My Rooting interests for the AL and NL championships

To demonstrate that I bear no animus toward New York City, I hereby declare my rooting interest in baseball’s American and National league championship series, gateway to the World Series. Anyone who knows me even passingly should not be surprised that I am pulling for the Guardians, the pride of my hometown, Cleveland. They are […]

An amazin’ Casey Stengel biography

Through my employer’s digital library, I checked out a copy of “Casey Stengel: Baseball’s Greatest Character,” a book rich in baseball lore and laughs that I highly recommend. Author Marty Appel combed through many records and historical sources to pen this biography of “the Ol’ Perfessor.” Stengel was managing the Mets when I was a […]

Coffee shop baseball talk: Long may it rage

Last weekend I was up in the Berkshires in Massachusetts, visiting family, and I was delighted to encounter incontrovertible evidence that baseball is still a point of passion for fans, at least among men of a certain age. As we started our drive back home, my wife and I stopped at a Dunkin shop in […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

Who’s worth more? A baseball player or the doctor keeping your wife or child alive?

I opened the papers this morning to read about the Seattle Mariners giving Robinson Cano a 10-year contract for $240 million. The New York Mets apparently have agreed to give Curtis Granderson $60 million over four years. And there was the Jacoby Ellsbury deal with the New York Yankees earlier in the week: 7 years, […]

Just a flesh wound: Some thoughts on baseball at mid-season

Wow, have I been a baseball blogging phantom this season. I cringe at the mere thought of checking the date on my last post, which itself was weeks and weeks after the previous post. My lack of posting doesn’t mean I haven’t been a fully engaged baseball fan. In fact, I’ve watched plenty of games […]

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’ […]