Among the numerous things I’m thankful for every year, one of them is the arrival of Roger Angell’s annual recap in The New Yorker, which I sat down and read last night over a bottle of seasonal ale after tiring of discerning the minutiae of various Angels pitching prospects. From Angels to Angell, now that …
The nation’s leading sticks in the mud, the Hall of Fame Veterans Committee, are having a vote in a few weeks. Two of them, in fact, one on umpires and managers and the other on executives and pioneers. Marvin Miller, the former executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association who led the fight …
The Royals’ Zack Greinke was a runaway winner in the AL Cy Young voting, which was announced on Tuesday, netting 25 out of 28 first-place votes. Greinke finished with a major league-low 2.16 ERA while striking out 242 hitters in 229.1 innings. His won-loss record was 16-8, certainly respectable, but also tied with Brandon Webb …
Last week, Bronx Banter’s Alex Belth put together a three-part series (one, two, three) on some of the greatest ledes — the opening sentences or paragraphs of newspaper or magazine articles — in sportswriting history, lines which pack a wallop that’s stood the test of time. A student of the genre, Alex called upon great …
Continue reading ‘The King of the Sports Page Ledes the Way’ »
Not a whole lot to report here that hasn’t been reported elsewhere. The Hot Stove season is upon us and after busting my butt to cover the postseason, I’m playing catch-up with my allotment of Baseball Prospectus 2010 comments. With my wife out of town on a business trip for a few days, I’ve taken …
Just before signing off early Thursday morning in the wake of the Yankees’ World Series win, the YES network ran a montage set to Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind,” the song which had become this team’s anthem; the rapper performed it live prior to Game Two of the series, the one I attented. In my …
After a night of revelry — I was a one-man dogpile — let’s get straight to the opener of today’s piece at Baseball Prospectus: Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter may be the Yankees for whom the spotlight shines the brightest, but it was Hideki Matsui who did the dirty work on Wednesday night. Setting a …
You never know what you’re going to get when it comes to A.J. Burnett, a sterling performance like he gave the Yankees in Game Two of the World Series, or an implosion like he gave them in last night’s Game Five. Through his first four postseason starts this fall, he’d allowed just eight runs, four …
Johnny Damon’s mad ninth-inning dash from second to third once he realized no one was covering will go down in the annals of World Series lore, but it was Alex Rodriguez who was the real story last night. From my writeup at Baseball Prospectus: Last night, in the ninth inning of Game Four of the …
The Yankees pulled ahead in the World Series on Saturday night, two games to one. Andy Pettitte survived an awful second inning, while Cole Hamels fell apart like a cheap watch after a dominating three innings, with Pettitte himself contributing to that via an RBI single amid a three-run fifth-inning rally that ultimately chased last …