Ichiro Suzuki had two hits yesterday, and by one form of accounting that gives him one more hit in his career than Pete Rose had while setting the Major League record — with 4,256 hits. It seems some are going to suggest that makes Suzuki the MLB “hit king”, displacing Rose, but that is not […]

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It took him three tries, but Julio Urias finally looked like he belongs in the major leagues. The 19-year-old left-hander, ranked one of baseball’s top prospects, gave up one run in four innings and racked up seven strikeouts in a game the Dodgers won over the Colorado Rockies 4-3, on Trayce Thompson’s ninth-inning home run. […]

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In sports, a lot of bad trades become bad trades after the fact. The Dodgers’ nine-player trade with the Boston Red Sox in August of 2012 was a bad trade from Day 1. The Dodgers did the Red Sox a huge favor (and themselves a huge disservice) in the heart of the infamous deal — […]

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My default setting when it comes to big-time sports in the U.S., both professionals and major colleges, is to apply my speck of psychic energy to the support of teams from the western United States. Thus, I should be sending negative vibes (however that is done) at the Cleveland Cavaliers, who tonight clinched the Eastern […]

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Only a few weeks after forward-thinking baseball pundits pooh-poohed the likelihood — as well as the wisdom — of calling up “best pitching prospect in ball” Jose Urias … the Dodgers have done just that. The left-hander from Mexico, still only 19, was working on a 27-inning scoreless streak in Triple-A when he got the […]

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First thought: This is no kind of team to give 88-year-old Vin Scully in his last season as the voice of the Los Angeles Dodgers. These are not The Boys of Summer. They are not The Big Blue Wrecking Crew. The Dodgers not quite awful but they certainly are not good — which you might […]

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Kids tend to believe their sports coaches know everything. Even if the coach is just someone’s mom or dad. Kids particularly believe in their coaches at the high-school level. Most of them, anyway. The coaches are adults. They have perhaps played, at the college level, the sport they are coaching. High school kids are 15, […]

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Well, that wasn’t very sporting. Manchester United’s team was trying to get to the Boleyn Ground for West Ham United’s last match at Upton Park, in east London, after 112 seasons there. The throng outside the stadium was so dense, before the game, that the ManU team bus could hardly move as it got close […]

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The website FiveThirtyEight.com is best known for political predictions and analysis. But it has a sports component, and today it produced an interesting piece on the best and worst teams in Major League Baseball history, at least according to the Elo statistical tool. It goes back to 1903, the year when the first World Series […]

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Bartolo Colon was called “The Horse” by Angels manager Mike Scioscia, back in the middle part of the past decade. In part because Colon was “strong as a …” but also because he “weighed as much as a …” That was back when Colon was the Angels’ ace and winner of the 2005 Cy Young […]

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