The Brewers helmet hangs in a new home

My beloved, talismanic Milwaukee Brewers batting helmet is hanging in a new home. More accurately, I should say it was hanging, briefly, above the mantel until it toppled off the too-short nail in the wall over the fireplace in our new house. The living room – like every other room in the house – is […]

A tip of the cap to the inventor of the electric football game

Sad news today from The New York Times for those of us sports fans of a certain generation: Norman Sas, inventor of the electric tabletop football game, has died at age 87. To my computer-gaming kids, the old Tudor electric football game must seem hilariously primitive. I only wish I still had my father’s mid-50s […]

Did R.A. Dickey get hosed by not being named National League starter for the All-Star Game?

I was a bit late in catching up to the news today that Matt Cain was named National League starter for the All-Star Game tomorrow in Kansas City. That surprised me, because I figured R.A. Dickey of the New York Mets would likely be chosen by virtue of his higher victory total. What didn’t surprise […]

Life among the Philly Phanatics

Although my wife and most of our goods are still out west, I’m back east in our new home comfortably inside the radio range of the broadcasts for the New York Yankees and Mets and the Philadelphia Phillies. While familiar with the Yanks and Mets broadcasts from previous years spent in the New York metro […]

What’s the proper look for a baseball cap brim?

Straight? Gently curved? Bent like a barrel? Multiple variations mark the way guys shape (or don’t) the brims of their baseball caps, and I’ve always been of the “gentle curve” persuasion. Ten, maybe 15 years ago, there was a big movement to an exaggerated curve, almost as if the bill were wrapped around a beer […]

The right way to sing the national anthem at a baseball game

At baseball games we spectators join the players in removing our caps for the singing of our national anthem, a notoriously difficult challenge that has produced some excruciatingly horrid renditions over the years. The most recent came a few nights ago by Victoria Zarlenga before the Scotland-USA soccer match (listen, if you dare!). Last night […]

How many major league ballplayers died serving their country in World War II?

On this Memorial Day, I awoke early, wondering how many major league baseball players lost their lives in the service of their country. The son of a World War II veteran, I was most curious about that conflict, and a Google search quickly pointed me to the Baseball in Wartime site. The site reveals that […]

New York Times profiles the ‘father of baseball card collecting’

The New York Times has a fine story today on the man considered the father of baseball card collecting, Jefferson R. Burdick. I’d never heard of Burdick, and I certainly didn’t know that he donated his card collection and other materials to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. I’ll have to check […]

Adjusting to baseball life in a new time zone

Back on the East Coast, I left work about 6 o’clock tonight and came home to make dinner and listen to a ballgame. But to my chagrin, I was home too early for our national pastime. The first games weren’t starting until 7:05 EDT, so I had to prepare the evening meal without a baseball […]

What’s a baseball cap worth? Half a million bucks if it belonged to Babe Ruth

A Babe Ruth baseball cap fetched more than half a million dollars at auction yesterday, but its value is a pittance compared with one of Ruth’s New York Yankees road jerseys that sold for $4.4 million. (The New York Daily News has the details.) The cap, which Ruth had worn in the 1930s with the […]