In this week’s Hit List, I made note of the fact that Ken Griffey, Jr. had tied Mickey Mantle on the all-time home run list with his 536th dinger on Sunday. Since then, Griffey has missed three games with what’s been reported as both hamstring and foot problems, with one report saying that he had …
The new Prospectus Hit List is up, a day late due to my travel over the Labor Day weekend. Andra and I took a trip to Milwaukee to surprise her parents on the occasion of their 40th wedding anniversary. She and her two brothers planned a weekend that included the whole family going to the …
Thanks to the magic of TiVo, I watched a dandy of a ballgame the other night, the pitchers’ duel between soon-to-be 42-year-old future Hall of Famer Randy Johnson and 19-year-old rookie Felix Hernandez. Brother, that was one game which lived up to the hype. I’d seen Hernandez, the Mariners’ wunderkind, pitch once before, but that …
Even as the pennant races heat up, baseball is of minor importance this week in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The images, footage and reports of the devastation and chaos in New Orleans and Mississippi are simply jaw-dropping and heart-rending. For all our our high standards of living in this country, to see a natural …
Last week’s Prospectus Hit List generated a larger and more contentious batch of reader mail than usual, with the relative rankings of the Oakland A’s and Anaheim Angels of Whereversville a particular flashpoint for some readers. Rather than take a defensive attitude towards the criticism, I’ve used the opportunity as a means to explain the …
Continue reading ‘Clearing the Bases — Crossing the Lines edition’ »
A few weeks ago, I mentioned a book I’d been reading, Matthew McGough’s Bat Boy: My True Life Adventures Coming of Age with the New York Yankees. I first encountered McGough’s story in the New York Times a couple of years ago. In that article, he described his first day as a Yankee batboy in …
Yesterday evening my pal Alex Belth sent an email asking my opinions about the Hall of Fame credentials of several active pitchers: Got a question I thought you might have some thoughts about. I figure that Maddux, Johnson, Pedro and Clemens are sure-fire, first-ballot Hall of Famers. And I also figure that Glavine and Mariano …
After a week’s hiatus so that I could complete my recent articles for the New York Sun and Salon, I’m back with a new Prospectus Hit List. The Cardinals sit at #1 for the ninth week in a row (zzzz), but the White Sox, who spent eight weeks at #2, have fallen to sixth on …
If you’re in the demographic that has more than a passing familiarity with this site and its proprietor’s damaged sense of humor and jaundiced view of the world, then you’re no doubt familiar with The Simpsons, hands down the greatest TV show in the history of, well, history (hey, that’s a perfectly cromulant claim!). For …
Written and delivered less than 24 hours after “The Claussen Pickle Revisited”, this week’s Prospectus Hit List is up at BP. This week’s edition features lots of stuff about rookies, for some reason; this late in the year, some pretty good ones, such as Oakland’s Dan Johnson and the White Sox’s Tadahito Iguchi, are playing …