Remembering a great season and a great World Series

As the sun has set on the 2025 baseball season, I’m in a reflective, thankful mood. We had a heck of a World Series, with the Toronto Blue Jays taking the mighty (i.e., mightily financed) Dodgers into 11 innings of Game 7 before coming up short. I was rooting for the Jays and shut the […]

Rooting for the BLue Jays (and hoping against hope)

Led by Shohei Ohtani, the Los Angeles Dodgers are a formidable force heading into the 2025 World Series. After whipping the Yankees in five games last year, the Dodgers are back and well-positioned for a repeat victory. As a San Francisco Giants fan, I am genetically encoded to root against LA, and I will do […]

Hammerin’ Hank is forever

I missed the news last year when the United States Postal Service issued a “forever” stamp in honor of Hank Aaron. But a lovely surprise arrived in the mail the other day. A friend and former Associated Press colleague had stuck one of the stamps in a notecard and mailed it to me in an […]

The MLB store in New York stirs emotions

I spent yesterday in New York City to help watch my two grandsons who live there. At his request, I took my 4-year-old grandson to the F.A.O. Schwarz store at Rockefeller Center early in the afternoon. As we were walking down 6th Avenue, I spotted the flagship MLB Store across the street and suggested we […]

Face it: We’re playing ‘The New York Game’

As Kevin Baker abundantly and entertainingly makes clear, America’s pastime is “The New York Game.” Baker’s book with that title examines the development of baseball from its organizational stirrings in the mid-19th century to the cusp of racial integration at the end of World War II. The setting? New York City. My friend Jerry and […]

Spills and thrills for the Renegades softball team

I came off the disabled list and got back onto the field with the Research Renegades softball team this week. With a game in the near-100-degrees heat Tuesday and another on cooler, cloudier Wednesday, my hands were continually switching from glove to camera to bat. We lost a tough one Tuesday, 9-8, but prevailed in […]

A farewell to the Oakland Athletics

For six years in the 1990s, I lived about two and a half miles from the Oakland Coliseum. From the front lawn of our home in Alameda, I could occasionally hear cheers from an Oakland A’s game, if the wind was just right. I followed the A’s regularly back then, listening to their games on […]

City-connecting with friends old and new

With few exceptions, my reaction to the funky City Connect uniforms that Major League teams are wearing has ranged from revulsion to loathing, On Friday, I finally got to see the Phillies’ City Connect uniforms in person, and my stance on the alternative togs is starting to soften. As we hung out at Comcast LIve […]

Giants’ baseball is on the air

I haven’t lived in California for 12 years, but I still love listening to the San Francisco Giants’ radio broadcasts. As I type this short post, I can hear Duane Kuiper’s soothing voice coming clearly from Arizona through my iPhone with the KNBR broadcast out of San Francisco. Yes, the Cubs are ahead 3-0, but […]

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 […]