The antithesis of the Kingdome: Seattle’s new ballpark

SEATTLE — I paid my first visit June 23 to what is now T-Mobile Park, a delightful place for a baseball game near the shore of Puget Sound. The day was glorious, a Wednesday afternoon in a seam between two heat waves dominating the American West in transition from spring to summer. With the sun […]

The Giants come out in rainbow colors

The San Francisco Giants debuted their new rainbow logo caps and sleeve patches for Pride Month, and good for them. Supporting the LGBTQ+ community is nothing new for the Giants. In the mid-90s when I worked in The City, the Giants became the first pro sports team to have an HIV/AIDS awareness game. They have […]

The phenom(onology) of MLB Draft League baseball

If a line drive falls into left field and no one’s in the stands, does it make a sound? That question came to mind as I cycled away from Sonny Pittaro Field this evening after watching several innings of an MLB Draft League game between West Virginia and Trenton. Pittaro Field is at Rider University […]

The antidote for ‘ghost runners’ poisoning baseball

My Twitter feed these days is awash in baseball fans bashing the “ghost runner” placed on second base to start each half of any extra innings in baseball games. If anyone has posted in favor it, I have seen no evidence. This man-in-scoring-position “enhancement” is designed to shorten the games. To me, this strange maneuver […]

Missing a moment of baseball history but getting more out of life

Since I’m parked for some time to come in my new home office that doubles as our guest room, I’ve spruced up my Zoom background by building the baseball wall. With permission from my wife, I’ve hung up several items with a baseball theme. One of the showcase pieces is a treasured photo from early […]

Baseball and betting are not social distancing

More than 100 years removed from the Black Sox scandal, betting is still a bad word in Major League Baseball. Shoeless Joe Jackson and his White Sox teammates accused of throwing the 1919 World Series are not and probably never will be in the Hall of Fame. Pete Rose, who like Jackson had the stats […]

A Chicago newspaper archive loaded with baseball history

The Chicago History Museum is digitizing thousands of images from the Chicago Sun-Times photo archive that was lost for a while and resurfaced in 1917 in a storage locker in Dixon, Illinois. An estimated 5 million images are in the collection. When I learned about this new resource, the first thing I searched for was […]

Hanging, not flattening the curve

Sean Doolittle has it right: to counteract COVID-19, we’ve done little. Multiple media accounts are carrying the remarks of the Nationals’ reliever about the pandemic, and I think he spells out its perils very well. Doolittle noted that the coronavirus outbreak is worse now than it was when the baseball season was put on hold […]

Tangled web: Should the Indians rename themselves?

Yes. It’s time. There’s never been a more opportune moment for a franchise in any sport to scuttle a nickname with — real or perceived, overt or subtle — racist aspects. On this blog six years ago, I recommended that Cleveland drop the Chief Wahoo mascot, which the team eventually did from their uniforms but […]

Nine positions and universal truth

I got a serious chuckle out of the graphic posted this morning on the Instagram account called The Baseball Authority. The graphic is a distillation of youth baseball, mid-point on the spectrum between cynicism and truth. In grade school gym class ballgames, I started by playing second base. I wasn’t the smallest kid (he was […]