Bisons Manager Torey Lovullo will be heading to Albuquerque in July as a member of the International League’s squad coaching team.

Congrats to our skipper!

More info on the Bisons website.

It’s coming down this Sunday.

Charlotte Coliseum was the venue for TWO official USRT visits… In January, 2001 we visited to see the NBA Charlotte Hornets; the Hornets eventually departed for New Orleans, but the city got an exapnsion team two years later. In November, 2004 we returned to see the Charlotte Bobcats take to the court in their one season at the old Coliseum, before moving to their new downtown arena the following year.

HERE is our venue profile.

From the email box comes news of two fellas.. Neal Koral and Alon Mass, who are in the midst of a 22,000 trip by car to every Major League Baseball venue, and are also raising moneys for various charities including the Make A Wiah Foundation, the American Cancer Society and the RBI Program.

In checking out their schedule, turns out the guys are in our region today, visiting Niagara Falls enroute to the Rogers Centre in Toronto. We would have liked to give them a shout and hook up, but with Pete moving into his new house in Amherst and me wrapped up in Cheektowaga Democratic Party affairs, free time is at a premium this week.

Check out their website. And we send them our best wishes for a successful journey and great adventures!

With the Los Angeles Dodgers slated to leave Dodgertown after the 2008 Spring Training season for a new headquarters in Goodyear, Arizona, the folks in Vero Beach will be scrambling for a new tenant.

But the Chicago Cubs?

So says TCPalm columnist Russ Lemmon in this article, which he must have jotted down after waking up from some wet dream of his.

Ain’t happenin’… and here’s why. The Cubs are the flagship franchise of Arizona’s Cactus League. They regularly are the spring attendance leaders, the top revenue producers, and with easy non stop air service between Chicago and Phoenix, have been a huge tourist draw for Windy City snowbirds. Getting to Vero Beach by air is far more cumbersome.

The Cubs will be staying put at Ho Ho Kam Park in Mesa, in my humble opinion. As for Holman Stadium in Dodgertown, they might be able to attract the Milwaukee Brewers, now based at the Maryvale Baseball park in Phoenix, or even the Cincinnati Reds, whose attempts to upgrade their venue in Sarasota have been one disaster after the next.

As for us, we’ve got a 2008 USRT visit to Dodgertown right on our road trip schedule. It will be a combo NCAA basketball subregional at Tampa’s St. Pete Times Forum, and stops to a few baseball parks, Vero Beach being among them.

This is one tribute that is way overdue considering we’ve been blogging a few months now.

No one, but NO ONE, has had as profound an impact on the Ultimate Sports Road Trip as Mike Harrington has. When Mike first met us and learned what we were doing, his passion and support was immediate. His coverage of the USRT through two feature articles in the Buffalo News, in 2001 and in 2003, made it to national news wires and media outlets. The rest, as they say, is history… the News stories resulted in a live appearance on The Today Show and a writeup in Sports Illustrated. For two average blokes like us, it was the “15 minutes of fame” that most people just dream of.

We first met Mike back in 2001 in the pressbox at the ballpark, when we were still starting out ourselves as media guys doing the Sportsblast stuff. We had just gotten back from our official USRT visit to Pac Bell Park in San Francisco, and we had snapped a photo there of a fan in the stands who bore a close resemblance to Mike, in fact it was scary how much alike this guy looked. We emailed the pic to Mike, he got a kick out of it, and asked us what we were doing out in San Francisco. We replied, “Stop #87, Mike. We’re doing all 121 teams in the four major sports.” Mike was so impressed, he pitched the idea of a story in the Buffalo News, and the first piece ran in the fall of 2001.

Since that time, Mike has kept closely abreast of our travels, and when we hit the finish line in Detroit in December 2002, he was one of the first people on the phone the next day, offering his congratulations, wanting to hear the details of the adventure, and of course another news story.

In February of 2003, we held a celebration in the party suite at HSBC Arena, culminating the USRT at the place where it started (Stop #1 - Buffalo Sabres 1998). Mike joined us at the party and was there to raise a glass to our accomplishment. It’s one thing for a reporter to cover a topic and write a story; that Mike Harrington would take time out of his schedule to take part in this occasion and meet our families and close friends speaks volumes for the type of guy he is.

We get to see Mike and spend time with him often during the year, as he is a fixture at Dunn Tire Park as the lead baseball reporter covering the Bisons. Mike also handles college basketball for the paper and we’ve bumped shoulders at numerous tournaments over the past few years and have even hung out a few times when the work day was done.

Mike is also blogging now on the Buffalo News website and we trade comments often. Check out his blog postings or his weekly Inside Baseball column in the Buffalo News. From time to time he will share a story about a sports venue he has visited, or commentary and critique about an arena, a behind the scenes peek that most sports reporters would ignore.

We shamelessly take credit for that. For while Mike Harrington has had a deep impact on the USRT, we think the USRT has rubbed off on Mike Harrington as well. And that’s a good thing!

When we visited KeySpan Park, home of the NY-Penn League Brooklyn Cyclones, the entire experience blew us away. Here sat this amazing minor league ballpark, right on the Atlantic Ocean, attached to the famed Coney Island boardwalk, and right next door was the seedy and rundown yet awesome amusement park bearing the famed Cyclone roller coaster. And right down Surf Blvd is the original home of Nathan’s Famous hot dogs, and they taste sooooo good there!

Put it all together and it is a tremendous baseball/entertainment experience.

And soon it will be gone.

In today’s New York Newsday, comes the announcement that a $2 billion hotel and entertainment venue will replace the venerable amusement park, but the ballpark will remain, and for the road tripper remains a truly top notch stadium destination.

By the way, the obligatory pilgrimage to Nathan’s is still a must!

Well all my sarcastic chants for U-S-A! U-S-A! have gone for naught.

It will be the Medicine Hat Tigers and the Vancouver Giants facing off on Sunday for the Memorial Cup, the trophy symbolizing supremacy in Canadian junior hockey.

Plymouth lost last night in the semi final by a score of 8-1 to Vancouver. Ouch!

The finals take place tomorrow at 4PM at GM Place in Vancouver. This tournament has shattered all Memorial Cup attedance records.

I had predicted Lewiston to win it all, and they looked like the worst of the four teams. What the hell do I know anyway!

May 27 update…. Vancouver 3, Medicine Hat 1, final…. Vancouver Giants win the 2007 Memorial Cup

The New York Penn League has rolled out some glitzy baseball parks in recent years, none nicer than KeySpan Park on Coney Island and Medlar Field on the Penn State campus in State College.

Then there’s Damaschke Field.

If you want the “old school” minor league baseball experience, there is no place more tumble down and humble than the home of the Oneonta Tigers. Owner Sam Nader holds court in his “box seats” on the first base side, bragging that this is the only “dry ballpark” (translation - no beer) in professional baseball, son Bill is running back and forth between the ticket booth and grilling hot dogs, the baselines and outfield are surrounded by a wooden fence with, yes, real knotholes to get a peek of the action. and the rolling hills in the distance make for a bucolic setting.

In other, words, this a slice of baseball heaven.

We got to visit this venue on a USRT journey back in 2003, got to talk with Sam which was a priceless experience in itself, and were just shaking our heads at how truly bad this place was, and how much we loved the experience.

Apparently, Damaschke Field is getting a bit of a touch up, as this article in The Daily Star indicates. The NY-P season opens June 22.

The nice thing about attending an Oneonta Tigers game is that it is just a short hop from the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, and less than five hours away from Buffalo. Wouldn’t mind heading back and checking the place out… and having a beer, ummm… soft drink with Sam and once again being regaled with timeless baseball stories.

I am not crazy about critiquing or picking apart the work of other journalists in the Buffalo sports media. For the most past everyone here does a solid job, and Buffalo News columnist Bucky Gleason falls in that category, even if he is a trifle cold and aloof to people (like us) who he does not deem as his contemporaries. We’re fine with that.

In today’s Buffalo News, Bucky presents this commentary offering some unique insight on Maxim Afinogenov’s mindset about the Sabres playoff run, more or less stating that Max was perfectly fine with the outcome of the season and what the team did achieve. Hmmmm. Interesting.

He then goes on to take jabs at Assistant Coach Brian McCutcheon and players Jaroslav Spacek and Dmitri Kalinin. OK.

Now time to put a wrap on the column, end it with a bang. Here goes…
“If they give half-hearted efforts next season like they did against Ottawa, they’ll have 10,000 people inside HSBC Arena rather than 10,000 people outside.”

Huh???

The Sabres capped their season ticket sales at 14,800 this year, and have a waiting list in excess of 6,000 more requests. Most current season ticket holders have already renewed for next year.

Or didn’t Bucky know that?

Furthermore, I’ve been told by sources that the team will most likely scrap the mini pack product next season, because it is too unwieldy to manage and the tickets just aren’t there. The team will leave between 2500-3000 tickets per game for single sales, and my bet is they get snapped up as soon as they become available.

Will it ever go back to the days where the season ticket base falters and there are yawning gaps of empty seats in the corners and end zones game after game? Sure it can, but with the season ticket price structure being so attractive, and the variable pricing policy for quality of opponent, it would take years of dreary and depressing play for the ticket base to erode. I’m confident that we’re looking at years of continuous sellouts.

It would be nice if Bucky could focus on some of the good days and great moments that have come from the Sabres these past two seasons, yet he seems to only want to dwell on the negative, almost hoping that the future brings misery and hard luck. Perhaps there’s something gooey in the water cooler at One News Plaza, because I flip the page, and there’s Donny Osmond, ripping once again on Canalside… “Big Box!” “Abomination!” UGH!

“Post Mortems”

The final Puck Stop of the season. Check it out!

It is one of the most beautiful ballparks in all of Major League Baseball - Kauffman Stadium, home of the Kansas City Royals, has always been best known for its dramatic outfield fountains.

And now it is about to get much better, as the Royals today have announced a $250MM renovation plan which will be built in several phases, with completion targeted for Opening Day 2010.

More on the plans here at the Kansas City Royals website.

In the USRT rankings, Kauffman Stadium earned 19th place out of 30 teams, with deductions coming thanks to some snooty ushers and generally a horrible location. There will be absolutely NO problem having to twist our arm for another Ultimate Sports Road Trip visit. Will the Sprint Center have a major sports tenant by then as well?

It will be the largest cable tv and satellite tv rollout in history… approximately 47 million homes will start receiving the “MLB Network” when it begins broadcasting on January 1, 2009. Included on the channel will be a Saturday night Game of the Week airing on 26 consecutive weekends.

More news at this article on mlb.com.

Alrighty. Enough already.

Time to lighten up on Ottawa Sun hockey writer Bruce Garrioch, the fella we demonized after he made his ridiculous rants on MSG back in February, back then ripping into Sabres owner Tom Golisano and poking fun at injured star Chris Drury.

Garrioch’s stories in today’s Ottawa Sun, linked HERE and HERE, are balanced stories and good reads from the Ottawa perspective.

Zero tee-hees. Happy trails to The Joe or The Pond, Bruce.

Oh heck, one last time for good measure… tickle that tummy!

Hey….there have been more cheap shots and dirty hits in those playoffs than in the NHL this season. See any Spurs game for proof….

I’d like to say I’m really anticipting the professional version of the Final Four, but really all the good fun teams to watch are gone. Miami’s title defense goes without so much as a postseason victory, Golden State aroused us with the latest version of Nellieball, and Phoenix was the victim of several cheap shots from the Spurs followed by a big one from the Commisioners Office….

(Quite frankly, Stern’s suspensions didn’t do nearly the damage to the Suns as he did to the Knicks back in ‘97, but the Knick fan in me digresses)

Anyhow, we’re stuck with this loathsome foursome as we head towards the awarding of the Larry O’Brien Trophy…..

Cleveland v. Detroit….is there any other reason to watch this series than to watch the brilliance of LeBron James? Unfortunately, he just doesn’t have a supporting cast to avoid being the wrath of Detroit’s suffocating defensive system. This one will be a yawner even if it goes seven games.

It won’t: Pistons in six games

Utah v San Antonio: Ah, yes…the Spurs, the Patriots of the NBA…..winners of three titles in the past eight seasons and until this season a rep for being a classy team. In steps Bruce Bowen(literally) and Big Shot…..errrr….Cheap Shot Robert Horry among others. It makes you wonder if referee Joey Crawford wasn’t too far off in challenging Tim Duncan to a scrum late in the season. This team has developed quite the nasty edge, for certain.

Wow! So that’s where Deron Williams went after leaving Illinois…..what a breath of fresh air that guy has been, and who knew that the Jazz would get to the Conference Finals this quickly after the end of the Stockton/Malone era. I like this group, they have been able to play whatever style has been thrown at them by the opposition…whether it be the uptempo Warriors or the slower Rockets.

But unfortunately, the Spurs are too deep for these guys I thinks. Would love nothing more than to see a freak injury hit Bowen or Horry.

Screw it: let my heart think this time. Cinderella lives in Salt Lake City. Jazz to the Finals in seven with stunned silence at Riverwalk when it’s done.

The dream died tonight.

From the very moment the Sabres lost game 7 in Carolina last June, everything was geared towards this season - the perfect storm of keeping this team largely intact, a year of maturity, of seasoning, a mantra of “One Team. One Goal.” The energy began early on… the winning streak in October set the tone, fans snapped up every remaining available ticket and for the first time since the 70s there is a “waiting list” for season tickets.

In February adversity hit the team with injury after injury, yet the team worked through their troubles, and by March the run for the division banner and the President’s Trophy was on.

By playoff time there came that queasy feeling - the stumbles against the New York Islanders and the New York Rangers, and somehow just the feeling that this was not the same as last year.

Then came the Ottawa Senators.

Said Daniel Alfredsson, “I think they ran into us at the wrong time.”

Alfredsson was right on the money. His team played like they were possessed through the last two months of the regular season. That epic brawl in Buffalo on February 22 set the tone for the coming playoff matchup. Was anyone in Buffalo really looking forward to seeing Ottawa in the playoffs?

After the game, a dejected Lindy Ruff looked like he was fighting back tears as he saluted the fans. “The positive was how energized this city was. How much fun this whole area and city had. We had a lot to be proud of.” Then choked up he added “We let the fans down. The expectations were so high. That room was as quiet as quiet can be.”

Chris Drury’s comments sounded more ominous. Sporting eight stitches below his lip and three more inside his mouth from a puck to the face he took in the third period, Drury remarked “great chance we’re not going to be a group anymore. We know there will be changes made. Ultimately that’s what we do.”

Uh boy.

Our guy Mike Harrington from the Buffalo News broke up the room when he asked Ray Emery this question: “Greektown or Disneyland?” Emery replied, “I got into a lot of trouble last time I talked about this so I don’t think I should answer.” Harrington pressed on, and Emery cracked back “I’ll be in the hotel either way.”

Pete missed this game as he worked his USPS shift plus overtime so I was furiously sending him text messages throughout the game to keep him updated. I’m sure he will have his own thoughts to post here, but for now I will post mine.

This was another amazing season. It’s been an amazing two years and I can wrap myself in the great memories of the post lockout era and how much being a Sabres fan means to me. We have every reason to be proud of this city and I am prouder than ever of my community and how they have embraced this team. Yeah, we’re going to lose players. But so are other teams. This organization is positioned to compete next year and beyond for the Cup.

Thank you Sabres. I am looking forward to next year already. Can’t wait!

And yeah, Ottawa is now our bitter rival, and next season I will start hating them again. But for me, right here and right now? “Go Sens Go!”