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 […]

Gabe Kapler: From Rockhead to Genius

What do I know? When Gabe Kapler took over as manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, I thought he could do nothing right. I remember listening to the opener in 2018, and I forget what managerial gaffe or gaffes Kapler made as the Phils fell to the Braves. Things didn’t get much better for Philadelphia that […]

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 […]

The Giants come out in rainbow colors

The San Francisco Giants debuted their new rainbow logo caps and sleeve patches for Pride Month, and good for them. Supporting the LGBTQ+ community is nothing new for the Giants. In the mid-90s when I worked in The City, the Giants became the first pro sports team to have an HIV/AIDS awareness game. They have […]

This season counts

I spent a relaxing Sunday sitting on our back patio, listening to snippets of four baseball games late in the afternoon, Phillies and Mets on my portable radio, Giants and Brewers on my iPhone, a home-brewed ale in my glass. During the Phillies game against the Cardinals, play-by-play announcer Scott Franzke referred to the statistics […]

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 […]

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 […]

A baseball idyll, COVID-19 edition

My baseball-crazy next-door neighbors have set up a virtual academy in their back yard, and it brings joy to my heart. It’s a family of Phillies fans, as affirmed by the tell-tale red and white “P” sticker clinging the back of their SUV. The boys, about 12 and 9, emerge from the house at sun-up […]

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 […]

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 […]