baseball 21

As Kauffman tells Bardenwerper, perhaps being cut loose from MLB will turn out to be a blessing.

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…

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…

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…

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.

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…

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 to keep score. Sometimes he didn’t…

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

The coming of October, and of the World Series as culmination, invites reflection on yet another season in which the home run (and the strikeout) became the centerpiece of the…

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

“Quit Trying to ‘Fix’ Baseball: Its Leisurely Pace Is Just What Our Society Needs.” Gregory Hillis tells Rob Manfred (and the rest of us) that we need what baseball offers:…

Being a report on a journey whereupon I dragged my wife to see seven minor league baseball games in seven days, as well as the National Baseball Hall of Fame,…

“Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball” –Jacques Barzun Grove City, PA. Opening Day, 2011 Dutifully following the links provided by FPR’s editors, I…

Spring training is over, and I find myself at loose ends. Since moving to Phoenix a few years back, this has become the saddest time of the year for me.…

What a trifling thing it is to control man! How easily we believe in fairy tales when they come cloaked in the black box of authority and superior knowledge.

It’s been almost six years now and I suspect he’s still talking St. Peter’s ear off.

Devon, PA.  In February 2007, as the Iraq war crept to the end of its fourth year, I published this short essay, proposing a few notions on foreign policy that…

BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY---The Muckdogs open tonight against the cursed Auburn Doubledays. It's seventy years now that we've had a professional baseball team in Batavia, and no one knows more about…

PHOENIX, ARIZONA. Today is opening day, and how sweet it is. But nine days from now comes the most annoying day on the Major League Baseball schedule, when the league…

John Miller asked me to write on why I love the Diamondbacks. Twenty-nine others pitch in on the rest of the league, if you're interested, including my friends Darryl Hart…