Barry Bonds is a Giant, now and forever

[picapp align=”left” wrap=”true” link=”term=barry+bonds&iid=3145857″ src=”http://view2.picapp.com/pictures.photo/image/3145857/sports-august-2007/sports-august-2007.jpg?size=500&imageId=3145857″ width=”234″ height=”171″ /] The last few days without baseball have been miserable, but today started with an unexpected delight: An outright, unequivocal endorsement of the San Francisco Giants over the Philadelphia Phillies from Barry Bonds. In an on-the-street encounter in Santa Monica on Wednesday recorded for TMZ.com, Barry was asked […]

Joy in Mudville-by-the-Bay: San Francisco Giants win the NL West

[picapp align=”center” wrap=”false” link=”term=Giants&iid=9908391″ src=”http://view.picapp.com/pictures.photo/image/9908391/san-francisco-giants/san-francisco-giants.jpg?size=500&imageId=9908391″ width=”500″ height=”329″ /] It was a Sanchez-Sanchez kind of day at AT&T Park. Jonathan Sanchez got the victory, pitching five shutout innings. Maybe even more important, he tripled and then scored what turned out to be the winning run on an RBI single by Freddy Sanchez, who came in to […]

Barry Zito crashes and burns as the Giants’ collars get tighter

[picapp align=”left” wrap=”true” link=”term=barry+zito&iid=9900232″ src=”http://view1.picapp.com/pictures.photo/image/9900232/san-francisco-giants/san-francisco-giants.jpg?size=500&imageId=9900232″ width=”234″ height=”277″ /] I wanted Barry Zito to excel to today. To put the horrid outings behind him. To justify his gargantuan salary. To redeem himself, to be the hero, to be the man as the San Francisco Giants clinched the American League West title and advanced to a glorious […]

Does the term ‘pennant race’ mean anything any more?

“Pennant race” conjures images of clutch hits, great catches, overpowering pitching and long shadows slanting across the diamond. But with baseball’s division structure, there isn’t a true pennant race left. Right now, the team I follow — the San Francisco Giants — has a slim lead over San Diego and Colorado in the National League […]

Musings on new ballparks and competitiveness

Back in the 1970s, I figured the surest way to assure your major league ballclub a pennant and victory in the World Series was to build a new stadium. I watched it happen in Cincinnati and Pittsburgh with Riverfront Stadium and Three Rivers Stadium, respectively. But baseball is more complex than that, as any number […]

The steroids gang: New villains for a new century of baseball

The early days of 20th century baseball live in the imagination of us modern men. We have in our heads hazy images of Frank “Home Run” Baker, Smokey Joe Wood and Muggsy McGraw, hard-nosed country boy players and managers from a rough-and-tumble era that ended ignominiously with the Black Sox game-fixing scandal of 1919. [picapp […]

Scoring big with discount-bin ball caps

My wife is a regular shopper at Marshall’s and TJ Maxx. I often tag along eagerly in hopes of finding a great deal on baseball or football caps and clothing. The stock at these discount stores rotates regularly, and you never know when you’ll stumble onto something you really like. After numerous trips over the […]

Astros fan makes great catch with his cap

Here’s great use of a baseball cap: An Astros fan, sitting along the left field foul line in Houston, uses his cap to snag a foul ball out of the clutches of the Mets fan sitting beside him. And the Astros fan made the catch while talking on his cell phone! Here’s a link to […]

Rest in peace, Bobby Thomson

Bobby Thomson died today at age 86, but his memory will live on as long as the game of baseball is played. It was Thomson who hit “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World” in 1951, a home run that lifted the New York Giants over the Brooklyn Dodgers and into the World Series. That blast […]

Tracking down my first major-league baseball game

The Internet was invented for us baseball fans. No other sport offers such a rich trove of statistics, and the Web is chock full of sites that slice and dice them. One of my favorite is baseballlibrary.com, which enabled me to track down the precise date of the first major league game I attended. I […]