I don’t know Mat Latos. Pretty sure I’ve never been in the same room with him. Maybe not even in the same stadium, since he got to the bigs just as I was leaving California. But he seems to be the sort of guy who gets under the skin of people around him, and Dodgers […]

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When we left the country for Abu Dhabi, in 2009, the whole of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ season could be seen on TV by consumers who had even lower-end cable packages. This month, we came home during ball season … and I was able, for the first time, to experience the ridiculous situation — now […]

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It is beyond cliche, so much so that I will refer to it, for TV and radio news people to recite the title of the 1972 pop song — It Never Rains in Southern California — when it actually does rain in Southern California. Of course, it rains. Fifteen inches per year in Los Angeles, […]

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I try to make one major-league baseball game per year. Not always do-able, when you live in Abu Dhabi. This one turned out well on several fronts … starting with the Maury Wills bobblehead doll we got upon entering the stadium.

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This is a big concept in advanced metrics. Well, actually, you don’t need a big brain, or a fascination with numbers, to grasp this. If a guy has a history of performing at level X, but for a month he performs at level X+50 percent … it is likely he will find his way back […]

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Relegation would be a handy thing to have in U.S. sports. Most Americans, I think, understand the concept, by now. In nearly all global soccer leagues that aren’t Major League Soccer, two or three teams at the bottom of the standings go down to the next-lowest league. Which is pretty much a disaster. (And the […]

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I was sure I must have written about this before, on this blog, the final organized sports competition I was part of, so many years ago. But I have searched the site with all manner of names and terms, and I got no results, so the search function is not working or I wrote about […]

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Some sports fans might be amused at the topics that come up on a sports desk while producing a newspaper. Arguments, declarations, declamations … it’s like being in a sports bar 365 days a year. And today’s topic? The ugliest athletes. Any sport.

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The Baltimore Orioles’ game with the Chicago White Sox at Camden Yards was played today without any fans in the stadium. It came about because of a city curfew, following civil unrest, and the teams involved not wanting to get too many games behind schedule. The White Sox have three games to make up, I […]

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I was looking up some statistics on Josh Reddick, outfielder of the Oakland Athletics, in the marvelous online resource baseball-reference.com, and just above players’ numbers the site has a sort of “ticker” of where that particular player ranks, in baseball history. Josh Reddick, I noted, was #1439. And a bit to the right of Josh […]

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