Post-game drivel

Here’s an absurd, imagined scene: yours truly as manager of the Cleveland Indians, addressing reporters after a ballgame in a press availability that is broadcast live to the masses. The absurdity is not so much that I’d be manager of the Tribe (although it certainly is daft). No, what’s loony to me is that across […]

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 […]

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 […]

New York vs. Boston again – but I’m OK with that

On these posts I’ve complained, whined and kvetched about how America’s major television networks and the media overall are obsessed with the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry. Super Bowl XLVI is upon us, and we have another Boston-New York matchup with the Patriots and Giants. The network executives must be mighty pleased that those two big northeastern […]

My TV is too lame, so I can’t host a Super Bowl party

At a measly 36 inches on the diagonal, the low-def television set in our family room is simply too pathetic for me even to begin thinking about inviting people over to watch the Super Bowl. Our Toshiba is a hand-me-down from my brother. He gave it to us when he moved overseas back in 2001, […]

Taking the specialty relief pitcher to extremes

One of the aspects of baseball that must bore casual and haphazard fans is the game’s increasing reliance on short term relief pitching. Such maneuvers even test the patience of diehard fans like me. It happened again tonight as I watched the late innings of the Giants-Pirates game. In the top of the eighth, the […]

For Oscar night, a list of my favorite baseball movies

Oscar takes center stage tonight at the annual Academy Awards, and this is a good time to reveal my list of favorite baseball movies. The list is just that: my favorites, influenced as much by sentiment and personal experience as it is by objective judgments on quality film-making. A few ground rules: It contains movies that […]

“Seinfeld” and baseball: A zany reverence for the game

During its long run on TV the “Seinfeld” show had a hilariously entertaining take on urban life, baseball included. With George working for the New York Yankees and the occasional Keith Hernandez appearance, “Seinfeld” embraced the game in its own zany way. I was reminded that last night while watching a rerun of Episode 37 […]

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 […]

Don’t bother Tiger Woods, officer. He’s sleeping.

[picapp align=”left” wrap=”true” link=”term=Tiger+Woods&iid=7029112″ src=”9/9/1/c/2009_Australian_Masters_8b90.jpg?adImageId=7920619&imageId=7029112″ width=”234″ height=”150″ /]Before the Tiger Woods story erupted this Thanksgiving weekend, I’d been ruminating on the differences between elite athletes and us mere men and women. Highly paid pro athletes like Woods in golf or Alex Rodriguez in baseball or LeBron James in basketball exist on a plane at which most of us mortals […]