It was getting late for Howard “Howie” Joseph Kendrick. He had a solid career. Of course he did. No one lasts 14 years in Major League Baseball without being solid. Solid enough to be paid $65 million over those 14 seasons. Good enough to have played in an All-Star Game in 2011 and received an […]

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It went something like this: I regained consciousness about 6 a.m., and thought the decisive Game 5 of the National League Division Series between the Dodgers and Washington Nationals ought to be over, back in Los Angeles. And I did not expect good news, especially when I saw the game was tied at 3-3 in […]

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The home run era has been fun. I think a consensus has developed among baseball people that it is beginning to grow tiresome and that something will soon need to be done to make baseball look more like baseball. Know who wrote that? Bill James, the man whose insights jump-started baseball’s advanced metrics revolution back […]

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In the 1961 Major League Baseball season, Roger Maris of the New York Yankees hit 61 home runs to break Babe Ruth’s homer record of 60, set in 1927. However, many fans of the Bambino, and perhaps those not enthralled by the laconic Maris one-upping the charismatic Ruth, clamored for an “asterisk” to be added […]

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Did you attend a Los Angeles Dodgers home game this season? If so, you are part of a club record: The Dodgers counted 3,974,309 customers for their 81 home games in the 2019 season. Unprecedented, at Chavez Ravine. Being part of an attendance record is kinda cool. Especially when you get up into six figures. […]

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The New York Yankees came to town to play a three-game inter-league set with the Los Angeles Dodgers, in a matchup of the clubs with the best records so far this season. Excuse me if I, a lifetime Dodgers fan, was a little creeped out by it. The Yankees took two of three, outscoring the […]

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As a sportsman, Jim Bouton was best-known as a pitcher for three early-1960s New York Yankees teams that reached the World Series. As a careful observer and serial pot-stirrer, he was best-known for the diary he kept of the 1969 Seattle Pilots season, which led to the 1970 book Ball Four. It was an endeavor […]

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Many baseball fans love the idea of the ballpark hacked out of a corn field in Iowa to serve as the focal point for the baseball movie Field of Dreams. It is not a one-shot prop. It is not generated by a computer. It is acres of land where corn once grew, carved out for […]

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Kind of a Triple Crown, as far as I am concerned. The not-expensive set-up with MLB-TV to choose among various live games during the European night and early morning; the Dodgers doing what they do (destroy the National League); and the pleasure of listening to the cerebral and chatty Orel Hershiser, who serves as color […]

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Anyone who has watched the 2019 Dodgers for a half-dozen games already knows what is going to keep this team from its first World Series championship since 1988. The bullpen. Yesterday, the club had its last chance to address the problem under the new trade deadline of July 31 … and chose not to. “We’re […]

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