Remembering Sal Bando and the shortest interview in sportswriting history

I was saddened to learn today that Sal Bando, one of the mainstays in the great success of the Oakland A’s in the 1970s, died Friday. I watched Bando a lot on television during those great A’s years, and I also got to see him play late in his career when he came over to […]

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 […]

Paving the way for women sports writers in the locker room

The Baseball Hall of Fame saluted a pioneering female sports reporter the other day in noting that a couple of her press passes from the late 1970s will be on display in a new exhibit on women in baseball. The reporter was Melissa Ludtke, who was writing for Sports Illustrated during the 1977 World Series […]

The Penn State scandal, the media and irony

This is a vacation week for me, and I’m catching a lot more sports talk on TV and radio than I usually do. There’s plenty of pontificating about the horrifying Penn State sexual abuse scandal, and I’ve heard a number of comments along the lines of, “We’ve built a monster in college football by all […]

In baseball broadcasts, there’s comfort in the home team

Major League Baseball is again offering a free preview of its TV package during April. While I never have the time to watch so much TV that I’d spring for the season-long package, I take advantage of the preview to sample games and see teams from around the American and National leagues. Last night I […]

Twitter and baseball: A good match

Twitter has been around since 2006, but it was last year when it really took off. And 2010 was the year I discovered the power of Twitter for us baseball fans. It was early in the season when I started using the #SFGiants hashtag, and I unexpectedly found myself caught up in a loose-knit community […]

Google’s news archive a treasure for baseball researchers, fans

For the baseball fan and the baseball researcher, the Google News Archive is a dream come true. Point your browser to news.google.com/archivesearch and at your fingertips you have access to an unimaginable bounty of newspaper and magazine clippings on the grand old game, not to mention just about any subject you might care to […]

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 […]

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 […]