When I saw that Tommy Lasorda had died, I knew I had to write something about him. He was an icon of the game for 70+ years, and especially of the Los Angeles Dodgers. I lived in L.A. for nearly 20 years, but as a lifelong Yankees fan, I didn’t feel I had the chops…
I read in the Washington Post this morning that Jim Bouton had died at age 80. He pitched for the Yankees in the 1960s, but was perhaps most famous for his groundbreaking book, Ball Four. It is a fantastic look inside baseball in the late 1960s. If you are a fan of the game and…
[T]here is a new player joining Shoeless Joe on the field of dreams tonight. I was saddened to learn of Yogi Berra’s passing when I woke up this morning. He is one of those few people that I feel like I’ve been aware of my whole life. I feel almost as if I was born knowing…
[I] have been lax in my efforts to break in the Little Man’s baseball glove, and that has made things more difficult on the field for him than they should be. So this weekend, I decided I would figure out the right way to do it quickly. A Google search led me to the Glove…
[I] recently finished reading Sports Illustrated collection Great Baseball Writing, which gathers about 60 articles from over the last 60 years, all on baseball. It was a fantastic book, and I loved every minute of it. Of course, with nearly 60 articles, some stand out more than others. Here are a list of my favorites, along…
[I]n a 1976 Roger Kahn piece on Stan Musial that I just finished reading, I was sort of floored by a comment that Musial made on the state of major league hitters at the time. Musial started out by praising Pete Rose, and then went to express embarrassment that many major-league hitters were hitting in…
[K]ansas City won in an epic duel last night, and I was very happy to see that, because I wanted to see the Royals make it to the playoffs. I remember the 1985 series, George Brett, and the Kansas City glory that year, and it would be fun to see them go all the way…
[I] started at my present job in the fall of 1994, at the end of one of the more depressing baseball seasons of my life, thanks to the player’s strike that killed the postseason for that year. Baseball, it seemed, was at an all-time low. In May of the following season, Derek Jeter made his…
[L]ast night, after a wonderful happy hour at Finn McCool’s in Santa Monica, catching up with old friends and coworkers, I walked back to my hotel. Movie crews were working on both sides of Pico between 4th and Main filming something all day long, but by the time I walked through there at 9 pm…
[R]ather than inundate you all with posting my scorecards after each game, I’ve gone ahead and created a shared notebook in Evernote that contains scans of all of my scorecards from this season. Feel free to peruse them at your leisure. Since posting my first few scorecards of the season, I’ve had a few questions…
[L]ike they say, it’s early in the season and the championship is never decided in April. Still, you’d like to see at least a glimmer from your team. The Yanks, while much more settled defensively than last night, seem fairly quiet at the plate, and abysmal when it comes to runners in scoring position. Here’s…
[L]ast night, the Yankees played their opening day game against the Houston Astros down in Houston. As this is Derek Jeter’s last season, it was his last opening day game. I watched the game, and as I usually do when watching, I kept score. Here are my scorecards, visitor and home, respectively. The Yankees lost…