In the years before the baseball bug returned to my life, the Utah Jazz were at the center of my sports universe, and the annual attempts of the John Stockton/Karl Malone/Jerry Sloan teams to win an NBA championship were as absorbing as any Dodgers or Yankees team if not more, since they remained part of …
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 …
“…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 …
“Dock Ellis was my first client in baseball, and he gave me as much joy as anybody outside of my family… He was so unique. He was viewed by some people as an outlaw, but he was far from that. He was so ahead of his time. He was so intuitive and smart and talented …
Continue reading ‘The Dock Is Out: Dock Ellis (1945-2008)’ »
I have saved the closing words for Preacher Roe, who soon will be eighty-three. Roe is retired but vigorous in West Plains, Missouri, and proud that every one of his grandchildren has gone to college. “I know one of these days the good Lord is going to come calling,” Preacher says, “and when that happens …
By all rights it should be a happy day in my household this morning with the Brewers opening a one-game lead on the Mets in the NL Wild Card race, but I was bawling in my coffee when I found out that Paul Newman had passed away at age 83, the latest big-name celebrity death …
Friend, colleague, YES Network columnist and cancer survivor Steven Goldman has a touching piece on the passing of Bobby Murcer in which he relates an encounter the two of them had last year. I’m not ashamed to say that it borught a tear to my eye: I told Bobby that I didn’t mean to intrude, …
Several years ago, the legendary Cleveland proto-punk band the Styrenes rose from the grave long enough to reissue some great old material via album entitled All the Wrong People are Dying. The title track (listen here) is dirge beneath vocalist Mike Hudson’s spoken-word eulogy for his 33-year-old recently deceased brother Joey, a fellow musician, and …
The Grim Reaper’s hitting streak continues. In the three weeks since I wrote about Eliot Asinof and a host of others, we’ve lost Tim Russert and George Carlin. Via Baseball Toaster’s