No sooner than five minutes after walking in the door to my apartment, home from my week-long European vacation (Paris, then London), I had the TV on in search of baseball. A week of reading about the nationalistic soccer miseries of two countries and searching for day-old line scores beneath 900 stories about the ouster …
Continue reading ‘I’m Going Back to New York City, the Only Place I Can Get Enough’ »
I’m off to Europe for a week; Andra and I are hitting Paris (for her 30th birthday) and then London. My travels mean I’ll miss the Yanks’ series with their crosstown rival Mets as well as a set with the Sox, both of which I had to surrender tickets for. Oh well, we can’t have …
As I noted on Friday, the good folks at All-Baseball.com invited me to participate in the Rashomon Project — so named for a Kurosawa movie presented from the point of view of four separate narrators — in which each writer (eleven in all) contributed his take on Sunday night’s Dodger-Yankee ballgame. Jon Weisman was at …
As has been mentioned several times this weekend, the Dodgers and Yankees have met 11 times in the World Series, the most frequent postseason matchup in history. While the Yanks have won eight of those 11 Fall Classics, the two teams have been fairly evenly matched; the Yanks hold only a 37-30 edge in games …
Continue reading ‘A Thumbnail Guide to the Dodger-Yankee Fall Classics’ »
Round one of the long-awaited interleague series between the Dodgers and the Yankees went to the boys in red, white and Dodger blue, 6-3. Former Yankee Jeff Weaver looked shaky, giving up three runs in the third inning and exhibiting the same pouty body language — like a two-year-old with a full diaper — that …
It took eight years to bring the most natural AL-NL matchup to fruition, and if that isn’t the most scathing indictment of Bud Selig’s poorly conceived interleague plan, then I don’t know what is. The Dodgers and Yankees have met in the World Series eleven times, the most frequent matchup in history, yet until this …
I wasn’t at the ballpark, but last Saturday evening was every bit as saturated with baseball as Sunday turned out to be. On the occasion of a Baseball Prospectus/SABR Bookstore Event (no pizza, to our disappointment), Alex Belth, Alex Ciepley, Mike Carminati and I hung out for about an hour at Bryant Park, across the …
The Yanks were cooked. Down 2-0 with two outs in the ninth inning, it looked for all the world that they were headed to defeat, both for the afternoon and for the weekend’s interleague series against the San Diego Padres. David Wells had returned to Yankee Stadium wearing the navy-and-sand garb of the Padres but …
ESPN’s Buster Olney — yes, my favorite whipping boy of late — recently took an interesting look at bullpen usage, namely the pace at which the Yankees and several other teams are taxing their top three relievers so early in the year. Fifty-five games into the season (through Monday, June 7) — one game past …
Friday marked the 30th anniversary of one of the more colorful — or dubious, depending on your take — events in the history of baseball, the 10-Cent Beer Night Riot. On June 4, 1974, at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium, a promotion — ten ounces of Strohs for ten cents — went predictably awry, resulting in a …