All Things Bubba

Daisuke Matsuzaka jack-o-lantern
Because I went to see the Louisville Bats at McCoy Stadium last July, I'm now on the McCoy Stadium mailing list. Apparently, they fill the stadium with thousands of jack-o-lanterns on October (and charge people $8 a piece to walk through the resulting Halloween maze). Many of the pumpkins are carved to look like Red Sox players, past and present. Now that's what I call scary!

Well, it's Halloween, and what's Halloween without ghost stories? What's the most haunted baseball stadium? Yankee Stadium? Fenway Park? Wrigley Field? According to Haunted Baseball, it's Huggins-Stengel Field, in St. Petersburg, Florida. It was the Yankees spring training facility for years. The Mets, the Orioles, Devil Rays, and Cardinals also used the field.

With that much history, it's not surprising there are ghosts. Some of the groundskeepers have seen the ghost of Babe Ruth on the grounds: a bulky figure in a gray, #3 uniform. In one case, a groundskeeper saw a man he assumed to be a living person - until it walked through the wall. Later, he and his boss found footprints burned into the grass - leading right into the wall the ghost had walked through.

And once, two clubbies spent the night in the clubhouse, catching up on their work. All night long, they heard the sounds of a card game: cards shuffling, glasses and bottles clinking, and the scent of cigar smoke. They kept searching for the source of the sounds, but no one was there!

Labels: books, obake