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 […]

Every desk needs a baseball

Office trends have come and gone over the years of my career, from fax machines to Zoom screens, but one constant has been baseball. Not in the James Earl Jones/Thomas Mann sense from “Field of Dreams.” I mean literally a single baseball. Years back when I was working in San Francisco, a PR firm sent […]

Dodgers and Giants: Let’s bring them back to New York for a series

Knotted in a tie for first place in the National League West Division with the best records in baseball, the Giants and Dodgers begin a marquee weekend series tonight, Friday, Sept. 3. First pitch is scheduled for 6:45 p.m. Pacific time. The Giants and Dodgers left New York for the West Coast a lifetime ago, […]

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 […]

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 Cards, the Astros, and other Garbage Pail Kids

As I dashed into Target last week to pick up a few food items that needed restocking, I swung by the display for the trading cards on my way to the checkout line. If there’s not going to be a baseball season, I reasoned, I need some baseball cards by which to remember it. I […]

On the Fourth, reporting on a first game in Pittsburgh

Here it is, the Fourth of July, 2017, and the day is perfect for baseball. I couldn’t make it out to a game today, but I was able to catch the San Francisco Giants defeat the Pirates 2-1 in Pittsburgh on Saturday. The game — my first in Pittsburgh — was a delight. Under a […]