Rocky Colavito remembers the Detroit years, and a whole lot more

The Detroit Free Press today has a terrific interview with my boyhood baseball hero, Rocky Colavito, who was famously traded from Cleveland to the Tigers in exchange for Harvey Kuenn. Even if you’re not familiar with Colavito — one of the best players in the game from the late 50s into the 1960s — I […]

A crazy day for baseball!

[picapp align=”left” wrap=”true” link=”term=Ubaldo&iid=8438873″ src=”b/b/6/0/MLB_Brewers_vs_237f.jpg?adImageId=12521858&imageId=8438873″ width=”234″ height=”156″ /] Here it is, nearing the end of Week 2 of the Major League Baseball season and I’ve yet to post on anything. This is a good day on which to break my silence. Ubaldo Jimenez (shown in a photo from earlier this season) no-hit the Atlanta Braves, and […]

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival rocks

This afternoon I returned home from a three-day trek to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, which is just north of the California border on Interstate 5. What a magnificent trip it was. I was a driver and chaperone on the trip for the theatre department at my younger son’s high school. There were pleasures […]

Congress caps off the drive to health care reform in historic vote

[picapp align=”right” wrap=”false” link=”term=health+care&iid=8314826″ src=”5/2/9/d/House_Votes_On_d0f8.jpg?adImageId=11544699&imageId=8314826″ width=”234″ height=”319″ /] This blog mainly focuses on sports, but I couldn’t let tonight’s historic Congressional vote on an overhaul of health care go without some sort of comment. And to find a photo of a Capitol police officer standing watch in front of the dome while wearing a ball […]

An American icon: The pocket baseball schedule

CLEVELAND – Besides the crocuses poking their way up through the snow, one of the first signs of spring in northeast Ohio is the emergence of the annual Cleveland Indians’ pocket schedule. I picked my copy up at a shop counter the other day while visiting relatives. The schedule, neatly folded and tucked into my […]

Tim Lincecum start rained out in Arizona

Rain washed out a lot of Cactus League games in Arizona today, including a Giants game in which Tim Lincecum was scheduled to start. The young San Francisco ace brings consecutive National League Cy Young awards into the 2010 season. He and Matt Cain make a fearsome duo to lead the pitching staff, and when […]

From the old Coast League: The story of Spider Baum

Here’s a gem of a slideshow about Charles “Spider” Baum, a member of the Pacific Coast League Hall of Fame who spent his best years pitching for the Sacramento Senators (a.k.a. Solons) and San Francisco Seals. The piece is by my McClatchy Co. colleague Mark Morris, multimedia director of The Sacramento Bee. The presentation is […]

Baseball and the folly of retaliation

[picapp align=”right” wrap=”true” link=”term=barry+zito&iid=5013585″ src=”c/d/d/1/Texas_Rangers_v_d498.jpg?adImageId=11010285&imageId=5013585″ width=”234″ height=”314″ /] The Cactus League season has just gotten under way, and controversy has already come out of the San Francisco Giants’ camp. In a game yesterday, Barry Zito plunked Prince (not Cecil, as I first had) Fielder with a fastball to the back. Although no one has definitively […]

Iconic baseball caps: Chicago White Sox

[picapp align=”right” wrap=”true” link=”term=chicago+white+sox&iid=5050132″ src=”7/0/8/1/Chicago_Cubs_vs_393f.JPG?adImageId=10913160&imageId=5050132″ width=”234″ height=”332″ /] The Chicago White Sox cap has gone through several iterations over the long history of the South Side franchise, and I write tonight to recognize the classy gothic lettering that now adorns the current model (displayed by infielder Gordon Beckham last summer). The script has that old-timey […]

A fond farewell to the Winter Olympics

The Winter Olympics have begun their slow fade into history, and I offer here limited and selective observations. I stress limited and selective because that’s what my experience was with the 2010 Vancouver games. When NBC decided to delay virtually everything to us Americans on the West Coast, I wrote off watching most of the […]