In early January, a rumor surfaced that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation might sell the Dodgers. To anyone capable of counting on their fingers, this hardly came as a surprise. Count five: having purchased the Dodgers in 1998, News Corp’s five-year window to depreciate player contracts had just closed. The five-year rule (brainchild of Bud Selig …
The Cub Reporter, Christian Ruzich, turned me onto this site, which uses something called RSS to collect recent links from several blogs. As I’m prone to, I spent a couple hours fumbling around trying to get things to work so my RSS feed could be picked up by the site. In doing so, I came …
A long-awaited piece of the Futility Infielder puzzle is now in place: my profile of 19th-century ballplayer Tony Suck, a man who truly lived up to his name. If Suck hadn’t existed, somebody would have made him up. This two-part piece looks at Suck’s unlikely career, then asks two burning questions: is he the worst …
As I stare out the window at the fallen snow and accumulated slush, my thoughts are of warm, sunny places where baseball is being played and feet are dry. One of my favorite bloggers, Cub Reporter Christian Ruzich, was lucky enough to spend some time one of those places: Maryvale, Arizona with the Cubs. Christian …
Hot on the heels of my recent brush with fame, I’ve created a Lenn Sakata page for my Wall of Fame. A prototypical futilityman who was about my size (5’9″ 160 lbs) in his playing days, Sakata caught my eye in a number of ways, and I’ve gotten a lot more mileage out of him …
Apparently I’m having trouble with messages to my futilityinfielder.com address bouncing. If any of you reading this have suffered this fate, please re-send your email to jayjaffe@nyc.rr.com.
Baseball Primer is running a series previewing each team for the upcoming season, and they’ve started with the cellar-dwellars. Rather than face the music about how awful the Kansas City Royals could be in 2003, writer David Brazeal has turned to poetry. Or rather, Poe-try, for Brazeal has chosen to parody Edgar Allan Poe’s “The …
In what’s already been a momentous month, I reached another milestone of sorts on Sunday. I was quoted, and this website was mentioned, in a mainstream media outlet for the first time. The San Jose Mercury News published a column by San Francisco Giants beat writer Dan Brown about the odd careers of the Giants’ …
You wouldn’t — or perhaps shouldn’t — expect stellar objective analysis to emanate from a team’s cable-network website. And you shouldn’t — or perhaps couldn’t — expect such frank and entertaining writing to emerge from the domain of the mad King George. But a writer named Steven Goldman is turning those notions on their ear. …
Every baseball fan has his or her own favorite harbinger of spring, their own signal that a frigid winter without breaking balls, bunts, and box scores is on the wane. For Mike Carminati over at Mike’s Baseball Rants, that harbinger arrived yesterday in the form of the year’s first Joe Morgan Chat Day on ESPN.com. …