“Every good manager effectively threatens his players with professional extermination if they don’t give him the best effort that they are capable of giving; Casey Stengel, Billy Martin, Whitey Herzog and Earl Weaver are masters at it, as was Durocher. They are not nice people. . . .” – Bill James, The Bill James Baseball […]
Grading and the Fear of God Read More »
“Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about.” (Hemingway 153) Hemingway’s Jake Barnes was quite
Shawn Green: the Zen Pragmatist at the Plate Read More »
(I never played even high school baseball, let alone professionally. Could I hit a 100 mph fastball? An 87 mph slider? Even a major league change-up? It is to laugh. Most professional athletes agree that hitting major league pitching is the hardest thing to do in sports. The only right I have to criticize major
The Perpetual Home Run Derby Read More »
The bat hit the ball with the crunching sound of an axe splitting wood. I couldn’t really see it, but everyone’s head swiveled in my direction, so I knew that in spite of the odds, a right-handed batter had just hit a ball to my position in right field. “Catch it!” people started yelling, more
A Nose for Baseball Read More »
Herbie was a slow, heavy, dark-skinned man who kept himself clean and well-groomed. In the summer when the weather was warm, he dressed in cotton short sleeves and plaid Bermuda shorts, and he always carried a white handkerchief to clean his wire-rim glasses or wipe away the beads that constantly reformed at the end of his large nose
Forever Forty-Something Read More »