Chicks may dig the long ball, as the slogan went from 20 years ago. But I do not. And when a pitcher hits a 467-foot home run, as Jon Gray did in Denver today, it’s time to act against the home run madness that is disfiguring Major League Baseball in 2017. Gray’s homer was the […]

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Thank goodness this is July 4, because after tonight’s games Major League Baseball players can stop wearing the garish and ridiculous special uniforms they have been trapped in since July 1. What is it the kids say of something that is lame and stupid? “Clown shoes”, I think it is. Just about everything the world’s […]

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Forgive me if I have been slow to acknowledge this. Twenty-nine years since the Los Angeles Dodgers’ most recent championship … since the last time the club played in a World Series, actually … well, the club’s history-scarred fans cannot be expected to immediately climb back on the Big Blue bandwagon. The Dodgers are moving […]

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The draft. Whichever you want to talk about … is very much an American thing. The rest of the world, you collect players in a youth system and watch them develop. You keep a few, loan some others, release the rest. Especially the case in world soccer. In the U.S. however, talent is typically distributed […]

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Major League Baseball hitters are on pace to obliterate the record for home runs in a season, a record set in 2000, during the height of the steroids era. An analysis done by The Ringer traces this homer binge to the second half of 2015 and suggests the surge is due to a bouncier, slightly […]

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We have an interesting and alarming piece of journalism on espn.com today, as one of the site’s baseball writers projects 20 years into the future, and what the game might look like. For long-time fans of the game, nearly all the changes foreseen by a dozen people closely involved in the game … are appalling. […]

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On our Tijuana-to-Mexico City road trip ahead of a 2006 World Cup qualifier, back in 2005, we noticed that the main north-south road on the western side of Mexico goes right through Navajoa — where Los Angeles Dodgers pitching star Fernando Valenzuela was born. Back in 2005, I assumed readers would not be interested in […]

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Most Los Angeles Dodgers fans remember when Yasiel Puig was going to be something special. It was five years ago this week that he was called up from Triple A and for a spell looked like the Mike Trout of the National League, except with a stronger throwing arm. He was on my fantasy team, […]

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I saw the headline: Twins Turn Triple Play … and, sure, I went to the video. The Twins were playing in Anaheim Stadium and I wondered which of the Angels’ slugs had managed to hit into a 5-4-3 (round the horn) TP. But what really struck me, as the video began? Well, have a look/listen, […]

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Mike Trout played 857 games in the major leagues without visiting the disabled list. Of course, as long as he continued to use the headfirst slide as his preferred means of getting to a base in a hurry … it was nearly inevitable he would hurt some key part of his body. The headfirst slide […]

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