Tag: baseball

Little League, Then and Now

But that love for baseball didn’t mean that we organized our lives around the sport, or that any parent with a Little Leaguer had baseball scholarships in mind. It didn’t enter into the picture. A child’s life was not packaged up and dressed for ambition. That meant, too, that the fans did not take things too seriously.

Against Fun: The Ubiquitous Specter of Youth Sports

More to the purpose of this essay, organized youth sports should challenge students to be dissatisfied with amusement or entertainment in their pursuit of excellence. Our culture is soaked in entertainment, the preponderance being of a low quality. While it can be entertaining, sports also offers an education.

Looking Back to Oscar Charleston and Forward to a Strange Baseball...

Before I begin to complain about the shortened season, the lack of travel to the usual hubs, the lack of live fanhood, it might be well to remember those who loved baseball with extraordinary intensity, yet for whom no season of major league baseball ever opened up its bounty.

Spring Fever

I had bought a few baseball cards when I was eight years old, mostly for the gum, but the start of fourth grade, in 1967, was when I became serious.

Loving—But Not Believing In—Baseball

Many of Forbes’s best insights stem from this notion—baseball helps us navigate life, because much of life is also boring. It’s a game about waiting, about disappointment and failure, about reckless hope for a late rally or a triple-play to turn the tide.

Infinite Baseball review

The official scorekeeper for my sixth-grade baseball team was our catcher’s mom. Sometimes she couldn’t be there, and it would fall to our coach...

Robo-umps and Us

As is so often the case when new technology promises to correct the errors of human fallibility, robo-umps could be bad for everyone involved.

The Local Game

The baseball season has ended. For fans just about everywhere outside of Boston, this will signal either melancholy or relief. Or possibly disgust. Melancholy...

Leo Durocher: The All-American Contradiction

The coming of October, and of the World Series as culmination, invites reflection on yet another season in which the home run (and the...

University Press of Kentucky, Group Think, the Farm Bill, and more

“An Open Letter.” The bad news is that the University Press of Kentucky lost some of their funding in the new state budget. The...