Happy New Year, everybody! I’m back in NYC, still buried under an avalanche of work, beating editors back with a fungo bat while sleep is in short supply. When the news came down that CT scans of Mark McGwire’s 70th home run showed a ball that was out of MLB’s specifications, it rang a bell …
Baseball Prospectus has a new blog, and I took the opportunity to follow up my latest Hall of Fame ballot piece with my Unfiltered debut, featuring a couple of JAWS-flavored notes on Jeff Bagwell (who retired today) and Cal Ripken, Jr. Enjoy!
This week’s Trading Deadline Extravaganza Hit List is up at Baseball Prospectus. Rather than delve into its baseball content — it’s all free there, if you care to read it — I’ll skip to the dedication at the bottom: This week’s column is dedicated to the loving memory of Clara Gottfried Jaffe (11/2/1912-8/1/2006), wife, mother, …
I’ve often traced my yen to write about baseball back to a pair of dog-eared secondhand books — Roger Angell’s The Summer Game and Jim Bouton’s Ball Four — rescued from a flea market by my grandfather, and by the marvelous yet unrecorded swath of the game’s history he himself witnessed in his 91 years …