I finally made it to Cooperstown

After a lifetime of waiting, I finally made it to Cooperstown. Not to be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame — that childhood dream evaporated years ago — but to tour it and savor it. Tour and savor I did, along with a lifelong friend and our wives, and we thoroughly enjoyed the […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Missing baseball? Check out these old radio broadcasts

Baseball on the radio forms the soundtrack to much of my life, and I miss hearing live games. Fortunately, the Internet Archive has a trove of old broadcasts that can scratch your audio itch. The broadcasts, free of copyright restrictions, run from the 1934 All-Star game through the 1973 World Series. I’ve sampled several games […]

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 […]

BUSHVILLE WINS again!

I spent many happy innings at ballgames at Milwaukee County Stadium when I lived in that great city, but one of my biggest thrills from that long-gone park came this morning in a Strat-O-Matic baseball game. At my dining room table, I played the 1953 Dodgers against the 1957 Braves in Milwaukee, derided in 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, […]