Baseball is on the way back, we were told this week. “Spring” training camps will open on July 1, a 60-game mini-regular-season will begin play on or about July 24, and the World Series will finish no later than October 28. The NBA’s plan for a return-to-play “bubble” in Orlando was made public on June […]

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Let us take a moment and indulge in some alternative prep sports history. I have been thinking about a particular high school baseball game since May 11 of 1971, when it was played. It was the final game of the season, and of my organized baseball career. Had we won, on our home field at […]

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Sports may not be the be-all and end-all we came to count on. Many of us have only recently grasped that, as sports content disappeared from our TV diets, shoved aside by a microscopic but deadly bug known as Covid-19, or the Coronavirus.

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I have been off the air most of this month, and have not weighed in on how the Houston Astros stole the 2017 World Series* from the Los Angeles Dodgers. Though the headline and first paragraph can be considered a spoiler alert on where this is going. That, and the asterisk (forever) after any reference […]

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And there I was, thinking maybe I was the only person in France who made it a habit to kick rocks off roads. A week or two ago, as we approached one of the entrances to the local “big” city, I looked to my left, and a woman, wearing pants, maybe 45, kicked a rock […]

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It was getting late for Howard “Howie” Joseph Kendrick. He had a solid career. Of course he did. No one lasts 14 years in Major League Baseball without being solid. Solid enough to be paid $65 million over those 14 seasons. Good enough to have played in an All-Star Game in 2011 and received an […]

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It went something like this: I regained consciousness about 6 a.m., and thought the decisive Game 5 of the National League Division Series between the Dodgers and Washington Nationals ought to be over, back in Los Angeles. And I did not expect good news, especially when I saw the game was tied at 3-3 in […]

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The home run era has been fun. I think a consensus has developed among baseball people that it is beginning to grow tiresome and that something will soon need to be done to make baseball look more like baseball. Know who wrote that? Bill James, the man whose insights jump-started baseball’s advanced metrics revolution back […]

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In the 1961 Major League Baseball season, Roger Maris of the New York Yankees hit 61 home runs to break Babe Ruth’s homer record of 60, set in 1927. However, many fans of the Bambino, and perhaps those not enthralled by the laconic Maris one-upping the charismatic Ruth, clamored for an “asterisk” to be added […]

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Did you attend a Los Angeles Dodgers home game this season? If so, you are part of a club record: The Dodgers counted 3,974,309 customers for their 81 home games in the 2019 season. Unprecedented, at Chavez Ravine. Being part of an attendance record is kinda cool. Especially when you get up into six figures. […]

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