The Giants’ World Series trophy comes calling, and the Ball Caps Blog goes uptown

The San Francisco Giants brought the World Series trophy to Modesto today, coaxing hundreds of orange-and-black-clad fans into the cold January air to queue up to see it. By the time I walked from my office to the convention center, the line snaked around the block and I spent a few minutes at the end […]

Jason Giambi keeps hanging in there

Like the drips falling off icicles on the eaves, baseball news comes in slowly but steadily during the month of January. I just did a quick check of the latest deals on MLB.com and chuckled when I read that the Rockies have reached a minor league deal with Jason Giambi. If Giambi finds a way […]

Thanks to television, the NFL is truly the national sport

Baseball may traditionally be America’s national pastime, but as a spectator sport football is king. That’s a tribute to television broadcasting. In a continent spanning four time zones (and I’m excluding Alaska and Hawaii), football has an enormous advantage in capturing the attention of the public. Even in an era of Monday night and occasional […]

Try as I might, I can’t get behind the Green Bay Packers

You’d think someone who spent a significant chunk of his life in Wisconsin, met his wife there and has two cheesehead children would be backing the Green Bay Packers in the NFL playoffs. But that’s not the case with me. I tried to like the Packers when I lived in Milwaukee in the late 70s […]

Oakland Raiders cut Cable, and other musings on big-league coaching

Word is out tonight from the Bay Area that Al Davis has given the heave-ho to Coach Tom Cable, who guided the Raiders to an 8-8 record this season, their best in recent years. Evidently improving operations is not enough in Oakland, where it’s “just win, baby.” Or so it’s supposed to be. The Raiders […]

An extremely slim connection to Stanford bowl game glory

Congratulations to Stanford for their no-doubts 40-12 victory tonight over Virginia Tech in the Orange Bowl. The Cardinal were led by standout quarterback Andrew Luck, a sophomore who must weigh the prestige of a Stanford degree against the lucre of a big-bucks NFL contract. I have the most tenuous of connections to young Mr. Luck, […]

A new year, and it’s about time I got started

We’re already two days into 2011, and it’s high time I got cracking here at the Ball Caps Blog. I can’t quite explain my absence the last several weeks other than to speculate that it may be fallout from surgery in November. I just haven’t had the drive to post. Nonetheless, I’ll offer a few […]

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health: The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow. Crunchy numbers The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 19,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping […]

Where the heck have I been?

It’s unlike me to go a week without blogging, let alone a couple of weeks. I think what’s happened is that I’m fully a baseball fan, nearly to the exclusion of everything else. A lot of ideas have been marinating in the ol’ noggin, and I’ll be posting again post haste.

Blowing the NL West notwithstanding, Bud Black wins NL manager of the year

Here’s how the story should read: “Bud Black, who guided the San Diego Padres on a 10-game losing streak that cost them the Western Division title, was named National League manager of the year on Wednesday. He edged Dusty Baker, whose Cincinnati Reds took the Central Division but didn’t win a playoff game, by one […]