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Buck-ing the trend
Mets catcher designs his own helmets
If you want to know how much John Buck enjoys playing in New York, just look at his personally designed catching helmet.
He has tributes to 9/11, the Statue of Liberty, the 7 train, the New York skyline, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Big Apple.
“I’m really the only catcher in baseball now allowed to design his own helmet,” said Buck, who was acquired by the Mets in December in a trade with Toronto. “Under the new licensing agreements, Wilson designs them all now, but I’ve been grandfathered in. I just wanted to show the people how much I enjoyed coming to New York.”
The helmet was produced by Voodoo Airbrushing of Ontario, Canada. Buck plans to duplicate the helmet later in the season and auction it off for charity.
He has made a good impression on Mets manager Terry Collins.
“John takes control of the game, really lets our pitchers know what to do and provides power from behind the plate,” Collins said. “Everything I heard about him has been evident in the first week of the season.”
Actor pegs Leo in Jackie biopic
Leo Durocher played a significant but ultimately reduced role in Jackie Robinson’s rise to the major leagues. So Durocher’s role, played by Christopher Meloni in the Robinson biopic “42,” leads to limited yet memorable screen time.
Baseball commissioner Happy Chandler suspended Durocher, then the Brooklyn Dodgers’ manager,
for the entire 1947 season because of Durocher’s “association with known gamblers.” Durocher managed Robinson for about half of the 1948 season, Jackie’s sophomore campaign, then departed for the rival Giants.
Before he drew his suspension in ’47, though, Durocher squashed a Dodgers player rebellion in spring training over the arrival of Robinson, who broke the game’s color barrier. Meloni, as Durocher, calls a late-night meeting and delivers an impassioned speech imploring his players to worry about winning rather than the race of their new teammate.
“I thought his stance was very enlightened, without being a twinkly liberal,” Meloni, in a telephone interview with The Rumble, said of Durocher. “‘I’m one of you. We’re here to win. You take your personal feelings and you shove them up your a–.
“He was the perfect man for the job. What bears that out is when he moved on to the New York Giants, he managed Willie Mays, with whom he became intimately connected. Willie spoke at Leo’s funeral. He said many times that Leo was a father to him.”
Meloni, who has starred in NBC’s “Law & Order: SVU” and HBO’s “Oz,” had played a real person just once before. In the 2002 television movie “Murder in Greenwich,” he portrayed controversial former Los Angeles police officer Mark Fuhrman.
In preparing for the colorful Durocher role, for someone who was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame and also married actress Laraine Day, he studied the man and his personality. Not too much, though.
“I think I do my best not to get bogged down by details and realities and all that stuff, and yet honor him as best as you can,” Meloni said. “There are certain things of Leo that are not of my nature, that maybe I don’t quite have. He was an absolute extrovert. He was a showman.”
Film dresses to impress
Born in Brooklyn, sewn in California.
The legend of Jackie Robinson is captured in the movie “42.” And to give the picture an authentic look, movie-makers went to Sports Studio in California, which specializes in creating costumes for sports-related films.
There are major differences than the uniforms worn in “42” and those athletes wear today.
“Uniforms are heavy, not performance-enabled because they, as well as the socks and hats, are made of wool,” Sports Studio President and CEO Mark Koesterer told The Rumble.
Sports Studio felt there was added pressure with this project considering the historical and social ramifications Robinson had on the game.
“The main aspect … is to ensure authenticity on camera,” Koesterer said. “Because of that we went to great lengths to replicate the uniforms.”