Say what you will about Barry Bonds, but reaching 700 HRs is no small task. Congratulations, Barry.
However, I bet this guy feels dumb now.
Six months ago, the Dodgers sold Michael Mahan nearly $25,000 worth of tickets. Now, like an unwelcome home run ball hit by a visiting player, they’d like to throw the whole deal back.
Mahan, 28, a Los Angeles investment banker and lifelong Dodger fan, bought every seat in Dodger Stadium’s right-field pavilion for two of the last three games of the season against the San Francisco Giants, gambling that Giant slugger Barry Bonds would hit his historic 700th home run into his seats in one of the games.
Mahan has resold thousands of the tickets, requiring every buyer to sign an eight-page contract compelling them to hand over to him any Bonds home run ball they might catch. He would then sell the ball and split the money evenly with the fan who caught it, according to the contract.
And if you’re sick of the Bonds coverage, check out this great Column One article in today’s LAT, about a semi-pro baseball team in eastern Iowa, the Cascade Reds, who went 64-1 this season. Terry McDermott, the writer is from Cascade.
The patchwork of fields here in eastern Iowa is a crazy quilt of rectangles, triangles, circles, oblongs, long swooping curves and blobs Ñ almost every shape but a square, following the land’s soft swells, bound by limestone gravel roads, crooked rivers and stands of maples, hickories, black walnuts and oaks. It’s gorgeous country and I don’t get back as much as I should.
When I do, people ask:
“Which one are you?”
Mac’s boy, I say, the oldest.
“Umm. Yeah. Uh-huh.”
I left town in 1968 and Mac’s been gone for good since 1986 and still that’s all the information people need to file you in the proper drawer.
“And where are you now?” they ask, as if I had been a particularly hard one to track. They would ask what I was doing in Cascade.
“A story on the Reds,” I’d say.
“I’d heard that,” one man said. “Just wanted to get it from the horse’s mouth.”
This was in August. When I asked what people thought of the team’s phenomenal year, the conversation would proceed along these lines:
“What’s that record again?”
“Fifty-nine and one.”
Pause.
“That’s something, isn’t it?”
“Yup. Amazing.”
Pause. Long pause
“Another beer?”
Which is to say, the Reds have not exactly burned up the town this summer.
Cascade is and has been a baseball town. Banners strung along Main Street sport a sort of informal city coat of arms. Beneath the banal motto, “A place we call home,” are depictions of three things Ñ a bridge, a pair of cornstalks and a baseball.
