Hammerin’ Hank is forever

I missed the news last year when the United States Postal Service issued a “forever” stamp in honor of Hank Aaron. But a lovely surprise arrived in the mail the other day. A friend and former Associated Press colleague had stuck one of the stamps in a notecard and mailed it to me in an […]

Barry Bonds is a Giant, now and forever

[picapp align=”left” wrap=”true” link=”term=barry+bonds&iid=3145857″ src=”http://view2.picapp.com/pictures.photo/image/3145857/sports-august-2007/sports-august-2007.jpg?size=500&imageId=3145857″ width=”234″ height=”171″ /] The last few days without baseball have been miserable, but today started with an unexpected delight: An outright, unequivocal endorsement of the San Francisco Giants over the Philadelphia Phillies from Barry Bonds. In an on-the-street encounter in Santa Monica on Wednesday recorded for TMZ.com, Barry was asked […]

The steroids gang: New villains for a new century of baseball

The early days of 20th century baseball live in the imagination of us modern men. We have in our heads hazy images of Frank “Home Run” Baker, Smokey Joe Wood and Muggsy McGraw, hard-nosed country boy players and managers from a rough-and-tumble era that ended ignominiously with the Black Sox game-fixing scandal of 1919. [picapp […]

Great baseball rivalries: Giants and Dodgers

For some time I’ve been debating how to categorize and present the top rivalries in Major League Baseball. I’ve contemplated rankings, countdowns and the like in an effort to stoke some traffic on this blog. If I were a more savvy blogger, I’d probably start tying these posts to whenever the teams start their next […]

Mark McGwire comes clean

[picapp align=”left” wrap=”true” link=”term=Mark+McGwire&iid=7520370″ src=”2/e/7/0/FILE_PHOTO_Mark_0cd9.jpg?adImageId=8935258&imageId=7520370″ width=”234″ height=”350″ /] Mark McGwire finally admitted publicly today that he used steroids and human growth hormone during his brilliant yet tarnished Major League Baseball career. He’s a pitiable figure. I vividly recall the night he overtook Roger Maris for the single-season home run record, how he circled the bases […]

Baseball players should wear caps, not earrings

With the San Francisco Giants losing horribly to the Los Angeles Dodgers tonight, I must vent my frustrations. I haven’t posted in a while, but here goes: baseball players shouldn’t wear jewelry. Oh, it’s fine if they wear their diamonds off the diamond. But when they go to work between the foul lines, they should […]