A tribute to Vic Davalillo

In my schoolboy days in the 1960s, Vic Davalillo was a fixture in the Cleveland Indians lineup. Sadly, I learned today that he has died at age 84. Davalillo, a good-fielding center fielder, finished third in the American League in batting average in 1965 at .301. I remember the Topps “league leader” baseball card the […]

Turkey Bowl XXVIII on a beautiful Thanksgiving Day

Forget the Lions and the Cowboys. We have plenty of football excitement of our own in Princeton, New Jersey, on Thanksgiving. Today we held the 28th Turkey Bowl pickup touch football game. The curiously named Princeton Gentlemen’s Club holds the annual event, which brings players of all ages and their families to the big field […]

A season with the pitch clock: We survived

Major League Baseball completed its first season with a pitch clock, and as far as I can tell the world is still spinning on its axis. I am a traditionalist at heart when it comes to baseball, but as much as I sentimentally resisted the idea of a pitch clock, I was glad when the […]

A fabulous auto racing museum in Philly

The World Series is off to a rollicking start out west, and I’m filing what surely to my longtime readers and friends is an unexpected post about auto racing. A few years back I discovered that there’s a terrific auto museum not far from Philadelphia International Airport, the Simeone Foundation Automotive Museum. After my first […]

princeton-Harvard football: a classic matchup

Princeton and Harvard have faced off in football since 1877, and I got to watch the 115th meeting Saturday at Princeton Stadium. The Tigers beat the Crimson 21-14 after scoring what turned out to be the winning touchdown with about a minute and a half left in the game. One hundred years ago, a good […]

A Salute to Tito Francona, his dad and an old mitt

The Cleveland Guardians gave a wonderful tribute last night to Terry “Tito” Francona on his last home game managing the team before his retirement. It was a well-deserved sendoff, as illustrated by this video the team produced in his honor. That tribute video prominently mentioned that he spent a lot of his early childhood with […]

As the NFL season begins, nostalgia for my hometown browns

Baseball caps are wonderful things, even when they are football caps. One of my brothers was visiting from Cleveland recently, and he surprised me by bringing two new Browns caps, one (above) for me and another destined for a friend, another Ohio native who lives elsewhere in New Jersey. As the NFL season begins in […]

The daily challenge and pleasure of Immaculate Grid

For roughly a year running, I played Wordle _ The New York Times’ puzzle _ virtually every day. And then along came Immaculate Grid, a daily sports challenge from Baseball Reference, one of my go-to sources for information on baseball players and their stats. Throughout July and August, I stopped playing Wordle and instead got […]

The healing comfort of baseball broadcasts and books

Little did I realize that when I wrote my previous post, I had some medical adventures in store — and that baseball would once again be a tonic in unsettled times. I’ll spare you the details of what I’ve been going through and emerging from, but I must note that the first inkling I was […]

Two Princeton ballplayers drafted BY San Francisco Giants

The Major League Baseball Draft isn’t hyped like the NFL and NBA drafts, the televised spectacles where those expecting to be drafted appear on national TV in thousand-dollar suits in anticipation of million-dollar contracts. No, the baseball draft is a lower-key affair, devoid of the immediate fawning talking-head commentary that oozes from the football and […]