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 […]

The stars (of baseball) in the sky

One of the pleasures of winter is a crystal clear sky revealing the sparkling stars in all their glory. On a walk this evening, I got to thinking how cool it would be to reconfigure the sky with baseball constellations. Citing their heroes and legends, the ancient Greeks affixed names to the many patterns in […]

Google’s news archive a treasure for baseball researchers, fans

For the baseball fan and the baseball researcher, the Google News Archive is a dream come true. Point your browser to news.google.com/archivesearch and at your fingertips you have access to an unimaginable bounty of newspaper and magazine clippings on the grand old game, not to mention just about any subject you might care to […]

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 […]