There is no better place in baseball for bizarre park-affected plays than Tropicana Field in Tampa, Fla. There are oddly short fences, catwalks in play and even a roof that can be reached occasionally.
It's a quirky ballpark, as former Arkansas Traveler Peter Bourjos learned in the Tampa Bay Rays' 5-0 loss to the New York Yankees on Tuesday night.
The Rays acquired Bourjos from the Chicago White Sox at the end of spring training, so he didn't have a lot of time to adjust to the idiosyncrasies of the ballpark. He had made trips to Tropicana Field before as a member of the Los Angeles Angels, but not since 2013.
So on a sky-high popup from Matt Holliday, the roof proved to be far from a home-field advantage for Bourjos.
The left fielder lost sight of the ball, allowing Brett Gardner to score for a 3-0 lead on a lucky double for Holliday.
"I lost it, as you could see from my reaction," Bourjos told Bill Chastain of MLB.com after the game. "The ball got up in the rafters, probably higher than any ball I've ever seen hit here. And once it got up past the first ring, I lost it."
"The ceiling might be the roof in North Carolina, but down in Florida, the ceiling is apparently, well, the ceiling?" Andrew Mearns wrote on the Cut4 blog on MLB.com.
Schilling a dummy?
Curt Schilling excelled as a major-league pitcher, winning two World Series titles, but trying his hand at being an agent was another matter entirely.
Speaking on Barstool Sports' Pardon My Take podcast, former Boston Red Sox General Manager Theo Epstein (now the GM for the Chicago Cubs) recalled negotiating a contract extension with Schilling in which the six-time All-Star employed some hilarious tactics.
"So we were negotiating back and forth," Epstein told the podcast, as transcribed by Sports Illustrated. "He had fired his agent, and he was representing himself. We were negotiating a contract extension back and forth.
"I thought we were doing pretty well in the negotiations. So we reach a deal. We're happy with it and we go back to print it out in his little home office. We were using his computer and his printer to print it out and there on his desk is a well-worn dog-eared copy of the book Negotiating for Dummies. ... Every time he was pretending to go to the bathroom, he was running back and looking at that book."
Spring to remember
Most baseball fans outside of Arkansas probably aren't familiar with pitcher Blake Parker (Fayetteville, Arkansas Razorbacks). He can best be described as a journeyman reliever, appearing in 91 games since making his major-league debut in 2012.
Parker, 31, who's been claimed off waivers four different times since August, earned a spot on the Los Angeles Angels' opening day roster after closing spring training on a pitching roll not seen since 1974.
Over his final five spring training outings, Parker recorded every out by strikeout. That's a streak of 17 consecutive strikeouts, which hasn't been accomplished during an MLB regular-season game in 43 years.
Parker started by striking out five Texas Rangers on March 22. Then he struck out three Arizona Diamondbacks on March 25. Parker did allow one hit against the Diamondbacks, which turned out to be the only blemish against him during the streak. He went on to get three more strikeouts against the Oakland A's on March 28, three against the Los Angeles Dodgers on March 30 and got another three against the Dodgers on April 1.
Overall, Parker's spring training was solid, allowing 1 earned run over 111/3 innings with 2 walks and 21 strikeouts.
Sports on 04/07/2017