Surprise! Baseball players bunting

I could scarcely believe my eyes. During the three-game weekend college baseball series between Yale and Princeton, several batters squared to — wait for it! — bunt. The Bulldogs and Tigers each laid down a successful sacrifice bunt in the first game of Saturday’s doubleheader, and Yale laid down two in the nightcap. Neither team […]

On a winter’s day, a warm well of baseball history

As snow blanketed New Jersey and much of the Northeast on Friday, I headed to the Princeton University campus for a wonderful treat: a special class showcasing rare and unusual baseball artifacts and memorabilia donated to the university over the years. The class was part of Wintersession, the annual between-the-semesters opportunity for students, faculty and […]

The beautiful game, in under 3 hours

As the Euro 2020 final between England and Italy neared the halfway point of extra time, it dawned on me that, even with a penalty kick shootout, the match would take less time than the average Major League Baseball game. Think about that. In what turned out to be 2 hours, 54 minutes, the Lions […]

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 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, […]

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 […]

Baseball isn’t back — but I am

This may be the season that wasn’t. I’m writing this post as I conclude Week 6 of working from home during the coronavirus outbreak. Major league baseball has been postponed while most Americans and millions of others around the world are experiencing the strange sensations (or lack thereof) of social distancing. A decade ago when […]