did at the same time.

Posted in Baseball, Sports | Tagged 50's, baseball, Brooklyn Dodgers, Ebbets Field, history, MLB, New York Giants, New York Yankees, Polo Grounds, sports, Yankee Stadium | 4 Comments

A Baseball Fan Memoir – Introduction

Posted on September 9, 2014 by Ken Dowell

I always thought there were two kinds of baseball fans. The traditionally more charming of the two is the person who is born into fandom of a certain team because of who his or her parents root for and where they live and then continues to support the home team forever.

The second is the bandwagon fan. This individual is wowed by high salaries, marquee names, championship banners. Usually this involves the Yankees or the Red Sox or maybe the Dodgers. The Phillies had a lot of fans a few years ago and sold out every game. Now the Phillies don’t have so many fans. Wonder why?

The only problem with my theory is that I don’t fit into either category. While I’ve been a fan of the Mets consistently since they were formed, I’ve also been a fan of several other teams as different times and it can’t be explained by either heredity or celebrity.

Sometimes my baseball preferences clearly reflected where I was in life. That is what this series of blog posts in about. It’s about my childhood heroes, about coming of age at the same time my favorite team did, about learning the joys of watching baseball games in places other than New York. And it’s also about growing disillusioned with the influence of money on the sport.

I’ll be posting these stories weekly between now and the start of the World Series.

Posted in Baseball, Sports | Tagged baseball, MLB, sports | 2 Comments

Take Exit 0 for America’s Oldest Seaside Resort

Posted on September 4, 2014 by Ken Dowell

Cape May

As numerous comedians have pointed out, in New Jersey we often refer to where we live by our exit number (I’m 151). The Garden State Parkway runs the length of the state and if you hit Exit 0, you are as far south as you can go. At the southern tip of the state is Cape May, a town of less than 4,000, which on a summer weekend may be home to as many as 40,000.

Cape May is generally considered the country’s oldest seaside resort. Visitors, mostly from Philadelphia, began arriving there in horse-drawn wagons in the 1760’s. They came in larger numbers by the 19^th century as two railroads began serving the Cape.

The heyday of Cape May as a resort was in the mid-1800’s. It attracted visitors from the northeast corridor between New York and Washington and its reputation was enhanced by visits from prominent Washingtonians. A parade of presidents including Lincoln, Grant, Arthur, Buchanan and Hayes all spent some time there.

In 1878, a five day long fire destroyed 30 blocks of Cape May including the large beachfront hotels which were the primary destinations of 19^th century beachgoers. As the town was rebuilt, these large-scale resorts were often replaced by smaller inns and cottages. Built in the style of that time, this reconstruction is what gave Cape May its reknowned Victorian character.

At the beginning of the 20^th century Cape May was eclipsed by Atlantic City as the playground of the rich and famous. What evolved was a greener and quainter beach town. A resort with an historic look and a small-town feel. In the 70’s it was named a National Historic Landmark City, the only whole city to have been designated as such.

Congress Hall

In two years Congress Hall will celebrate its 200^th anniversary. Built in 1816 it was originally called Big House by its proprietor Thomas H. Hughes. The locals thought it was too big to succeed and called it “Tommy’s Folly,” a name that currently adorns the hotel’s coffee and gift shop. Hughes later was elected to the House of Representatives in 1828 and it was then that he re-christened the hotel Congress Hall. Presidents Buchanan and Grant stayed there and during the administrative of Benjamin Harrison it was known as the Summer White House.

Like the other 19^th century beachfront hotels, Congress Hall was destroyed in the 1878 fire. It was replaced by a brick structure that reopened in 1879.

The hotel had its ups and downs in the 20^th century. Plumbing was installed in the 1920’s but it was closed during the Great Depression and fell into disrepair later in the century. New owners embarked on an extensive renovation that was completed in 2002 and it is once again a truly grand destination.

The Cape May Lighthouse

View from a porthole inside Cape May Lighthouse

This is the third lighthouse to be built at Cape May Point. The first in 1823 was sucked up by beach erosion. A replacement was built in 1847, but not very well, and it crumbled. The current structure, built in 1859, is solid as a rock and its beacon is still used as a navigational aid.

World War II army bunker built in 1942 as part of Harbor Defense Project. In Cape May Point State Park

Posted in History, Travel | Tagged beach, beaches, Cape May, Congress Hall, history, Jersey shore, Lighthouse, New Jersey, travel | 26 Comments

What I Read (aka The Content I Consume)

Posted on September 2, 2014 by Ken Dowell

I start each day with the expectation of getting around to a pretty full list of news and information. Or, to put it in more modern vernacular, I expect to consume a lot of content.

I approach this task armed with a full stockpile of devices: a smart phone, an iPad, a laptop and a desktop. I also have at my disposal the complete suite of legacy devices including printed newspapers, an assortment of magazines, a couple of televisions and car radios and a mountain of both read and unread books, the black ink on white paper kind, mostly purchased in person after browsing the shelves of a bookstore.

From Tattered Cover bookstore, LODO branch, Denver

Bearing in mind that I don’t have a full time job and don’t go into an office or work site every day, I have more time to devote to this than most. But I don’t even come close. Here’s the list:

Newspapers — I get the New York Times delivered on weekends and the local weekly in the mail. My iPad newstand includes the Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and the Wall Street Journal, I have the AP app downloaded and nj.com bookmarked. In addition I get alerts from the Journal. Realistically the only one I get to daily is the Times and I mostly read it on my iPad with morning coffee. I’d really like to take a look at the AP app ever day, especially the “editor’s choice” photos, but it usually passes me by.

Email newsletters — I like these and get a lot of them. For the most part they are lists of headlines. I probably spend 10 seconds on each unless I find things I want to read. The two that most often draw click throughs from me are NJ News Commons “Must Reads” and CommPro.biz. I spend up to 15 minutes on each of these daily. I also get, in order of interest, Digiday Daily, PBS MediaShift Daily, Editor & Publisher, Mediabistro’s PR Newser and 10,000 Words, Network World, Ad Age Daily and Media Buzz, Today on the Hub, MLB Morning Line, Internet Week Weekly Dose, and Bulldog Reporter’s Daily Dog (increasingly worthless), I also get weekly book related newsletters from Watchung Booksellers and Goodreads. Collectively I might click on about 10 stories a day from this group.

Social media — I have accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, Tumblr, Google+, Pinterest. I use all of them to try to drive traffic to Off the Leash, but Twitter and Facebook are the only ones that I monitor (almost) daily. I use Twitter for news and information and in addition to following many individuals, I follow NY Times, HuffPo, Yahoo Finance, BBC Politics, NJ News Commons, the New Yorker, CJR, Poynter, Search Engine Land, Mashable, Harvard Business Review and probably many others that I can’t think of at the moment. I don’t follow brands or publishers on Facebook because the way they’ve jerry-rigged their newsfeed doing so buries the personnel posts from friends which are really the reason I look at Facebook. The one exception is NPR. I follow NPR News, Music and Books. Most of my social media scanning is done via mobile during brief moments of idleness like waiting on line at the grocery store.

Blogs — I probably read 5-10 blog posts a day. I am a member of a blogger group on Linked In and I try to read the posts from all other members. I also follow a few dozen other WordPress bloggers. I would like to explore more and find new blogs but I can barely keep up with the ones I already follow.

Magazines — There are a handful of magazines scattered around my house including Wired, E&P, AARP, New Jersey Monthly and Mother Jones. I often set these aside to read but almost never get to them.

Radio and Television — Entertainment. Other than the occasional traffic and weather update I listen to radio for music and watch TV for live sports.

My daily content consumption expectation is thus invariably unfulfilled. There is an overwhelming flow of information at my fingertips that I can’t possibly absorb. How does this impact me?

For one, my attention span is fried. I can be reading something and will lose interest in the middle, start to skip around and eventually click off. Since most of this is delivered and read electronically I am always subject to alerts or notifications which will divert me elsewhere, sometimes never to go back to what I was reading.

I’ve become intellectually restless. Bits and pieces of downtime, waiting for my food at a take-out counter, waiting at a railroad crossing, waiting for someone to get out of the bathroom, find me reaching for my phone and reading, browsing, clicking.

But I’ve also learned to savor some dead time that I used to find tedious or boring. A plane or train ride, waiting in the music studio for my son to finish his piano lesson, is now less about waiting and more about unplugging. That’s when the aforementioned mountain of hard print books come into play. I can sit and read without the distraction of electronic content chaos.

Posted in Digital publishing | Tagged blogs, books, content, digital publishing, media, newspapers, social media | 3 Comments

Digital Deception: Sockpuppeteers

Posted on August 27, 2014 by Ken Dowell

Wikipedia defines a sockpuppet as an online identity used for the purposes of deception. The Urban Dictionary has some more colorful definitions:

“A fake personality, usually a ‘friend’ or ‘sister’ created by a drama queen/king for the sake of defending his/herself against others in an online forum.
“An account used by someone unfairly banned by a biased, abusive or just plain asshole moderator to defy the ban and return to the forums.”

There are many other different types of sockpuppets, some of which have equally colorful names. A strawman is a fake identity created to expose opinions in a way that makes them look ignorant. A meatpuppet publishes promotional messaging on blogs and online discussion sites. There is also the ballot stuffer who adopts multiple identities to multiply his or her votes in an online poll.

The idea of adopting false identities and using them for the distribution of information is not new. The use of pseudonyms is as old as publishing itself. In the 18^th century there was a sockpuppet named Alice Addertongue who wrote scandalous gossip about prominent citizens in the Pennsylvania Gazette. Alice’s sockpuppeteer was Ben Franklin. Maybe we should consider him among the founding fathers of sockpuppetry.

In my previous Digital Deception posts I flagged a number of different types of sockpuppets. There’s astroturfers who contaminate online review sites with their self praise or competitor bashing. There’s China’s 50-centers and Russia’s Web brigades who regurgitate propaganda under assumed personas.

My vision of a sockpuppeteer is someone working on their computer in a one bedroom apartment feverishly pumping out commentary and reviews because he or she is being paid a per piece pittance by an ethically challenged marketing agent. But in fact there are sockpuppeteers in all walks of life and there are numerous examples of corporate executives, professors, journalists and lawyers who have been caught red handed.

Here are some of my favorite examples:

Raphael Haim Golb is a New York real estate attorney. His father Norman is a University of Chicago professer. The elder Golb’s arch-rival in the academic world of Dead Sea Scrolls scholars is NYU professor Lawrence Shiffman. The younger Golb, who was convinced that Shiffman plagiarized his father’s works created email accounts in the name of Shiffman and through those accounts issued confessions of that plagiarism. Golb ended up with a jail sentence after a conviction for identity theft, criminal impersonation and aggravated harassment. (Dispute Over Dead Sea Scrolls Lead to Jail Sentence)

John Mackey is the co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods. But on Yahoo message boards he was “Rehodeb.” And under that identity, he promoted both his company and himself, something that caused the SEC to raise an eyebrow. Rehodeb once commented “I like Mackey’s haircut. I think he looks cute.” (The Hand That Controls the Sock Puppet Could Get Slapped)

Lee Siegal is an award-winning writer with a masters degree from Columbia who wrote a blog for the New Republic. “sprezzatura” was a big fan of that blog and was not shy about posting comments that demonstrated that. Guess who the sockpuppeteer was behind the adoring sprezzatura? Once, after Siegal wrote a blog post criticizing John Stewart and earning the wrath of Stewart’s fans, sprezzatura countered “Siegel is brave, brilliant and wittier than Stewart will ever be. Take that you bunch of immature, abusive sheep.” (Sock Puppet Bites Man)

And lastly there’s Orlando Figes, described by the Guardian as a prominent British historian at the University of London. Figes used the sockpuppets “orlando-birkbeck “ and “historian” to trash some of his rivals on Amazon. (Who knew academics were so viciously competitive?) And he wasn’t beyond posting a review that put in a good word or two for his own work, such as “a fascinating book…leaves the reader awed, humbled, and yet uplifted.” (Historian Orlando Figes Admits Posting Amazon Reviews That Trashed Rivals)

Peter Steiner cartoon as published in the New Yorker

Posted in Digital Deception, Digital publishing | Tagged astroturfers, Ben Franklin, Digital Deception, digital publishing, fraud, sockpuppets | 24 Comments

2014 Best of the Minors – NY/NJ

Posted on August 21, 2014 by Ken Dowell

Best Stadium

Provident Bank Park in Pomona, N.Y., has the advantage of being the newest stadium in the area. But the home of the Rockland Boulders also has some character, features that you don’t see everywhere. There’s a center field bridge just like Citi Field and there are old school outfield bleachers. There’s a field level bar just inside the left field foul pole and in right field as well “The Short Porch.” Another bar sits on the roof on the third base side. The scoreboard is major league caliber with state of the art video. There’s a spacious children’s playground, not just a bounce house squeezed onto the concourse, and plenty of parking all around the stadium.

Arm & Hammer Park in Trenton and TD Bank Ballpark in Somerset are solid runners-up in this category and while they are both great places to see a ballgame these two stadiums are a little more of the cookie- cutter variety and don’t have as many unique features as Rockland.

Best Stadium Food

The choices at TD Bank Ballpark in Somerset rival even the newest major league stadiums. There is a build your own burger bar, a burrito stand that also offers dry rub barbeque and a sausage stand. (Unfortunately they serve Premio sausage which is crap, but they seem to have completely cornered the local sports venue market.) There is a healthy choices section with items like salads and turkey burgers in addition to the traditional ballpark standards. For dessert there is an ice cream parlor and a stand to get freshly-made funnel cakes. There is also a nice little bar along the third base side that has a pretty good beer selection. The Patriots have a ton of people working there so there are no lines. In Somerset everybody eats, nobody waits.

Trenton is a solid runner up with Chickie & Pete’s, the Waterfront Grille and barbeque in left field.

Best Name for a Stadium

Yogi’s box

Most of these parks are named after banks. The New Jersey Jackals stadium is named after Yogi. No contest! Yogi Berra Stadium, Little Falls, N.J.

Most Idyllic Setting for a Ballpark

I didn’t enjoy my trip this year to Richmond County Bank Ballpark in Staten Island. Maybe they just don’t do day games well. When I got there the parking lot was full which is understandable since the lot also serves the Staten Island Ferry. What is not understandable was the three slugs who manned the parking lot gate who kept their back turned and ignored the cars looking for a place to park. So I drove around and eventually found a 2-hour meter spot that was 15 minutes away, meaning I had about 90 minutes to watch the game. Since it was an 11 a.m. start I was planning to have lunch at the ballpark but the concession stands were so overwhelmed that I would have spent at least half of my 90 minutes waiting on line.

But take a look at what you see when you look out toward center field. Does it get any better than that?

There are a couple of solid runners up in this category. MCU Park, home of the Brooklyn Cyclones, in on the ocean in Coney Island and the Camden Rivershark’s Campbell’s Field in tucked under the Ben Franklin Bridge. Both are beautiful settings.

Best Baseball Team

The Atlantic League plays a split season. In the first half, the Somerset Patriots had a 67% winning percentage and finished 6.5 games ahead of the Long Island Ducks who were themselves 40-29. Second half same story. As of this writing the Patriots are 24-16, 6 games up on the Ducks. Only issue to be settled is which team gets sacrificed to the Patriots in the first round of the playoffs. I saw about 12 different minor league teams from 4 leagues this year and I don’t think any of them could beat the Patriots in a series.

Lifetime Achievement Award

Arm & Hammer Park

The Trenton Thunder are the gold standard for minor league baseball in the NY/NJ area and have been since they were founded. The Thunder is the team that ushered in the modern era of minor league baseball in this area. Before the Thunder opened play at what was then called Waterfront Park in Trenton in 1994, there was no minor league baseball in the area since a short-lived double A team in Jersey City in 1977-78. Before that the last minor league team folded up in 1961.

Soon after the Trenton team got started there would be teams in Frankford (Sussex County), Newark, Little Falls, Atlantic City, Somerset, Camden, Lakewood, Staten Island, Brooklyn and Pomona. Some have dropped off, some are thriving and some are fighting to survive. But during their 20 years, with three different major league affiliations but with consistent ownership, the Thunder have provided a first rate fan experience and have kept the ballpark full of people. If you ever plan to get involved in operating a minor league sports franchise, go spend some time in Trenton. Nobody does it better.