The Dodgers’ victory in Game 4 was semi-clutch. Can’t really call it a clutch performance, because they blew that three-run lead in the seventh inning. (They won on a hit batter, a pinch single and Chase Utley’s ground ball that was a foot out of reach for the second baseman.) And semi-clutch is not enough […]

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The TV package I have here in southern France gives me a lot of sports stuff, but Major League Baseball is not part of the menu. Team handball nearly 24/7. Lots of tennis. Every English Premier League match, every Champions League match. (I actually watch some of those.) No baseball. This is France, after all, […]

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I had disappeared down the YouTube rabbit hole today, when I came across some videos that might interest sports fans, and baseball fans in particular. Renditions of the speech from the movie Field of Dreams, a soliloquy sometimes known as “The People Will Come” speech. I have three versions of it here — one you […]

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I did not plan on making the Chicago Cubs a topic for two days running, but today it struck me anew that I really would prefer they not win a World Series for the first time since 1908 … Because I love, love, love long championship droughts, and when it comes to North American sports, […]

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I woke up convinced the San Francisco Giants had won the National League wild-card playoff game the previous night. This decade, that’s what the Giants do in the postseason. Any game they need to win, they win. Including this one, a 3-0 victory in New York over the Mets, thanks to a three-run home run […]

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It was only yesterday — October of 1988 — that the Dodgers won the World Series. They beat the Oakland Athletics in five games, behind Kirk Gibson (a Game 1 homer you may have heard about) and right-hander Orel Hershiser, who was pretty much unhittable in winning twice. That was the sixth Major League Baseball […]

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We usually encounter some sense of shock when a Major League Baseball player dies during his active career. Or, at least, we certainly do in the more modern history of the game, when players stopped dying from influenza, typhoid fever and tuberculosis. And when the player dies during the MLB season. A guy who was […]

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Final day of Vin Scully anecdotes. A few years back, a former colleague — and Dodgers writer — brought a batch of his wife’s molasses cookies to the ballpark and presented them to Vin. Just a way to say “thinking of you” to Vin, apparently. Maybe the best part of it, for my friend, was […]

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I was going to note other interactions in the press box with Vin Scully — a recent meme seems to be about reporters and bumping into Vin in the washroom and making small talk, and I’ve done that. Instead, I’m going to offer him an anecdote pertaining to an event to which he is deeply […]

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A couple of decades ago, maybe a month after having published a comment piece on Vin Scully (spoiler alert: I liked him), I was going through the letters to the sports editor at the San Bernardino Sun. It didn’t take long, I’m sure. We never got many letters … and that was back when some […]

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