Plastic surgery is all the rage these days, so it shouldn’t cause any surprise when even birds fly in to go under the knife. Yet, the apparent off-season cosmetic surgery on Sandy the Seagull, the Cyclones’ original mascot, has ruffled the feathers of more than a few Cyclones fans.
Sandy, alliterative beach reference aside, is named after Brooklyn-born Sandy Koufax, the Hall of Fame Dodgers left-hander. And this year, the avian Sandy has a much-altered appearance. He no longer wears the gray pinstriped jersey of his first four seasons. His feathers have been trimmed, and he wears his cap further back on his head, exposing more of his forehead.
Sandy has been feeding pretty well from the Steeplechase Pier, and he’s been supplementing his clam diet with in-season feasts at the ballpark of peanuts, popcorn and the remnants of hot dog rolls. Thus, his seagull avoirdupois was bulging, and so he went in for a tummy tuck.
But it is the seagull’s face that has undergone the biggest transformation. Sandy’s beak has a whole new look — in human terms, he’s had a nose job. His eyes have also changed, undergoing what fan Staci Bromberger terms a “Disneyfication” — in other words, they look more like the eyeballs of a cartoon character than those of a Coney Island seagull.
Actually, Sandy’s new eyes look like the bird equivalent of the eyes of Jennifer Willbanks, the famous runaway bride. In other words, he’s now a pop-eyed bird.
But will fans still love him? After all, a bird can’t change his feathers, but nowadays he can change his head, midriff, eyes and beak.
And is the scalpel poised over fellow bird mascot Pee Wee, his younger sidekick?
Stay tuned.
Going up
What happened to the 2004 Brooklyn team that won the McNamara Division championship in the New York-Penn League? Well, most of the players have advanced to the South Atlantic League with the Hagerstown Suns, and the guys have continued their winning ways with their one-game playoff victory over the Lexington Legends on June 25 to clinch the first half of the league’s Northern Division and a playoff spot at the end of the season.
Cyclone alumnus Gabby Hernandez (6-1) started and picked up the win. Fellow alum Grant Psomas hit a two-run homer and Cyclone-fan favorite Derran Watts had a two-run double.
Some fans have made trips to Lakewood, N.J. — the Phillies’ affiliate in the South Atlantic League — to catch games with Hagerstown.
The day after Hagerstown clinched their first-half title, outfielder Dante Brinkley, who hit .364 for the Suns, was promoted to Port St. Lucie.
“What I miss most about Brooklyn was the energy that I felt at the ballpark,” said Brinkley. “I haven’t found that ballpark energy since.”
Have a cow, man
On June 28, the Cyclones played their first of five games this season at Skylands Park, near the Delaware Water Gap in tiny Augusta, N.J., and for Brooklyn fans who haven’t made the relatively short trip yet, the sights at these environs are a bit different than the sights and sounds at Coney Island.
The drive to the park itself takes one along Route 15, a two lane roadway that winds through farm country marked by occasional small towns with antique shops, a Dairy Queen and a single traffic light.
The ballpark is situated in what used to be a cornfield, and several existing cornfields border the grounds of the park.
“People will go to the ball game, but first they sometimes walk over to the bordering cornfields and pose for a picture walking out of the corn, as the old-time ball players did in the movie ‘Field Of Dreams,’” notes the New Jersey Cardinals assistant general manager Herm Sorcher.
Sorcher played ball at Freehold High School, the New Jersey school attended by rock legend Bruce Springsteen and believed to be the hometown school of the pitcher referred to in his baseball anthem “Glory Days.” Even though Sorcher is proud of his Brooklyn roots — his father attended many games at Ebbets Field when he was growing up in Bensonhurst — Herm doesn’t have the Cardinals play music by Brooklyn artists like Neil Diamond. Instead, he has the team public address system play songs by Jersey guys such as Springsteen, Bon Jovi, and, of course, Frank Sinatra.
But the Jersey emphasis doesn’t stop with the music. The team has a cow pen that borders the visitors’ bullpen down the left field line.
The cow pen is the home of a real cow called Rally III, the third Rally Cow for the Cardinals. The cow really spends the summer living at the ballpark and between games roams in the areas surrounding the ballpark. Every evening, Rally III is taken out of the bullpen and makes an on-field appearance in the bottom of each sixth inning.
At the Cyclones’ initial appearance there this season, Brooklyn fans in attendance could be excused for believing that there were dozens of Nick Cunninghams (Brooklyn’s Cowbell Man) loose in the ballpark as many fans rang their souvenir Rally Cow cowbells when Rally III came out.
To say the cow pen is right next to the bullpen is, well, udderly true. When a Cyclone reliever warms up on his right-side mound, he’s closer to the cow than to his fellow pitcher to the left.
The ballpark environment exhibits not the Jersey stereotype of gas storage tanks along the New Jersey Turnpike, but the rural Jersey that’s a treat to see.
July 2/9, 2005 issue
