The antidote for ‘ghost runners’ poisoning baseball

My Twitter feed these days is awash in baseball fans bashing the “ghost runner” placed on second base to start each half of any extra innings in baseball games. If anyone has posted in favor it, I have seen no evidence. This man-in-scoring-position “enhancement” is designed to shorten the games. To me, this strange maneuver […]

This season counts

I spent a relaxing Sunday sitting on our back patio, listening to snippets of four baseball games late in the afternoon, Phillies and Mets on my portable radio, Giants and Brewers on my iPhone, a home-brewed ale in my glass. During the Phillies game against the Cardinals, play-by-play announcer Scott Franzke referred to the statistics […]

Missing a moment of baseball history but getting more out of life

Since I’m parked for some time to come in my new home office that doubles as our guest room, I’ve spruced up my Zoom background by building the baseball wall. With permission from my wife, I’ve hung up several items with a baseball theme. One of the showcase pieces is a treasured photo from early […]

Baseball and betting are not social distancing

More than 100 years removed from the Black Sox scandal, betting is still a bad word in Major League Baseball. Shoeless Joe Jackson and his White Sox teammates accused of throwing the 1919 World Series are not and probably never will be in the Hall of Fame. Pete Rose, who like Jackson had the stats […]

A Chicago newspaper archive loaded with baseball history

The Chicago History Museum is digitizing thousands of images from the Chicago Sun-Times photo archive that was lost for a while and resurfaced in 1917 in a storage locker in Dixon, Illinois. An estimated 5 million images are in the collection. When I learned about this new resource, the first thing I searched for was […]

Hanging, not flattening the curve

Sean Doolittle has it right: to counteract COVID-19, we’ve done little. Multiple media accounts are carrying the remarks of the Nationals’ reliever about the pandemic, and I think he spells out its perils very well. Doolittle noted that the coronavirus outbreak is worse now than it was when the baseball season was put on hold […]

The Greatest Rivalry in Human History!

Throughout the course of history, we homo sapiens have witnessed and recorded intense rivalries, starting with Cain vs. Abel. As we have progressed through the centuries, we’ve seen the intense and fatal feuds between the Athenians and the Spartans, the Romans and the Persians, the British and the French. But none of those multi-generational conflicts […]

MLB 2020: Can’t find my way home

This post contain less rational thought than (presumably) most of my posts exhibit. Essentially, I’m screaming into the void. I’m frustrated that the owners and players have gone ’round and ’round on a 2020 season everywhere except on the base paths. Even more, I sympathize with the thousands of people whose livelihoods are tied to […]

Pitchers who rake —a dying, underappreciated art

The chatter around the Cold Stove League today is that Major League Baseball is likely to allow a universal designated hitter for whatever shortened season we get in 2020 as well as 2021 and, inevitably, forever after. For years, I’ve been expecting this change to come, all the while fervently hoping it wouldn’t. Metaphorically speaking, […]

My baseball career, corrected

Following a line of reasoning current among some federal officials that coronavirus would go away if we merely stopped testing, I had an emotional breakthrough today in looking back at my youth baseball career. I didn’t realize it until now but, had we not kept statistics, as a teenager I was rocketing on a trajectory […]