August 1997
by Barry Stagg
BASEBALL: ATLANTIC STYLE
The Major League All Star game is being played as this column is being written. Two Canadians, British Columbian Larry Walker and New Brunswick native Jason Dickson are in the game. Dickson, the pitcher, even has a chance to face Walker the power hitting National League right fielder.
The usual hype and hoopla surrounds the game. Predictions that venerable baseball records will fall before season's end are being made. Ken Griffey is supposedly on a pace to erase Roger Maris' home run record of sixty-one set in 1961 while Cleveland catcher, Sandy Alomar with his thirty game hitting streak is being set up as a challenger to the magnificent fifty-six game hitting streak of Joe Di Maggio set in baseball's last pre-war season in 1941. It is hot fun in the summertime and the myth making and dreaming about record falling is all part of the allure of baseball.
One thing quite noticeable with Canadian sports writers is the difficulty they are having in wrapping their minds around the fact that Jason Dickson is from New Brunswick. Several Ontario based writers are determined to cite Dickson as being from Chatham, Ontario rather than from his actual birth place of Chatham, New Brunswick. Conceiving of baseball east of Olympic Stadium appears to be somewhat difficult for our central Canadian colleagues.
New Brunswick actually has two representatives in Major League Baseball this season. Line drive-hitting slugger Matt Stairs has resurfaced with the Oakland Athletics after rising through the minor league system of the Montreal Expos and then floating in baseball limbo for a few seasons. Stairs and Dickson both play in the American League West Division. Dickson is throwing off the mound with the Anaheim Angels who are 4 1/2 games out of first place at the All Star break. Oakland is far off the pace, thirteen games out of top spot but playing very interesting baseball principally because of a high powered offence led by Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco. On that team Matt Stairs has the leading average at .356 with a respectable twelve homers and thirty-five RBI's in part-time play. He is not at the All Star Game.
Over in Anaheim the Disney-owned Angels find rookie of the year candidate Dickson as their leading starter with an 8-4 record and a very good 3.41 era. Dickson is ahead of such multi- millionaire suspects as Chuck Finley and Mark Langston as well as the now injured Mark Gubicza who has gone on the disabled list with an era of 25.07 and a very large multi-million dollar contract.
Down on our east coast from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick baseball has always been beamed in loud and clear on the radio waves from our American cousins just a little down the coast in the sleepy hamlets of Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore. Anyone with a decent A.M. radio and an inclination to search the dial at night could have heard Red Barber broadcasting the feats of Maris and Mantle from Yankee Stadium or eavesdropped on Vin Scully, in his early days, recording the escapades of the late, lamented Brooklyn Dodgers.
These days the radio still works in the same way that radio worked in 1950 or 1960 or 1970 and we still love baseball on the east coast. The Atlantic provinces really had more exposure to baseball in the days before the Expos and Blue Jays because quite simply we were closer to it then the rest of the country. So hurray for Jason Dickson and hurray for Larry Walker, baseball bookends from the east and west making us proud and playing baseball in the hot summer sun.
Until next month, be proud, be prosperous.