Tag Archives: Canwest Park

More Stuff Banging Around in My Noggin…

Posted on August 24, 2009 by Scott Taylor| Leave a comment

I was sitting in the press box at Canwest Park last night waiting for the Goldeyes and Joliet to get it on when my brain started to go thump, thump, thump.

Here’s what fell out onto the page…

1) Last Friday night, Minnesota Vikings head coach Brad Childress felt that Brett Favre would play at least a half against Houston next Monday night.

Childress said all he wanted from Favre last Friday night in Minneapolis was to complete all the exchanges from centre-to-quarterback ad to hand the ball off to Adrian Peterson.

“If he completed a couple of passes, great,” Childress added. “That’s not what we were after. We have a 39-year-old guy playing his first game of the year after 2 1/2 days of practice. Taking the exchange from centre was a good first step for Brett.”

I asked Childress during the news conference how long he felt it would take Favre to get used to his teammates, the terminology, the surroundings and his own physical capabilities and Childress was forthright.

“Two weeks,” he said.

That sounds about right. Sounds like it was about right for Michael Bishop, too.

2) A website/newsletter/journalistic-type-place called the Bleacher Report, picked the Top 100 players in baseball this month. No. 1 was Albert Pujols. No argument there.

However, at No. 5 was Minnesota’s Joe Mauer. No. 5? Number Freakin’ 5?

I cancelled my subscription. Anyone who picks Mauer No. 5, hasn’t ever seen Mauer play and if they haven’t seen Mauer, they have nothing of interest to a baseball fan.

Mauer is a freakin’ catcher for goodness sake. He plays the toughest position on the field and throws bee-bees from his knees to each of the bases. He handles a pitching staff. He calls for pitches. He has to know everything going on out on the field at all time.

Meanwhile, he hits .380. And he’ll win the American League batting title this year with at least 30 home runs, 100 runs scored and 100 RBI even though he didn’t play a game until May 1.

However, he’ll also lead the AL in slugging percentage (.635) and on base percentage (.449) and right now, he leads Pujols in batting average and on-base percentage (Pujols is slightly ahead in slugging percentage, .665 to .635).

Mauer is a lifetime .328 hitter who won the AL batting title in 2006 (.347) and 2008 (.328) and he’s a freakin’ catcher. Oh yeah, and he’s only 26.

Hanley Ramirez and a couple of pitchers couldn’t carry Mauer’s 6-foot-5, 235-pound jock to the ballpark. The Bleacher Report is not a report. It’s a bunch of dudes farting around.

3) They say female South African runner Caster Semenya is not a woman, but a man. The IAAF is forcing her to undergo tests to determine that she’s indeed a woman. As it is for most sports governing bodies, humiliating people is an easy thing to rationalize. In fact, the IAAF “ordered” her to take the tests. Ordered.

Hey, I don’t know if she’s a man or a woman, but if she says she’s a woman, she’s a woman. What real man would want a woman’s medal anyway?

And besides, despite the humiliation she’s been forced to endure, one thing is certain. She has the best abs in sport … anywhere, anytime, any sex.

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More Stuff: Ricciardi Treats Halladay like Meat. Why Does the Local Media Perpetuate the Myth that Canwest Park Was Built for the 1999 Pan Am Games?

Posted on July 26, 2009 by Scott Taylor| Leave a comment

The things that are banging around in my head today…

1) Roy Halladay is a professional athlete and as a professional athlete he makes a very large amount of money. He certainly makes enough money to put up with all the crap that is flung in his direction and as a result, no one should feel sorry for him.

However, far too often we look at the professional athlete as the bad guy in those potential blockbuster deals that may or may not benefit our favourite teams. We often ask questions like: Did the jerk stand in the way of the deal? Why did he have a no-trade clause? Why did they give him a no-trade clause?

And on and on it goes.

In Halladay’s case, we might be witnessing one of the rare times when the athlete is the good guy and the people running the baseball franchise are little more than loud-mouthed buffoons.

According to ESPN, the Blue Jays turned own another offer for Halladay yesterday. the best pitcher on Toronto’s staff did not ask for a trade, but two weeks ago Ricciardi made it clear that he was going to shop around his ace and see what he might get in return.

Then, a week later, Ricciardi said the team might not get a deal for Halladay and he could stay with the club although Ricciardi also made it clear he wants to deal Halladay because the pitcher will “probably” test the free-agent market after his contract expires.

What a jerk. For one thing, Halladay has never even hinted he won’t re-sign in Toronto.You an go ahead an assume it might happen but don’t go public a year in advance and suggest that he’ll probably leave the team. That Ricciardi remark was made for Ricciardi’s benefit. It was made to make Halladay look like the bad guy and it’s wrong.

It was a stupid statement by a guy who has failed to make the Jays anything better than a fourth-place team in the AL East.

The fact is this: Ricciardi went public with his desire to trade Halladay. Ricciardi tried to make Halladay look like the villain. Ricciardi is the bad guy, not Halladay.

All Halladay has done is say nothing and pitch two gems since he was put on the trade block.

Halladay is the good guy.

2) Originally, Junior Moar’s plan was to fight a non-title “keep-busy” bout in September and then defend his Canadian Boxing Federation light-heavyweight crown in December.

But in boxing, like no other sport, things can change dramatically in a very short time.

Last week, during an exclusive interview with Grassroots News, Moar revealed that he will now defend his belt against Regina brawler Michael (Flash) Walchuk on Sept. 17, at the Red Robinson Theatre in Port Coquitlam, B.C. He signed the contract for the fight this past Friday night.

Check out the latest issue of Grassroots News (available Tuesday) for Junior Moar’s story. It’s one of the greatest stories in all of sports today.

3) I hate reading a newspaper and seeing something passed off as fact that is, at worst, a lie and, at best, a myth.

But that’s what happened on Sunday when the Winnipeg Free Press claimed — once again — that Winnipeg’s Canwest Park was built for the 1999 Pan Am Games.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The baseball park was built for the Winnipeg Goldeyes of the Northern Baseball League by the team’s owner Sam Katz. The city of Winnipeg wanted nothing to do with the construction of the ballpark and that is reflected in the fact that the city’s commitment to the building was less than $1 million.

The Goldeyes had been playing at Canwest Global Park (now Canwest Park) for more than two months when the Pan Am Games arrived. The Pan Am Games organization paid rent to use the building while the Goldeyes played an extended road trip.

The Mayor at the time, Susan Thompson, did everything humanly possible to stop construction of the stadium. She even publicly backed away from a pledge to make the ball park happen by telling the Pan Am Games organizers to play in Stonewall. If the Pan Am Games baseball tournament had been played in Stonewall, Winnipeg would have been the laughing stock of the baseball world. At the time, there were considerably  better facilities in Grand Forks, N.D., than in Stonewall, Man.

As it was, the Pan Am Games executives rented Katz’s ballpark and the tournament was sensational. But the ballpark was NOT built for the Pan Am Games.The Pan Am Games had absolutely nothing to do withe building’s construction. Nothing. Those who contend it did — like the folks in Winnipeg’s mainstream media — are nothing more than revisionist historians.

(NOTE: Want the truth? Just go to www.winnipegmen.com and buy a copy of my book Home Run: A History of the Winnipeg Goldeyes and Canwest Global Park. The true story — much of it from the pages of the Winnipeg Free Press in 1999 — is much more fun than the one the paper likes to sell to its readers today)

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Things that make you go “Hmmmmm…”

Posted on May 4, 2009 by Scott Taylor| Leave a comment

Stuff that’s interesting, crazy, muddled, odd or just downright frightening:

1) Everyone out here in the West is just thrilled that B.C. product Scott Richmond is doing so well with the Toronto Blue Jays this season. It’s a tribute to both Richmond’s determination and the Jays decision to take a big chance on a guy who came out of the independent Northern League.

But while, Richmond has gone 4-0 with a splendid, Cy Young-like 2.67 earned run average and a brilliant 1.22 WHIP,  those who remember Richmond in his final season in the Northern League, are shaking their heads in disbelief most nights.

He went 10-9 that season with the Edmonton Cracker-Cats with a 4.26 ERA. Not bad, not great. But he was pounded by the Winnipeg Goldeyes. In fact he went 1-3 with two no-decisions in six starts against Winnipeg . He gave up seven home runs all season, three to Winnipeg.

Obviously, you can reach the big leagues through the Northern League. However, Scott Richmond makes it appears as if the Northern League is a lot tougher than the bigs.

2) There there is this report, just out in New York City yesterday: New York Islanders owner Charles Wang has lost $283 million in the nine years since he purchased the franchise. 

We could have told him it was a bad investment. So, too, could have the guy from whom he bought the team, re-insurer Steven Gluckstern. Gluckstern was a partner of Dr. Richard Burke. He and Burke bought the Winnipeg Jets from Barry Shenkarow and moved them to Phoenix where they just kept losing more money.

Gluckstern, a very nice man who loved hockey, eventually went off and bought the Islanders. It’s hard to imagine one good businessman could be sucked into owning the teams in Phoenix and Long Island, but re-insurance is a lucrative business. Hockey is not. Some say that between the Coyote sand the Islanders, Gluckstern lost more than half his personal wealth.

So now Charles Wang (Computer Associates) owns the team and while no one will have a tag day for Wang, one has to wonder how stupid these really smart people can be.

The NHL is a lousy investment, so unless you’re just a philanthropist who gets a charge out of making millionaires out of otherwise non-descript Canadian twenty-somethings, buying a National Hockey League franchise in the United States is a pretty stupid way to flush your cash down the toilet.

See Charles Wang. Or Steven Gluckstern. Or Jerry Moyes. Or Dr. Richard Burke. Or Alan Cohen in Miami. Or those poor suckers in Atlanta and Nashville.  

3) At 11:30 p.m. on May 3, 2009, the Winnipeg weather office predicted that on Monday, May 4, we would have gusting winds up to 50-kilometres and rain. 

When I got up this morning, it was perfect. By 6 a.m., the same donkeys who were predicting cold rain were now predicting sun and 20-degree C temperatures.

Of course, at 6 a.m., they didn’t have to do much predicting. All they had to do was walk outside.

We have many problems in this world from an economy that was simply one giant Enron to a mainstream media that preys on fear and ignorance to a national weather office that couldn’t properly predict what’s going to happen to the skies in the next seven minutes let alone the next seven days.

When I was giving ballpark tours at Canwest Park on Saturday, I asked our baseball fans to do me one favour this year: Do not believe a word a TV or radio weather person tells you about the upcoming weather. Not one word. The weather office is as useless as teets on a bull and the more it predicts, the dumber it gets. For a baseball team like the Winnipeg Goldeyes, these wild, stupid predictions of constant bad weather that turn out to be dead wrong do so much harm, it can’t be quantified.

Environment Canada hurts Canadian business. These morons tell people the weather is going to be lousy when it’s not going to be lousy and they seem to do it for laughs. They are bad for the economy and bad for anyone who does business outdoors in Canada.

Along with greedy Harvard MBA grads, we’d all be better off without them.

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The New Yankee Stadium: A Band Box Joke.

Posted on April 19, 2009 by Scott Taylor| 1 Comment

Canwest Park here in Winnipeg, is a gorgeous 7,000-seat minor league ballpark that cost $22 million. It’s dimensions are 325 down the leftfield line, 325 down the rightfield line, 375 to the gaps and 400 feet to straightaway centrefield.

 

The New Yankee Stadium is 318 feet down the leftfield line and 314 feet down the rightfield and that old fashioned “short porch” in right that contributed mightily — more than steroids ever would have — to Roger Maris’s 61 home runs in 1961, has been reconstructed for your historical enjoyment.

 

It is, for lack of a better term, a $1.5 million band box. In fact, in this day and age, it’s a joke and just like those geniuses who built Comerica Park in Detroit had to bring in the leftfield fence, the idiots in New York who built a “porch” that made sense in the dead-ball era will have to do something to make the new Yankee Stadium just a little more than a quirky little joke.

 

For $1.5 billion, the Yankees gave their players and fans all the amenities of a five-star hotel in a ballpark best suited for Senior Amateur Baseball.

 

In the first three games at the new Yankee Stadium, there have been 17 home runs. That could be a result of bad pitching, but as Tim McCarver so aptly put it on Saturday’s Fox broadcast, “It’s April. What’s going to happen in the home run months of July and August?” 

 

Here’s the real problem: Asdrubal Cabrera’s grand slam during Cleveland’s 22-4 shellacking of the Yankees on Saturday afternoon would have been a routine out in every other ballpark in the majors.

 

The new Yankee Stadium is obviously a beautiful piece of modern design and engineering. Outside the actual playing surface. The field’s dimensions make for a less-than-realistic major league stadium. In fact, the size of the playing field of the new Yankee Stadium has been designed for the low minors.

  

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Katz says announcement on new stadium for CFL’s Blue Bombers could come soon. If it doesn’t, look out…

Posted on August 3, 2008 by Scott Taylor| Comments Off

Appearing with myself, Ken Wiebe of the Winnipeg Sun and Jim Toth of Shaw TV on the Goldeyes-Schaumburg Northern League baseball game on Shaw Channel 9 on Sunday afternoon, Winnipeg Mayor Sam Katz said he believed an announcement on a new stadium for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers is right around the corner.

 

In fact, David Asper’s dream of building a new football stadium in Winnipeg and, ultimately, taking over control of the city’s CFL franchise, is very close to coming true. 

 

“The city is ready to go and I know Creswin Properties (the Asper family’s real estate arm) has been working very hard on the project and my belief is we’ll make an announcement about a new stadium very soon,” Katz said.

 

“Now, understand, in my world, ‘very soon’ means 30-60 days. But I’m confident it’s going to happen. 

 

“But I will also say this: If it doesn’t happen soon, it probably won’t happen at all.”

 

Katz refused to say where the new stadium would be located, but one got the sense it won’t be at South Point Douglas, unless Creswin has secretly acquired a great deal of land.

 

“Here’s my argument with people’s concern over where the stadium will be located,” Katz said. “The Bombers play 10 games a year. Bomber fans will get to those games.

 

“I agree with you when you say the Bombers are important to our community and after 54 years they need a new stadium. The Goldeyes played in that stadium (Canad Inns Stadium) for five years and I knew back then that we all needed a new place to play. I don’t think anyone can say Canwest Park or the MTS Centre were bad for Winnipeg. A new stadium will be good for Winnipeg, too.

 

“I don’t want to say or commit to a site for the new stadium. But I will say this, no matter where it is, 10 times a year, Bomber fans will find it.”

 

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