If you, like me, pass by the construction site of the new Tiger Field at least once a day, it’s been a lot of fun watching the progress on a day-to-day basis.
It’s really been fun in the past two and one-half weeks. When that green turf went down, and the home field bleachers began to go up, it stopped being a construction site and became, well, a field.
Of course one major difference in the new Tiger Field, as compared to the old, is its orientation.
Action on the new field will be north and south while on the former field it was east and west.
In fact, that was one of the first things said about the new field when it was announced, that Rockdale would now join much of the rest of the country in having a north-south field.
And that’s the truth. About 70 percent of the football fields in the U.S., and even a larger percentage of those built in recent years are laid out north and south.
Is there a reason? Well, yes.
Anyone driven to Thorn-dale or Taylor in the late afternoon this summer?
Yep, the sun’s in your eyes the entire way. If you take the same drive toward Cameron or Lexington, it’s coming in your side windows.
Going to Milano it’s behind you, of course.
It’s been the same for a football team heading goal-ward on those early series of games before we change our clocks to Standard Time on Christmas Eve, or whenever.
Also, the layout provides a little “home cooking” for the Rockdale fans.
With the home bleachers on the west side, the local folks will have the sun to their backs until it sets and it will be the visitors breaking out the welder’s helmets.
Do they think about things like that before building a sports arena? You bet they do.
The more-or-less default direction for a baseball field is to face east.
Almost all the major league fields face the sunrise—at least the ones that don’t have retractable roofs—and the reasoning is pretty much the same.
You’d like for most of the fans to be facing in a non-westerly direction, not staring directly into the sun.
Of course baseball has different dynamics than football with players looking in all sorts of different directions at any one time.
That’s led to some interesting “sun fields” in various stadiums. “I lost it in the sun” is a frequent excuse for outfielders and sometimes it’s even true.
Of course baseball players, being baseball players, can come up with warped interpretations of anything.
Tom “Flash” Gordon of the Cubs once greeted his manager at the dugout steps—after a pop fly in a night game’s key situation dropped 20 feet away from him—with a loud “I lost it in the moon.”
The layout of a baseball field has also produced one of the greatest urban legends of all time.
I know you’ve heard it. Left-handed people are called “southpaws” because when a left-handed pitcher stood on the mound, facing home plate, apparently on a west-facing field, his left arm was on the south side.
Except the killjoys who track down origins of words and phrases have found lefties referred to as southpaws as long ago as 1813.
In an 1813 newspaper called the Philadelphia Tickler—yes, you read that right—an orator is referred to as “holding a newspaper in his right paw and pointing with his south paw.”
Apparently “south paw” meant “the other (left) hand many years pre-baseball.
They’ve even unearthed a political cartoon from the 1848 presidential race between Lewis Cass and Zachary Taylor.
It shows Taylor has knocked his opponent to the ground with Cass exclaiming: “Curse the old hoss. What a south paw!”
This column was supposed to end with a joke about left-handed people.
Then I remembered.
I’m married to one.
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