I was born in 1988, so I completely missed out on the 1980s era of baseball, only reliving it through traditional media like books and retrospective videos. Even though this was a terrible decade to be a Braves fan, I’d say that this is still one of my favorite decades. You lucky people got to…
Friends, before I get properly started, let me assure you this is about baseball. I just need you to bear with me for a paragraph or two. I took my seven-year-old daughter to a basketball game on Sunday. The Iowa Hawkeyes women’s basketball team was playing Northwestern on Senior Day, and thumped them quite thoroughly….
There were five ballfields within a square kilometer of the house in which I spent the bulk of my childhood. They were all similar in that their upkeep had been largely neglected by the community, yet each wore its neglect differently. One had a gaping hole in the chain link fence behind home plate, another…
Reader, last week in this space, James Fegan, a fine man and colleague whose opinion is to be respected, wrote that Spring Training is “a false liferaft amid a sea of boredom and unwanted college football recruiting updates.” He calls it “lame,” “meaningless,” and “incredibly long.” He is, I’m sorry to say, right on most…
On July 19, 2008, on the seemingly hottest day of that summer, I stepped into Yankee Stadium for the first time. It would also be the last time, too; new Yankee Stadium was already nearly complete across the street, and The House That Ruth Built would close its gates forever at the season’s end. This…
September 30, 1999 is an important if somewhat forgettable day in San Francisco sports history. That’s the day when the Giants played their final home game at Candlestick Park, and the day that stadium became a football-only venue. The Giants have spent their last 19 seasons playing in the stadium now known as Oracle Park….
Baseball Tonight is dead and gone. The longtime ESPN studio mainstay was already wheezing out its final gasps of life after they relegated it out of daily status, but recent news confirmed that it wouldn’t be returning for the 2019 season. I’m skeptical that ESPN and the people in charge of distributing MLB content will…
In high school, one of the mandatory courses was succinctly named “Technology,” in which students cycled through various stations acquiring largely non-essential information. These stations consisted of things like career placement tests (my routinely no. 1 and no. 2 ranked jobs were circus performer and sanitation engineer), typing games we had mastered by grade 7,…
Unless you’ve extended indefinitely your holiday break or decided to finally part with the material world, you’re by now well aware that the past two off-seasons have sparked a bit of contention between the players/MLBPA and the owners. The specificities of the brewing conflict can be quite difficult to fully grasp, particularly since the animosity…
If you search Mike Trout’s Twitter account for the airplane emoji, you will find 168 tweets in which it is paired with some number of exclamation marks and often accompanying the name of a city. The first such tweet dates back to September 18th, 2013, the day the Angels ended a 10-game road trip and…
Lou Castro, as he preferred to be called, made his major league debut on April 23, 1902 for the Philadelphia Athletics. His professional baseball career lasted a paltry 42 games, in which he hit .245 with 15 RBI. On their way to winning the pennant, the Athletics removed him from the team in favor of…
Every year at Christmas I made my dad lebkuchen, a spicy, chewy German cookie. That description makes them sound good, so let me assure you they are not: They are, in fact, the world’s worst cookie. The dough is sticky and unmanageable, and very finicky: I ruined a whole sheet this year by daring to…
On June 22nd, 1914, just nine games into his career with the St. Louis Terriers, Armando Marsáns woke up to the news that he was no longer able to play professional baseball. He suffered from no illness or injury but rather something more sinister. Several days prior, August Herrmann, owner of the Cincinnati Reds and…
Baseball is a game built on failure, and the successful separate themselves through their ability to cope with failure. In many cases, coping with failure begins with accepting its enduring presence without dwelling on it, when the objective becomes living without regrets. Of course, this goal is inherently unachievable; every day players encounter regrets large…
Lou Castro, as he preferred to be called, made his major league debut on April 23, 1902 for the Philadelphia Athletics. His professional baseball career lasted a paltry 42 games, in which he hit .245 with 15 RBI. On their way to winning the pennant, the Athletics removed him from the team in favor of…
They brought baseball under the cover of cannon fire; within weeks of the Battle of Manila, soldiers were playing baseball in the fields, demonstrating their Americanness to the new Americans. Designed to supplant the local sport of cockfighting and instill cultural values and language, it proved a clumsy and effective propaganda, as the sport swept…