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batmagadanleadoff wrote: batmagadanleadoff wrote: batmagadanleadoff wrote: Who is this Spring Picnicking Met at The Forbidden Zone? bump Could that be Buzz Capra? Really? The outfield glove made me think wild guess. Edgy MD wrote: That shot was just too sexy for me to look at and think at the same time. I thought todays players were spoiled. He had a sexy food taster!!

And here's Ron Swoboda (1967) at the renovated Butterball Field, cage included. The water fountain ties the old and new versions of the field. Who am I extra credit. This question is worth two 2 two clapping gifs. Who's giving Ron batting tips? More from the Swoboda batting tips session. A better shot of the cage. Hint: He was a Rookie of the Year and a four-time all star. bump In profile the guy kinda looks like Robin Ventura in a few years. Bill Virdon Gil McDougald? I'm looking at a list of ROYs and I still can't get it.

batmagadanleadoff wrote: batmagadanleadoff wrote: Who is this Spring Picnicking Met at The Forbidden Zone? bump Could that be Buzz Capra?

metsmarathon wrote: thank you for doing this again this year. i'm sorry to have fallen off the wagon in july, though i hope to still be able to update my massive spreadsheet eventually and play along at home, if retroactively. Ditto the thanks and I think I didn't miss a one this year. I tried not to anyway. The best thing about this is not only is it a reflection of how this community rates the players, it's also like a bubble gum machine where I put my votes in and kool baseball cards come out.

Very well told. Pretty sure I told this story before but I'll always repeat it when I can. I cut school for the first time ever for this game. I had cut out of school early before, or skipped a class here or there, but I never before had gone to bed thinking tomorrow I'm gonna cut school. And I couldn't watch the game at home. My folks would not approve of me taking off, even knowing what a fan I was of the Mets (these days kids take off for vacations with their parents. Those days you didn't even consider doing something like that). So I had a plan to just float around the neighborhood (Corona, Rego Park, & Elmhurst) the morning hours and shortly before the game go to Macys on Queens Blvd and watch it there in the TV department. And that's just what I did. First I thought I should buy something, ya know, so I had an excuse for being in the store. I went to the record dept. and looked for a single that would catch my eye. Couldn't get and album, I only had a buck and change on me. I chose a song by Elvis Presley, a song that was released years before but was back on the radio getting airplay for some reason. I had never bought anything by the King. By the time I was aware of him and buying records myself he was a Hollywood card board cutout. But I bought this single, In The Ghetto, because I liked it. It was real. Then I headed to the TV department with my purchase. I wouldn't just be watching the game on one TV, but on rows of color TVs, all seemingly set to different color saturations and hues. This was perfect! The guy who was the TV salesman eventually could see what was up and by the third or fourth we were talking and watching the game together, just chillin. I don't think the TV Dept had any customers that day. A small group did form around me as the game went on and maybe there were 6 to 8 people there at the end, as Tug pumped his glove walking off the wet field on that drab grey day. Funny, I don't remember much of the game itself, like Cleon's homer, but I vividly remember Tug at the end. I had jumped on the YOU GOTTA BELIEVE bandwagon as soon as that started rolling, and it was so perfect that Tug was the one to bring it home. I did a lot of things that weren't really good things as a teen, like cutting school for this game, and I usually got busted for whatever it was. This one, I got away with. Now I had only one thought in my mind. How do I get tickets to the playoffs?

I base this on the line in the grass --- it's jutting out from near the corner where the two back fences meet and angling toward the field. It's in every photo. I figured out what that line in the grass is, that's angling towards the Butterball infield. It's the 1st base/right field foul line at Clendenon Field. From a few pages back: I thought the fields would line up perfectly put they didn't. They just couldn't without changing the parking lot. I may even have the top field a little too close to the corner. But it makes sense, and if you follow the right field foul line of the bottom field, that could be that strip where the grass didn't grow on other pics, like Botz. So I agree with you on that. The list from Wiki says that from 1968 to 1987 the Mets practiced at Naimoli Field. Am I forbidden to say that could be the forbidden zone? This pic: Just wow. Full frontal!

The Rays move on.Texas folds. 5-2

This is interesting. MLB.TV carries the game and they allow you to choose which camera you want to view the action though. Individually or 4 at once. Five cameras total.

batmagadanleadoff wrote: batmagadanleadoff wrote: batmagadanleadoff wrote: John Glass and Tug McGraw at some other cage near a tall conical structure. The conical structure in the Glass and Tug images -- does that structure appear at the extreme left side of the Jackson photo? I imagine that's a totally different practice field. And yes, that thing sticking up looks to be the thing in the Jackson photo. It would be just like the Mets to have something like that sticking up for no apparent reason. Look for a list of all the places the Mets practice. I like how we thoroughly investigated Butterball Field. And we can look into this one. But first, where is Sadecki now? And what's that batting cage behind him. And what's he been smokin'? I bet that cage has some history. Hmmmm, I wonder....

John Cougar Lunchbucket wrote: My impression is that Jack Heidemann brings a lot of wild sex to a pretend swing for the cameras. In spring training he always carted around his own wind machine just for this effect. Without the machine his hair was dull and lifeless.

So umps suck all over the game. Not just Met games. That's nice to know.

themetfairy wrote: EY scoring the game's first run - This is a great photo. As far as Piazza's dad goes I was concerned too. His fathers appearance was only touched on. As far as the Mets and their tickets go, I think their biggest mistake is trying to be something they're not. Their business model should not be so influenced by what the Yankees are doing. The Mets are more like the Phillies and it would serve them well to look more at the Phils business model.

Edgy MD wrote: The right field line in the upper field looks like it's about 220 feet. I wonder if that was by design or necessary. If the Mets had put the field there I'd think it was by design, but it was already there. The Polo Grounds dimensions^. The second field was there in 1956. I wonder when it was installed. The Giants did play at Stengel- Huggins. lil bit.

Rains stopped

Leroy Stanton? That does place the batters eye thing. Good work. The real blurry aerial pic has lots of foliage beyond the outfield fence. That's from 1956. All that has been cleared out. I'd bet that the year for the clearer pic is approximately 1965-67.

Damn. Picasa has been shrinking my pictures on me. This is the same picture posted from my photobucket. I wanted a record of how the field looked, and this is perfect.

I've been searching through google. I found this through bing. Googles always been good to me but bing is coming on strooong. No caption or year with the picture. So the field was swiveled around more. That's pretty nutty. This shows it all. That might even be the cage down there, I can't tell. There's definitely something there in that spot. I don't see the black batters eye thing in the outfield. It could be that last section. First base fence of Butterball Field has the middle bar. Still, hard to put an exact year on that. That is an amazin' picture. I'll make an image of this and the recreation with it side by side when I can. Man, I was close. Wasn't planning on updating the remake without more info, but should I? I was doing it because I couldn't find a picture. This ones awesome.

Young 2 Wright 1 Lagares 1 Niese 3 Germen 1 Black 1 Francisco 1

This is great FK because I forgot these details.

The internet is a wonderful thing. It's like having a gigantic library that takes weeks to search through on your lap. From Baseball Fever.com in a thread about all the fields Babe Ruth played on. Stengel Huggins Field 1956 and 2008 Fuzzy but it has both fields

I meant, who is this guy? Oh, sorry. I want to say Harvey Haddox. This is the recreation with actual names I have discovered. Calling the field close to the lake Stengel Field is my assumption. No official name for the water tower. The mural painted on it is by a local artist named Tom Stovall. From this link: http://www.crescentlake.net/water-tower.html The 1923 water tower is 100 feet high, holds 500,000 gallons of water, and is still in use. It is the only remaining historic water tower in the City of St. Petersburg and was recently repainted as a giant salt water aquarium by local muralist, Tom Stovall. The streets in this historic neighborhood dead-end unexpectedly, change names in the middle of the block, and skip numbers. But it's impossible to get lost. Just look up for the water tower.

batmagadanleadoff wrote: Here's a shot of the black tarp-like background slash batter's eye at Miller-Huggins in a The Man From Topps shot.. I've seen that black thing in more photos than I can remember, but until this thread, could never quite place it. I just lumped it all somewhere into the vast undefined sprawling forbidden zone forest of a spring training complex that I understood Miller-Huggins to be. But based on the evolution of this thread, I now think that the black tarp is in right/right-center Butterball Field, or even along the first base line -- consistent with the Liefer photo you posted below, and that the Met (Who is he?) is standing in short left, Butterball Field. Yea, some of these I thought were from a different field down there. If you mean the Met in the recreation, who else would it be?

batmagadanleadoff wrote: Is that a road running alongside old BB Field? And does it go under the field? I forgot to address this. That's a cement path that runs outside the outfield. Placing the new field, which was a copy and (then flipped and manipulated) paste of Higgins, cut off the path and I just left it that way. If I was to update the big picture (btw, the original of the recreated field is a HUGE image) I would remove all that, including the current outfield wall. My main priority was to see how both fields looked in place. I hope to find more pics with details and we are doing great in the finding part. The stuff you come up with, it's amazin' I haven't run across those photos in my searches. That's making this loads of fun, all these rare pics.