A great week of baseball in Philly and Baltimore

I took vacation last week and packed it full of baseball. On Wednesday, my friend Jerry and I saw the Phillies beat the Cubs at Citizens Bank Ballpark in Philadelphia. The next day, I drove to Baltimore to connect with relatives to catch an Orioles’ game against the Tigers and then two games against the […]

A gripping story of the Detroit Tigers and a 1930s wave of terror

I am forever on the hunt for baseball books, and by chance I discovered through an electronic library “Terror in the City of Champions.” The book, published in 2016, chronicles the exploits of the Detroit Tigers and other Motor City sports teams in the 1930s against a backdrop of violent crime perpetrated by a ruthless […]

Requiem for a Cubs fan

Bob Newhart has died, and it’s fair to say that any and all Americans who enjoyed his comedy are deeply saddened. I’m squarely in that category. I alway felt an affinity for Bob and his Bob Hartley character on the Bob Newhart Show. Newhart grew up in Chicago and was Jesuit-educated: St. Ignatius High School […]

Giants’ baseball is on the air

I haven’t lived in California for 12 years, but I still love listening to the San Francisco Giants’ radio broadcasts. As I type this short post, I can hear Duane Kuiper’s soothing voice coming clearly from Arizona through my iPhone with the KNBR broadcast out of San Francisco. Yes, the Cubs are ahead 3-0, but […]

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 […]

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, […]

Keeping the Tiger team intact

When your season is unexpectedly cut short by a pandemic, what’s a college coach to do? At Princeton, Scott Bradley has turned to virtual tools to keep coaching. Through the university’s athletic fellows program, I’ve had a glimpse of how the head coach and his assistants have managed to keep the team together and inspire […]

The 2016 Baseball Solstice

After the 2016 World Series ended in a nationwide outpouring of anguish over the Cleveland Indians’ heart-rending loss in worldwide jubilation over the Chicago Cubs’ victory ending more than a century of frustration, the realization slowly sunk in that another winter without baseball was approaching. We’re in the thick of that long, agonizing, “wait ’til next […]

Setting the annual Baseball Solstice

With the temperature flirting with 70 degrees today here in New Jersey, I’m aching for baseball even as I acknowledge we must endure weeks of winter before we hear “Play ball!” again. So it’s high time to announce the annual Baseball Solstice, that precise point between the final out of the World Series and the […]

Marking the Baseball Solstice with a list of Top 10 moments

To mark the Baseball Solstice, I’ve been contemplating the greatest moments in baseball history. A number of these came to mind instantly, a few of them took a bit more prodding of the memory banks. This list is strictly my own reckoning on this date. Ask me in a few weeks or a few months, […]