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 […]

Pass the hotdogs — and my change

It’s impossible to discuss the economics of Major League Baseball without discussing the “major market” and “small market” divide so eloquently illustrated in the movie “Moneyball.” Yet even the smallest of markets today is exponentially larger than the hundreds of small towns where baseball developed in its early decades. A nice perspective on baseball’s rural […]

The baseball gods are angry

There’s only one plausible explanation for the rainout that postponed Saturday’s American League Championship Series game between the Yankees and Angels: The baseball gods are angry. They’re angry that the mere mortals who run Major League Baseball would show such hubris to schedule the playoffs so late into the year. Assuming no weather delays and a […]

The Twins win, and we’re stuck with more games in that horrid dome

The Minnesota Twins defeated the Detroit Tigers 6-5 in 12 innings Tuesday night to win the American League Central title, and I’m not happy. Not because the Twins won per se. They’ve been a terrific story this season, charging from behind to tie the Tigers and force the one-game playoff for the division title. What […]

Of “Seinfeld” and baseball caps

The TV rerun gods were in a generous mood last night, enabling me to catch a Seinfeld rerun of “The Letter,” the episode in which Elaine twice causes a ruckus at a Yankees’ game by wearing an Orioles cap while sitting in the owners’ box seats. (Sorry, I can’t figure out how to embed the […]

The 2009 New York Yankees cap

The New York Yankees will be sporting a new cap when they take the field at the new Yankee Stadium this year. The team isn’t messing with the classic interlocking “N” and “Y” (thank goodness). The Yanks are adding a commemorative patch on the back to mark the stadium transition. For details, check out this […]

Ken Griffey Jr. returns to the Seattle Mariners…

… and there was great rejoicing in the land — especially in the Pacific Northwest. When I first heard the rumblings a few days ago that Ken Griffey Jr. might return to the Mariners, I tried to keep from getting too excited about the possibility. In today’s big-money baseball world, team allegiances are more fading […]

The final game at Yankee Stadium

A tip of the cap to all the great Yankees players who turned out tonight for the pre-game festivities at the last game at Yankee Stadium. The white-on-navy caps have stayed the same over the years, as is right. Those old-style cream flannels that Larsen and Whitey and Yogi were wearing sure are great.