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 […]

I finally made it to Cooperstown

After a lifetime of waiting, I finally made it to Cooperstown. Not to be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame — that childhood dream evaporated years ago — but to tour it and savor it. Tour and savor I did, along with a lifelong friend and our wives, and we thoroughly enjoyed the […]

Oriole Park at Camden Yards lives up to its reputation

Oriole Park at Camden Yards was the ballpark that started the modern movement to city-core stadiums with old-timey architecture and smaller, more intimate settings. I have been to many of its inspired imitators in Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh and more, but I never visited the progenitor in the Charm City until last weekend. To help celebrate […]

Just a bit outside: ChatGPT and Baseball

After a long wait to gain access, ChatGPT finally let me in on Friday, and I suddenly found myself challenged to enter a scenario to see what this newfangled Artificial Intelligence phenomenon could produce. My instincts, not surprisingly, took me immediately to baseball. As Friday was opening day for the Princeton baseball team, on the […]

Visits to two Holy Houses of college athletics

There’s no more storied venue in the history of college basketball than the Palestra in Philadelphia, and I was privileged to make my first visit there Saturday. My friend Jerry and I drove to the University of Pennsylvania campus to watch a men’s game in which the home Quakers dominated the Harvard Crimson for an […]

The cleveland browns, when they were champions

Yesterday, December 27, was the anniversary of the Cleveland Browns’ last NFL championship, a 27-0 thrashing of the Baltimore Colts at old Municipal Stadium on the shore of Lake Erie. Today, a friend posted to Facebook a marvelous video summarizing the game, and I reveled in every minute of it. The video, from the heretofore […]

Even the new wildcard rules wouldn’t have helped tribe

I am not a fan of the expanded baseball playoffs, with three wild-card teams in each league. While I’m sure millions of fans are stoked that their franchises have made the playoffs, I find little to crow about. Long ago I accepted the divisional playoff system as legitimate, a recognition that Major League Baseball had […]