Well, folks, I’m off for the trip which is the centerpiece of my summer. Six days in the San Francisco area visiting several old friends and capped by my pal Joel’s wedding, followed by six more in Alaska, with my newly-retired father on a guided fishing trip in the Katmai National Park. I may get …
Jim Bouton, the only knuckleballer on the New York Public Library’s Books of the Century List, has a new book out. Called Foul Ball: My Life and Hard Times Trying to Save an Old Ballpark, the book is a diary of Bouton’s efforts to save the oldest minor-league park in America (Waconah Park) and the …
The Yankee brass has added a new wrinkle to this coming Saturday’s crosstown doubleheader with the Mets. Their top pitching prospect, Brandon Claussen, will be summoned from AAA Columbus to start in the second (Shea) game, making his major-league debut in the process. Claussen is a 24-year-old lefthander who is only a year removed from …
Sometimes, when I do design work, it’s necessary to use chunks of filler text in place of actual live copy. The idea is that a designer can make decisions about the form an layout will take before the final content is determined. In QuarkXPress, the primary page-layout software I use, there exists a tool called …
Thanks to a late-night breakthrough in my understanding of HTML, I’ve added a feature: a new sidebar called “The Catch” which will feature brief notes and links, including some to products I’m recommending. This blog-within-a-blog feature is something I’ve wanted to construct for quite some time, and I’m elated to finally have figured it out. …
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Thursday afternoon’s Yankee-Devil Ray ballgame was rained out. Or rather, “rained out,” for anybody within range of the Bronx could tell you that while the skies had emptied in the morning and remained overcast throughout the afternoon, very little additional rain fell. Presumably, the ballgame could have and should have been played. The fact that …
In what will surely make him the butt of jokes for the next, oh, 15 years, former major league pain in the ass Jose Canseco was arrested at home on Friday for testing positive for steroids, a violation of his parole. For those of you needing a refresher course Jose’s recent rap sheet, Canseco and …
Larry Doby passed away on Wednesday. If you don’t know who he was, then your history lesson is LONG overdue. Doby broke the American League color barrier a mere three months after Jackie Robinson first played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, debuting for the Cleveland Indians on July 5, 1947. Yet he spent his career in …
When it comes to baseball phenomena I’ve observed in my lifetime, the line starts with Fernandomania. Nothing I’ve ever seen compared with the initial dominance of Fernando Valenzuela and the swirl of excitement surrounding the portly, unflappable 20-year-old southpaw from Mexico every time he took the hill for the Dodgers. I’d been introduced to Valenzuela …
Once again I’ve retreated to my pal Nick’s folks’ place in Northampton, Massachusetts. Nick’s stepfather is the great-grandson of Harry M. Stevens, the famed sports concessionaire. In honor of the occasion I’m repubilishing a piece I wrote two years ago after rooting through the Stevens-related memorabilia up here. I’ve revised it to include the further …