Some great names in the major leagues. Some just roll off the tongue. Others conjure an image, often not flattering. Some make me smile. After examining all 30 big-league rosters, these are the 10 best baseball names I came up with … and the competition was fierce.

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Some of us fell into print journalism. Some of us discovered it fairly late. Some of us knew we were destined for newspapers. Early and with absolute certainty. That was/is Vic West. I never pinned him down on this, but I bet he knew — KNEW — he was going to be a sports journalist […]

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We are nuts about lists. We all look at them. If you want something you’ve written to be read, put it in the form of a list. So, I’m going to take a stab at coming up with a daily list. Don’t know how long it will last, but here’s a start. The Top Ten […]

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I’m hearing that surviving sports staffers with the Ontario/San Bernardino arm of Dean Singleton’s L.A. News Group are being told not to expect a return to the main office in Berdoo any time soon. In one of the generically nonsensical and routinely unconscionable forced migrations of staff perpetrated on journalists at LANG’s eastern properties, the […]

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(Version 2.0: Updates/corrects bio info thanks to her son, Bob Wilmuth.) Katie Castator surprised us. Again and again. She was Somebody’s Mom, three times over. Yet she had a full-time job. She apparently hadn’t graduated from college, and certainly didn’t have a journalism degree. But there she was in the newsroom, a 40-year-old rookie. She […]

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I remember attempting, in my early 40s, to run a mile in eight minutes. Which doesn’t sound special until you actually try to do it … without a runner’s bodytype or lifestyle, diet or ability to withstand pain. My younger daughter was at soccer practice nearby, and for 10 or 11 weeks that fall I […]

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Dallas eliminated the Anaheim Ducks from the NHL playoffs tonight, which is vaguely newsworthy because the Ducks were the defending champion. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have noticed at all. We barely did, anyway. The NHL is as irrelevant to Southern California as snow tires. We’re just not all that interested. And don’t have to be. It […]

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Aside perhaps from the circus freak show pick-up team … has any starting five in basketball history sported more observable tattoos than the Denver Nuggets? Iverson, Anthony, Camby, Martin, Anthony … you’ve got a fivesome with enough color ink to supply a dozen copy machines. Throw in sixth-man J.R. Smith … and the Nuggets have […]

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A friend of mine noticed an interesting take at sj.com (sports journalists dot-com) recently on what the poster declared to be the dawn of the Post Fear Factor era in journalism. In short, this writer argues that print has become all stick and very little carrot. Particularly in the Dean Singleton-run MediaNews chain, and especially […]

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I’m back to living in Long Beach. It’s where I grew up and lived for 22 years, until getting a job in San Bernardino. I survived the culture and climate shock of the move to Berdoo (People buy groceries while wearing slippers? It’s 100 degrees for four consecutive months?!?) and lived in the Inland Empire […]

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