Taking a break from the 28 years we’ll have to digest the Alex Rodriguez steroid saga — his contract runs through 2017, which if he retired then would mean his Hall of Fame eligibility would run from 2023 through 2037 — I meant to post something I read last week. It’s from “The Fadeaway,” by …
The Alex Rodriguez story took a new turn on Monday evening, as A-Rod submitted to an exclusive interview by ESPN’s Peter Gammons in which he admitted to using steroids from 2001 to 2003 while a member of the Texas Rangers. While the interview was relatively softball — the hand-picked Gammons is about as threatening as …
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As usual, big news in baseball’s steroid story means me waking up at oh-dark-thirty to field a handful of interviews for the Fox News Radio network, talking sense to the occasionally inflamed radio hosts, though with the Alex Rodriguez story shifting a bit int he wake of yesterday evening’s interview with ESPN’s Peter Gammons, tempers …
It’s a dark day for baseball, the revelation that Alex Rodriguez was among the 104 players who failed a drug test in 2003. Never mind the fact that the test was supposedly anonymous and carried no punitive consequences but was being conducted as a survey to establish whether Major League Baseball should implement more stringent …
“…we write for each other, for baseball is not a paragraph, and losing, I think, is no parenthesis” — Humbug.com’s “Random Diamond Notes Generator,” after e.e. cummings Waaaaay back in the day, as a regular poster on Baseball Primer, I was a fan of the mysterious Score Bard, the poet laureate of the baseball blogosphere. …
Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike passed away today at age 76. While he didn’t write often about baseball, and while I’m no expert on the rest of his oeuvre, his career line includes one memorable home run of a piece: “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”, his account of Ted Williams’ final game, written in 1960 …
In today’s Hit and Run column at Baseball Prospectus, I take up “The Curious Case of Jeff Kent”, who retired last week: There’s no crying in baseball, which may or may not explain why Jeff Kent’s stoic facade crumbled during the press conference in which he announced his retirement last week. A notoriously gruff and …
Doubling up with yesterday’s Hit and Run column, I had a chat at BP as well. Alas, it was fraught with technical difficulties that slowed the system considerably, limiting the number of questions I could get to without pulling my hair out: frampton (Oakland, CA): Thanks for the chat! You alluded in today’s article to …
As you may or may not have noticed, the comments feature on this blog has been nonfunctional over the past month. As of December 23, the third-party system I used, YACCS (Yet Another Collaborative Comment System), discontinued its service, but it’s only now that I’ve had a chance to clean up my template and enable …
After a week and a half of laying low following the delivery of my final Baseball Prospectus annual essays and JAWS pieces, I’ve re-emerged with both an article and a chat. Today’s piece at BP focuses on last week’s Hall of Fame voting results and their underlying patterns. After noting that Jim Rice made history …