My hometown pays tribute to Rocky Colavito

I’ve marked Rocky Colavito’s birthday on August 10th for as long as I can remember. I’m sure I found the date on the back of one of Rocky’s baseball cards, some of my most treasured possessions. Months ago I learned that a statue of Rocky would be unveiled in Cleveland on his 88th birthday, and […]

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 […]

The Mets honor Mariano, and then defeat him

The New York radio airwaves are abuzz over how the Mets did the improbable last night and scored two runs in the bottom of the ninth inning off Mariano Rivera to beat the Yankees 2-1. It was a stunning victory — the second in as many nights at Citi Field — and even more amazin’ […]

Pass the hotdogs — and my change

It’s impossible to discuss the economics of Major League Baseball without discussing the “major market” and “small market” divide so eloquently illustrated in the movie “Moneyball.” Yet even the smallest of markets today is exponentially larger than the hundreds of small towns where baseball developed in its early decades. A nice perspective on baseball’s rural […]

Baltimore-Washington wins the 2012 Major League Baseball metro-area title

Which metro area had the most successful baseball season? After listening to the Athletics overtake the Rangers on my way home from work last evening, I was all set to declare the Bay Area the cross-league, total victory champions. But then I remembered that Baltimore-Washington is eligible, and a check of the standings this morning […]

Red Sox Nation shows its pride on Massachusetts license plates

Red Sox fans are crazy for their team, and as I traveled New England while on vacation last week I was struck by the number of BoSox specialty Massachusetts license plates I saw. They were a common site on Cape Cod, on Boston area highways, and I even spotted them in New Hampshire and Vermont. […]

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 […]

A tip of the cap to Tony La Russa

We tip our cap to Tony La Russa, who announced today that he’s retiring after 33 years as a big-league manager. With the White Sox, Athletics and the Cardinals, he had an uncanny knack for taking the talent he had and getting them far into the playoffs. Good for him, going out on top after […]

Salary cap for baseball? It’s not the American way

FOX Sports ran a commercial today during the Cardinals-Phillies game on TBS that got under my skin in a bad, bad way. It was a misty-eyed paean to the Yankees, with lots of images of Derek Jeter and Reggie Jackson implying that the Bronx Bombers own October. I hate that. Let me say that again: […]