Just a bit outside: ChatGPT and Baseball

After a long wait to gain access, ChatGPT finally let me in on Friday, and I suddenly found myself challenged to enter a scenario to see what this newfangled Artificial Intelligence phenomenon could produce. My instincts, not surprisingly, took me immediately to baseball. As Friday was opening day for the Princeton baseball team, on the […]

Visits to two Holy Houses of college athletics

There’s no more storied venue in the history of college basketball than the Palestra in Philadelphia, and I was privileged to make my first visit there Saturday. My friend Jerry and I drove to the University of Pennsylvania campus to watch a men’s game in which the home Quakers dominated the Harvard Crimson for an […]

Remembering Sal Bando and the shortest interview in sportswriting history

I was saddened to learn today that Sal Bando, one of the mainstays in the great success of the Oakland A’s in the 1970s, died Friday. I watched Bando a lot on television during those great A’s years, and I also got to see him play late in his career when he came over to […]

The cleveland browns, when they were champions

Yesterday, December 27, was the anniversary of the Cleveland Browns’ last NFL championship, a 27-0 thrashing of the Baltimore Colts at old Municipal Stadium on the shore of Lake Erie. Today, a friend posted to Facebook a marvelous video summarizing the game, and I reveled in every minute of it. The video, from the heretofore […]

Even the new wildcard rules wouldn’t have helped tribe

I am not a fan of the expanded baseball playoffs, with three wild-card teams in each league. While I’m sure millions of fans are stoked that their franchises have made the playoffs, I find little to crow about. Long ago I accepted the divisional playoff system as legitimate, a recognition that Major League Baseball had […]

Opening day for old Guy Football

It’s opening Sunday for the National Football League, and even better, I survived the first game of the year in the long-running “old guy” touch football game that’s been playing in Princeton since the mid-1990s. In my mid-60s, I was a rookie last season. Now I’m hoping to avoid the sophomore jinx, although I’ll settle […]

Coffee shop baseball talk: Long may it rage

Last weekend I was up in the Berkshires in Massachusetts, visiting family, and I was delighted to encounter incontrovertible evidence that baseball is still a point of passion for fans, at least among men of a certain age. As we started our drive back home, my wife and I stopped at a Dunkin shop in […]

Disaffected with the pros? Try college baseball

In the lead-up to the settlement of the Major League Baseball lockout, I saw a lot of grumbling in the Twittersphere about how fans were contemplating bailing on the big-league teams, their greedy owners and some pouty players. Minor-league and college baseball were offered as strong alternatives because, well, because they are. Anyone who lives […]

RIP, Ray fosse

I was saddened to hear the news that Ray Fosse, whom I knew in incarnations as a Cleveland Indians player and Oakland Athletics broadcaster, died this week at age 74. In the bleak years of the late 1960s, the Indians teams I followed were downright terrible. Fosse’s arrival was a sign of hope, which blossomed […]

Indians to guardians: In transition

The Cleveland baseball franchise has played its last game as the Indians, and they went out with a victory over the Texas Rangers. I’ve been preparing mentally for the transition to the new name, which I embrace. Feelings over the dispatching of Chief Wahoo and the Indians name remain raw among Cleveland fans, and probably […]