With God on our side

Another piece from Slate.com about the Rockies, who caused a star awhile back because of  their penchant for looking heavenward for strength.

While the piece, a reprint from 2000, looks primarily at football, the subject of religion applies across sports lines. It also links to the Rockies’ “emphasis on Christianity first reported by USA Today in 2006.”

More recently an op-ed piece from the Oct. 17 issue of the Washington Jewish Week by Ari Sunshine, the rabbi of B’nai Shalom of Olney, readdresses the situation. While there a dozen Jews in the majors in 2007, even non-Jewish players were offended by comments made in the Washington Nationals clubhouse, reported by Laura Blumenfeld in the Washington Post.

Sunshine, a long-time baseball fan, writes:

It seems fitting that it was when I was on my way to my grandfather’s unveiling on Sept. 18, 2005, that I came across [the article] about an evangelical Christian ministry called Baseball Chapel, which supplies volunteer chaplains to every major and minor league team (more than 200 in total).

Blumenfeld’s article focused on the Nationals team and its then-chapel leader, Jon Moeller. Toward the end of the story, Blumenfeld reported the following exchange: “[Ryan] Church was concerned because his former girlfriend was Jewish. He turned to Moeller, ‘I said, like, Jewish people, they don’t believe in Jesus. Does that mean they’re doomed? Jon nodded, like, that’s what it meant. My ex-girlfriend! I was like, man, if they only knew. Other religions don’t know any better. It’s up to us to spread the word.’ ”
I was stunned. Even more than I wondered how a ballplayer could think nothing of such offensive comments, I wondered how a chaplain could think this was appropriate for the clubhouse.

Local reaction to the article was swift and harsh, prompting the Nationals to suspend Moeller and drawing an apology from Church. But I was still bothered by what I perceived to be a larger national issue of evangelizing affecting the game I love so dearly — after all, Baseball Chapel’s stated vision on its Web site is seeing “deeply committed players use their platform to influence people around the world to become followers of Jesus Christ” — and so I wrote a letter to Commissioner Bud Selig, who happens to be Jewish.

I noted how troubling it was that this right-wing, evangelical view of Christianity was the only style of Christian worship and chaplaincy made available to MLB personnel. The majority of American Christians do not denigrate other religions and make it difficult to have meaningful dialogue and healthy interactions between people of different faiths.

Sunshine notes he’s still waiting for Selig’s overdue action.

It’s a delicate issue, bringing religion into the lockerroom. I’m sure many broadcasters roll their eyes during interviews when players give thanks to their Lord. I’m waiting for the time when Kevin Youkilis, Boston’s Jewish first baseman, praises “Ha’sham” — the Jewish word for God — for seeing his team through another World Championship.

Several books examine the role of religion in baseball, including:

• Rounding the Bases: Baseball and Religion in America , by Joseph L. Price (Mercer)
• The Faith of Fifty Million: Baseball, Religion, and American Culture, edited by Evans and Herzog (Westminster John Knox Press)
• 
  
• The Holy Trinity of American Sports: Civil Religion in Football, Baseball, and Basketball, by Craig A. Forney (Mercer)
• Preacher: Billy Sunday and Big-Time American Evangelism , by Roger A. Bruns (University of Illinois Press)
• The Great God Baseball, by Allan Hye (Mercer)

Moneyball: You can’t swing a dead cat…

…without some writer referring to the Michael Lewis book on effective baseball business management to explain how a given team was put together in an conventionial way. Here’s the latest, on the Rockies, from Slate.com.

This week (October 29) in Sports Illustrated

This week features the NBA preview, which sets an All-Star precedent by listing the sport’s luminaries in height order.

The lone baseball feature is “The Possible Dream,” a World Series preview by Tom Verducci, with a sidebar from Joe Sheehan of Baseball Prospectus.

Two other items on baseball:

• Whither the Yankees now that Joe Torre is gone?
• A nice tribute to Peanuts‘ Charles M. Schulz. No one better expressed the innocent agony and joy of what is, after all, a kids’ game. A collection of his baseball-themed strips was published as Sandlot Peanuts.
• The Life off Reilly riffs on Colorado baseball in the fall.

And just as an aside:

Which one is not like the other?

It’s a trick question! I realize both of these sports publications want to feature the Celtics for their NBA previews, but come on! Is this the best they can do? Which one’s the chicken and which the egg?

New Title: The Splendid Splinter

Read the review from the Washington Post here.

Ha, Ha. You thought it was a book a Ted Williams, didn’t you? The author must have been a baseball fan with a sense of irony.

Switching sides

Rick Reilly, formerly of Sports Illustrated, will now be working for ESPN. This comes on the heels of the announcement that Dan Patrick, formerly of ESPN, will now be working fo SI, which will also receive a writer to be named later.

Reilly will reportedly receive $2 million per year, but declined to elaborate. “I’m sworn to secrecy, but I’m drinking imported beer now and getting the deluxe car wash,” he told reporters.

Well, that explains everything: Cleveland Indians edition

Here is the real reason the Indians lost to the Red Sox from a random cross section of  sources.

From Poynter.org

From King Kaufman on Salon.com

From the Christian Science Monitor

From Maine Today

From Wikipedia

Baseball and instant replay: Is it about time?

In an op-ed piece in Street & Smith’s SportsBusiness Journal of Oct. 22-28, Eldon L. Ham, an adjunct professor of sports law and society at Chicago-Kent College of Law, argues persuasively about “An indisputable need for replay.”

Replay opponents steadfastly argue that baseball is a 162-game marathon, not a sprint, and therefore all its imperfections smooth themselves out over time. Such reasoning has merit and is consistent with our uniquely irreverent approach to baseball, its mischievous legacy, and even the game’s appropriately flawed personality.

Proponents of replay cite the absurdity of keeping a wrong call wrong and argue that crowning an illegitimate champion in the interest of stubborn complacency is an arbitrary self-indulgence. Baseball, they insist, should remain a game of inches and not of intractable umpires.”

Technology has improved so much that replay is now a staple of other sports, such as tennis and football. That it proves that referees and umpires are fallible is unquestionable, but do such errors cause players and fans to question the accuracy and competence of these officials and erode their authority?

Ham declares replays are necessary because of “the nature of the modern playoff system; big stakes including big dollars; and evolving societal demands for fairness.” If both sides are playing under the same conditions, such as the recent attack of the midges in the Indians-Yankees playoff series, there is no advantage. It’s not as if one team is playing with the advanced technology and the other isn’t.

I find the recent instance on chicanery in the Louisville-UConn football game more problematic.

The Louisville player, waiting to receive a punt, seemingly called for a fair catch, but once he caught the ball, he took off down the field for a touchdown, as the UConn defense had understandly lowered their guard. There was no question of this violation of sportsmanship. According to ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption, and as Ham agrees, the loss of a single football game can mean the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But Ham’s argument that “America has become a Court TV nation that demands justice, fairness…” is moot (from a layman’s point of view). The pursuit of justice and fairness have always been a hallmark of civilized nations.

This is the whole purpose of the Bill of Rights, civil rights, DNA evidence and that great bastion of national probity, NFL instant replay.

(I doubt that’s what our forefathers had envisioned when the composed the Bill of Rights.)

Ham suggests that replay be used only in the playoffs: “Blow one call in a five-game series and baseball history is changed. Blow it in the World Series and a slice of American history is altered.”

Why should that make the difference? What if the same event had occurred a week before the end of the the regular season and put the Rockies into the playoffs at the expense of the Padres? The injustice still would have been done.

Ham would like to see a system that does “not review everything, especially balls and strikes, but develop an intelligent but limited system to get the black-and-white threshold calls correct: missed tags, missed bases, home runs and long foul balls.”

Today we have a chance to get both the calls and history right, so why not do so for games that count the most?

More than one great baseball wit has said the games in april count as much as the games in September.

 

Well, that explains everything: Chicago Cubs edition

A Chicago Tavern:A Goat, a Curse, and the American Dream

by Rick Kogan

Well, the Cubs failed — again — to make it to the World Series. Naturally it was the billy goat’s fault.

Rick Kogan tells the whole sorry, and sometimes, confusing story in A Chicago Tavern. But what it really comes down to is pretty simple.

In 1945, William Sianis, owner of the aforementioned establishment, The Billy Goat Tavern, tried to enter a game at Wrigley Field during the 1945 Series against the Detroit Tigers. Although he and his mascot were initially admitted to the stadium — in tribute, no doubt, to the esteem Sianis was accorded because of his joint’s popularity — they were eventually given the boot; some nonsense about health code violations (this coming from a venue that used communal troughs as urinals in the mens’ rooms). So what does the overemotional Greek immigrant do? He puts a curse on the team, vowing that they will never again play in a Series because of their insult.

Thanks to the Red Sox’ 2004 championship, the Cubs have gone missing from the final games of the fall longer than any team. Coincidence?

Kogan, a columnist for the Chicago Trubune and host of a radio program on WGN, puts together an interesting pamphlet that probably has a limited readership at best: masochistic Cubs fans, urban legendistas, and a small cadre of other fans who will read anything, asl long as it’s about baseball (which includes me).

***

Some other explanations for the Cubs’ woes, according to the International Society of Supervillans, include:

• Exatly (sic) 1,908 leaves in the ivy that lines the outfield walls is actually poison ivy. This follows the decree of the shaman that found Hack Wilson sleeping with his wife.
• No Mascot Malaise: The Cubs will be without an official mascot until hair of the Phillie Phanatic is mixed with the blood of Mr. Met and poured on the steps of the home dugout.
• Harry Caray Harangue: On his deathbed, Caray told his widow that the Cubs wouldn’t win the Series until he sobered up. It is no coincidence that nine years after his death the Cubs still have not won the title.
• One kitten dies for every opposing team home run ball thrown back at Wrigley Field. This dates back to 1976 when Raul Jimenez, longtime Cubs fan and witch doctor, was beaten to death in the left field bleachers for trying to keep a Mike Schmidt homerun ball as a souvenir.
• No hot water in the clubhouse showers until an offering of cigars and rum is made to Yosh Kawano.
• Bane of the Ticket Brokers. They want $65 for a standing room ticket? For day game? In April?

Red Sox books, and then some

Now that the Sox are back in the Fall Classic, speculation is rampant over the effect this will have on the publishing industry.

The year after the 2004 World Series victory — the team’s first in more than 85 years, David Green published 101 Reasons to Love the Red Sox: And 10 Reasons to Hate the Yankees by David Green (Stewart, Tabori and Chang). It was just one of several dozen titles about the Boston franchise.
I found this semi-reverse piece while trolling the ‘Net.

Like the Yankees and Mets, it seems that neither rabid fan can give the other an inch. It’s not enough that fans of the Bronx franchise want their team to do well, they also want the Bostons to fail miserably. Human nature at its best.

I have assembled a “pseudo-bibliography” of the Red Sox books in my collection, using LibraryThing.com.

Here’s to the winners

So does this mean a new glut of books on the Sox? Or has that ship sailed, only worthy of the 2004 Championship?

 

 

 

And let us not forget the Rockies, who make their first appearance in the Fall Classic. From Time magazine on Oct. 16 and Oct. 29.

Interestingly, the Rocky Mountain News picked the team for a second-place finish in its April season preview. The Denver Post has an unusual take, but I guess that what happens when you have so much time on your hands.

 

And here’s a neat little craft to do during the games.

Why book publishing is like baseball

According to The Oregonian (Oct. 21).

The book game is not unlike the system baseball uses to cultivate new talent. It’s called the minor leagues, and the objective is to discover who can “play” at a higher level and who can’t. If you substitute the word “sell” for “play,” you have the fiction business in a nutshell.

As in baseball, publishers will promote a promising rookie to the next level and see what happens. Or more accurately, sells. If the numbers grow, then sooner or later the publisher may decide to give the rookie a shot at the Big Show. It’s called the “breakout book,” toward which the publisher throws significant marketing dollars, sponsors an author tour and generally hypes the book as The Next Big Thing, all in the hope that reviewers — the key to staying in the Big Show — and readers will agree.

Joe Torre, auteur

Don’t cry for Joe, Argentina. According to Rich Shapiro’s column in the Oct. 20, NY Daily News, the sky’s the limit for the ex-Yankee skipper:

He gets paid up to $100,000 for each speech he delivers, and he could land a big contract as a sports broadcaster. He also has penned two books. A third about the Yankees would command a large advance….

Matthew Lalin, executive vice-president of Steiner Sports, said Torre could make more than $2 million a year from speaking engagements and a book deal alone.

“He’s a treasure of New York,” Lalin said. “From a marketing standpoint, he could be right there with what the Yankees offered him -and with a lot less headaches.”

Review: The Card

From Gelf.com, this review on the ongoing lust for a little piece of old cardboard.

“In the last 15 years, sports-card collecting has been pulled in two opposite directions. The mainstream fan has lost interest in The Hobby, as it’s known. But the hard-core collectors have kept bidding up the most-valuable, rarest memorabilia. And nothing is more valuable than The Card, a small piece of cardboard bearing the likeness of Hall of Famer Honus Wagner that was once bought by Wayne Gretzky for $451,000 and more recently sold for $2.8 million.”

Author Profile: Richard Grossinger

Beyond the Sports Page

The 2007 season ended not with a bang, but with a whimper as the New York Mets frittered away a seven-game National League Eastern Division lead with 17 games to play.
Years from now, how will fans recall the events of this major disappointment?
If they are as thoughtful as author Richard Grossinger, the bad melds with the good to form a complete picture.
In his latest release, The New York Mets: Ethnography, Myth and Subtext, Grossinger goes beyond the team deconstruction that has become the standard in recentyears.
“It’s sort of a baseball book on the surface, but underneath it’s really a different book,” he said in a telephone interview from his summer home in Maine.
Grossinger, who has a PhD in anthropology and has written extensively on what would generally be considered more serious subjects, has edited several eclectic anthologies about the national pastime, including Baseball, I Gave You All the Best Years of My Life; The Temple of Baseball; Baseball Diamonds: Tales, Traces & and Voodoo from a Native American Life; and The Dreamlife of Johnny Baseball. He has learned that trying to market such esoteric books for the average fan didn’t work — “They didn’t sell worth a damn,” he said — so he decided to go in the opposite direction, starting up his own publishing company.
The 63-year-old Grossinger explained the meaning of his subtitle.

• Ethnography comes from his work as an anthropologist: “I considered a lot of the stuff I did on the Mets field work, especially some of the stuff in the 1980s when I interviewed players and went on the field.”
• Myth: “I’m writing about the mythic Mets, the Mets of my imagination rather than writing about the actual Mets.”
• Subtext: “That may be the trickiest. I may have used it because it’s a fashionable word, and it keys to the fact that it’s not really looking for what lies underneath the day-to-day coverage of the team.”

The son of Paul Grossinger — whose hotel in the Catskills was a staple of Jewish culture  for generations — the writer grew up a Yankees fan. “They had a tremendous influence over the hotel. So many of the players came there….[Y]ou’d have to say the Yankees always had that edge in New York. They’re deeper in [the city’s] history and consciousness, and in some ways they represent the New York that New York wants to see itself as.”
But when the Mets made their debut in 1962, he was hooked. “I went through my own personal transformation in college, when the culture was changing in the late ’60s and early ’70s and baseball came to seem sort of tawdry and uninteresting for a few years, and when I came back to it, it just looked different. Only the Mets seemed to relate to who I had become; the Yankees tended to relate to who I had been. [They] represented the New York in which I had grown up, which had been completely lost to me, and the Mets represented a kind of unknown future which I was looking at in my 20s.”
Jewish immigrant parents in the early 20th century disdained baseball for distracting their sons from more productive pursuits. So why would such an obviously thoughtful and learned man waste his time on such inconsequential matters? “Writing is writing. It’s what you make of the subject, the art of the subject that is interesting,” he said.
“It’s not the subject that’s trivial; it’s the way you relate to it. “What is ultimately important?”he asked. “The Zen monk sitting in the monetary getting to the bottom of the mind? The scientist trying to find the cure for cancer? The politician trying to end the war? All these things are very important but if you take a step back from any of them, you have to wonder whether they, too, are in some sense artifacts of existence and simply masks through which people find themselves. “I think baseball is one of those. It’s always better to dig into it and try and figure out the nature of the connection than to have this kind of ambivalence that says, ‘I’m not supposed to be involved in something so stupid and irrelevant [as baseball] but somehow I am.’”
The Mets’ collapse has one potential benefit for the author: Now that the team is done for the year, those more thoughtful fans will have plenty of time to read Grossinger’s books.

This article appeared in New Jersey Jewish News, Oct. 11, 2007.

“Torre resigns; book at 11″

So how long will it be until some publishing house signs the ex-Yankees skipper for a new tell-all tale about life with George?

Chasing the Dream: My Lifelong Journey to the World Series: An Autobiography, written with Tom Verducci.

Here’s an excerpt, courtesy of barnesandnoble.com.

The ultimate manager also tried his hand a a business book: Joe Torre’s Ground Rules for Winners: 12 Keys to Managing Team Players, Tough Bosses, Setbacks, and Success, with Henry Dreher.

Sample it here.

Fay Vincent and Leigh Montville discuss baseball on Charlie Rose

Guest host Frank Deford of Sports Illustrated and HBO talks to former MLB Commissioner Fay Vincent and author Leigh Montville about Babe Ruth and the history of baseball.

Vincent also appeared on Rose in 2004 with SI writer Tom Verducci to discuss another Rose: Pete.

This is Audible: Post-season edition

The podcast for This is Audible features baseball this week. In addition to a lengthy interview with Joshua Prager, author of The Echoing Green, and a reading by Roger Angell of his piece “Game Six” at a Symphony Space program, the podcast runs down the top ten baseball audio books. Not all the titles are new; the top three are excerpted briefly:

1. Moneyball, by Lewis
2. Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal That Rocked Professional Sports (Visit the book’s Web site here)
3. Three Nights in August, by Bissinger
   
4. Faithful, by King and Onan
5. Ted Williams: The Biography of An American Hero, by Montville
6. Fair Ball: A Fan’s Case for Baseball, by Costas
7. Coach, by Lewis
8. The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth, by Montville
9. The Summer Game, by Angell
10. Emperors and Idiots, by Vacarro

The podcast is available through iTunes.

Game of Shadows authors Fainaru-Wada and Williams discussed their release on Fora.tv:

This week (Oct. 22, 2007) in Sports Illustrated

Playoffs are still the baseball topic in SI but they don’t rate the top story, which goes to Tom Brady and the New England Patriots (followed by a midseason college football piece).

Tom Verducci penned “Something in the Air,” about the potential ALCS win by the Indians over the Red Sox (which may have actually happened by the time you read this). Chris Ballard contributes the sidebar on the idle Rockies, who beat the Diamondbacks 58 years ago.

C’est tout.

The first time in Time

The March 30, 1925 issue of Time magazine featured the first occasion in which baseball was treated as a cover feature. The article regarded the rookie season of future Hall of Famer George Sisler.

It’s always interesting to see how language — especially written — was treated in past generations. Before television, and even before radio was a fairly common appliance in the American household, writers — “wordsmiths” — were the only way baseball fans got their information. It was also a time when each major metropolitan area had several newspapers from which to choose. Some families were Democrats, some were Republicans. Likewise some were morning and evening readers, scoping the Herald for their sports coverage, while others were partial to the Post.

From the pages of Time:

“A lean figure walked into a Southern hotel, in the latter part of February, confronted the clerk, who surveyed him dubiously. His suit, shabby and worn as thin as paper, had obviously been made by an inferior tailor; his shirt was old and very dirty; and, in spite of the fact that his face had not been shaved for several days, the clerk could tell at a glance that it was not the countenance of an aristocrat. Before addressing the hotel employe, he respectfully removed from his head a felt hat, and requested a room. He volunteered the information that he had left his wife and children, even fishing from his pocket a photograph of them (spotted with marks that were certainly not tear-stains), which he insisted that the clerk examine. He was, he said, a baseball player. His services had been hired by a famed big league team. He had come for spring practice.”

Read the rest of the piece from the Time magazine archives here.

Short (baseball) stories from Symphony Space, Part 2

The second production of short baseball fiction from Symphony Space, which originally aired Oct. 12, 2007 by Public Radio International, featured:

• Various authors, Baseball Haiku, read by Alec Baldwin and Isaiah Sheffer (from Baseball Haiku: The Best Haiku Ever Written About the Game, W.W. Norton). Frankly, I couldn’t always catch the 17 syllables that make up a “formal” haiku. Poetry is an acquired taste, anyway.
• T.C. Boyle, “The Hector Quesadilla Story,” read by Jerry Zaks (from T.C. Boyle: Stories Viking). Well read, but a bit rushed at the end.
• Lawrence S. Ritter, “The Glory of Their Times” excerpt, read by Jonathan Rubinstein (from: The Glory of Their Times : The Story of Baseball Told By the Men Who Played It, Harper). It would have been nice if they identified which player was the subject of this particular excerpt.
• Rolphe Humphries, “Polo Grounds,” read by Fritz Weaver (from: Baseball: A Literary Anthology, edited by Nicholas Dawidoff, The Library of America). See previous entry.

Any baseball reference is better than no baseball reference at all

From a review of Steve Almond’s (Not that You Asked) Rants, Exploits and Obsessions appearing on dailycampus.com, the University of Connecticut’s on-line edition

There’s a chapter on baseball, which attempts to both invoke and criticize the  obese creature that is American sports fandom, but it’s limited to the predictable critiques of fanaticism and the idiotic-but-charming male psyche.

Almond is the author of Candy Freak, a memoir about the role of sweets in our lives.

 

Comebacks help sell books

With the Red Sox on the verge of elimination from the ALCS, from Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe, with emphasis added:

If any team knows how to recover from an ALCS deficit, it’s the Red Sox. Boston wrote the book (which yielded approximately 26 books the following spring), beating the Yankees four straight times in 2004, becoming the only team in baseball history to recover from a 3-0 deficit in a best-of-seven series.

Only 26? Seemed like a thousand. Guess he was talking about higher-end publishers.

 

Short (baseball) stories from Symphony Space, Part 1

Thanks to the powers that be for producing two sessions of top notch baseball stories read at Manhattan’s Symphony Space. The stories in this section, which aired on Sept. 28, 2007 by Public Radio International, include:

• James T. Farrell, “My Grandmother Goes to Comiskey Park,” read by John Shea (from My Baseball Diary, Southern Illinois University Press), a nostalgic tale of a young boy and his well-meaning grandma in the early 20th century.
• Philip Roth, Selection from Portnoy’s Complaint, read by Isaiah Sheffer (from Portnoy’s Complaint, Vintage).
• Rolfe Humphries, “Polo Grounds,” read by David Strathairn (collected in Baseball: A Literary Anthology, Library of America). Another version read by Fritz Weaver appears on a subsequent program of short baseball fiction. Personally, I prefer the younger Straithairn’s redndition, perhaps because I can picture him as Eddie Ciccotte in the movie version of Eight Men Out.
• Yusef Komunyakaa, “Glory,” read by Isaiah Sheffer (from “Magic City” in Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems, Wesleyan University Press).
• W.P. Kinsella, “The Thrill of the Grass,” read by John Shea (from The Thrill of the Grass, Penguin). Nicely done.
• A. Bartlett Giamatti, “The Green Fields of the Mind,” read by the author (collected in A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti, edited by Kenneth S. Robson Algonquin Books). The late commissioner (and former president of Yale) has a great voice for this essay.

Commercial Parody: Post-Season annoyances

Every year, networks and stations broadcasting the playoffs and World Series try to create a buzz for non-baseball fans, informing them, basically, that they’d be morons not to watch these games.

I can’t say for certain that the spokesman are not hardcore fans, but regardless, they can be quite annoying in their exuberance.

Herewith, a Saturday Night Live parody of one such advert:

Speaking of annoying, MLB.com and FOX have been cosponsors on Actober.com, a contest asking entrants to send in creative videos on what baseball means to them. I haven’t examined it in depth, but I imagine cute and pets babies wearing baseball hats and mini-unis (think America’s Funniest Videos, ugh). This gig sounds like the perfect opportunity for Ken Burns wanna-bes. Don’t know how long the site will be active once the Series gets under way, so as the advertisers always say, “Act now!!”

Baseball in

“Two Cleveland die-hards, Scott Raab and Jay Levin, blog the baseball playoffs until a champion is crowned.” The running running is reminiscent of King and Onan in Faithful which consisted primarily of back-and-forth e-mails between the two writers on the 2004 Red Sox season. How fortunate for them that the Sox chose that year to win it all.

Here’s a list of the Raab/Levin files.

As mentioned in a previous post, you can look for “baseball” in Esquire’s own search engine and come up with some typical off-beat pieces such as:

• “What I’ve Learned,” from Buck O’Neil, Dusty Baker, and Ted Williams
• Charley Pierce (a favorite of mine on NPR’s Wait Wait. Don’t Tell Me), on Rookie prospects
• Profile on Bill James , Don Zimmer (by Raab), Mariano Rivera (by Pierce), and Barry Zito
• A look at baseball fallacies from Ken Kurson, currently a key player in Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign