A hearty toast to those who ready the bubbly ... go inside baseball's clubhouse champagne celebrations
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
October 13, 2012
By Roger Rubin and Justin Tasch
The champagne celebration in a baseball clubhouse is one of the sport’s enduring traditions. Few people know much about how it works behind the scenes, but there was a lot to be learned at the O.Co Coliseum the past couple weeks. For six consecutive games — first while the A’s and Rangers were battling for the AL West crown and then when the A’s and Tigers had their AL division series — there was champagne in the house.
Most of the time the champagne is ordered by the club that intends to use it. Clubhouse staffers make the purchase, put it on ice and have it ready in the event there is a clinch. In the case of Texas two weeks ago, the Rangers brought their own champagne along with some ginger ale. It was left over from the 2011 World Series, which they never got to open when they were beaten by the Cardinals.
After Oakland won the penultimate game of the season to forge a tie with one game left, the Rangers offered to have their bubbly be communal and go to the locker room of the winning team on the final day. It was only then that one of the clubhouse attendants opened a bottle and discovered that it had gone bad — something that might have produced a scene right out of “Eight Men Out” had the Rangers won one of the first two games in that series. Clubhouse personnel went out and bought champagne for each team according to what they requested for the final game.
The only other situation an Oakland official could remember in which there was one champagne set-up before a clinching game at O.Co, was before the decisive game of the 2003 AL division series between the Red Sox and A’s. The bubbly chilled in rolling bins that were placed an equal distance from each clubhouse. The teams reached a pre-game agreement that the winner would pay for it.
For the decisive Game 5 between the A’s and Tigers on Thursday night, clubhouse personnel filled two orders for champagne. The Tigers had 300 bottles of Fre, an alcohol-removed sparkling wine ordered with an eye toward Triple Crown winner Miguel Cabrera, who is a recovering alcoholic. The Athletics’ order was described as more substantial.
Frequently, teams order two sets of champagne or sparkling wine: one for spraying and a smaller, better batch for consumption. Depending on what a team’s budget is for festivities, the price tags for the beverages can run the gamut.
To outfit a clubhuouse for a post-game celebration, clubhouse staffers in Oakland use tarps to cover the rugs and sheets of plastic to cover the contents of the lockers. It’s a somewhat time-consuming process for them requiring a crew of about six to ready the place. The interesting thing is what happens when a game changes directions and then the celebration is off.
The Tigers held a 3-1 lead going into the bottom of the ninth in Game 4 Wednesday and their locker room at O.Co was set to go. Then things unraveled as the Athletics scored three runs off closer Jose Valverde to win 4-3. The club source said the plastic was down and the tarps lifted before the first Detroit players got to the room after Coco Crisp’s game-winning single. All of it was thrown into a side room.
Republished from the http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/score-hears-a-hearty-toast-ready-bubbl...
