Granillo: Baseball’s best ballpark statues
From SABR member Larry Granillo at Baseball Nation on September 13, 2013:
Last Friday in Cincinnati, the Reds honored Joe Morgan with his own statue outside of Great American Ballpark. Morgan had this to say at the unveiling: “The Hall of Fame is about numbers and playing on great teams. You only get a statue or a sculpture if they want you to be remembered.”
The statue, depicting the squat speedster breaking down the line, was the sixth monument at the stadium, joining Frank Robinson, Ted Kluszewski, Ernie Lombardi, Joe Nuxhall, and Johnny Bench, and the second to be unveiled by the club in two years. And later this month, the Red Sox will unveil a bronze likeness of Carl Yastrzemski.
With their renewed interest in erecting statues for franchise greats, the Reds and the Red Sox join a long list of Major League clubs hopping back on the sculptural bandwagon. In early 2010, I looked at the statues in or around all thirty major-league ballparks. Since then, two new ballparks have opened while eleven stadiums have installed statues, some adding as many as seven. It’s a bit of a mini-Renaissance! To put it another way, more than a third of the league has installed statues since Giancarlo Stanton made his big-league debut.
Since things have changed so drastically in such a short period of time, I thought it would be worth revisiting the more than 100 statues found around the major leagues.
Read the full article here: http://www.baseballnation.com/2013/9/12/4717256/major-league-baseball-ballpark-stadium-statues
Originally published: September 13, 2013. Last Updated: September 13, 2013.