Denver baseball fans find themselves nailed to the couch again this October, watching a pair of teams from distant cities contest the World Series. This is the way it’s been for five seasons, and likely the way it will remain for five or ten or who knows how many more…
When I first knew Grissom–it seems like a century ago now–he was like a lot of other well-heeled jock wannabes. He wanted sporting goods. All kinds of sporting goods, and nothing but the best. When Wilson came out with its top-of-the-line A-2000 outfielder’s glove, Grissom (a pseudonym) was the first…
Baseball’s ghost of honor this season was Jackie Robinson, and the hundreds of uplifting things the scores of speechmakers said in ballparks from coast to coast about his courage were long overdue. But they told only part of the story. Half a century after Robinson broke baseball’s color line, he…
Does the next Dawn Staley go to kindergarten in Brooklyn? Is the Rebecca Lobo of 2008 shooting jumpers right now on her driveway in Des Moines? Is a whole gym-load of pint-sized Cynthia Coopers and Debbie Blacks playing zone defense somewhere in Texas? Could be. In their rookie seasons, the…
Since the bombastic and curious 1997 baseball season got under way last April Fool’s Day, Mark McGwire has hit 54 home runs for two different teams in two different leagues. Larry Walker has put indisputable (but hypo-oxygenated) MVP numbers into the book that will probably fail to win him anything…
Every horse on the grounds comes equipped with four legs. It doesn’t really take Magellan’s navigational skills and two tanks of gas to get out there. The jockeys don’t lift your wallet in the parking lot, and anyone who brings three kids along is pretty likely to go home with…
Now that the Padres and Rockies, newcomers to these proceedings, are peering up from the darkness, it cannot hurt to examine what they see high above. They see the Giants and the Dodgers, a couple of storied teams that would just as soon slash each other’s throats as exchange pre-game…
This is football country. Oh, sure, Coloradans have embraced their late-arriving, lovable Rockies, which makes everyone feel very big-league and connected to the ghosts of Ty Cobb and Jackie Robinson. Scratching their heads, fans also learned that Peter Forsberg isn’t allowed to make a two-line pass, and when the Stanley…
Let’s be clear. We’re not saying we want Andres Galarraga to drive that big green Mercedes of his off a cliff or come down with a case of Rocky Mountain spotted fever that lasts until precisely the 28th of September. Not at all. We’re not hoping the Big Cat gets…
Okay, dyed-in-the-wool sports fans. Here’s one for you. Bohdan Ulihrach. Tell us about Bohdan Ulihrach. Never heard of him? Fine. How about Filip DeWulf? Put together, if you will, a couple of cogent facts concerning his life and career. No? All right, then. Jan Siemerink. That’s S-I-E-M…Still coming up empty?…
Mack Marsh is one good-looking prospect. He’s a big kid with good hands, decent speed and plenty of power. He rarely loses his concentration up there at the plate. He plays with lots of desire and only occasionally swings at pitches three feet over his head. A real gamer. If…
That rumble of discontentment down in the Rockies clubhouse can now be heard in the cheap (and not so cheap) seats up above. Last Tuesday, for instance, midway through the club’s disheartening and premature fiftieth loss of the year (to the Dodgers, 6-5), you could, for the first time, hear…
The hardened baseball fan’s devotion to statistics–most home runs hit, most hot dogs eaten–has long since taken on the unearthly glow of religion. A thirsty man can no longer enter his corner saloon without being accosted by some bright-eyed wonder stuffed full of minutiae from The Baseball Encyclopedia–a glut of…
They say we’re living in the new Golden Age of Sports. Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player ever to lace up a pair of sneakers, they say, and Jerry Rice is the best pass receiver who’s ever run a post pattern. Young Tiger Woods won his first Masters as…
As long as your name wasn’t Mike Tyson, the last sports person in the world you wanted to be Sunday afternoon was Scott Sharp. Six hair-raising seconds after the green flag fell on the Samsonite 200, pole-sitter Sharp slid high up on the track at 170 miles an hour and…
Over the weekend, Dante Bichette, Ken Griffey Jr. and their brethren in The Bigs tried something new–interleague play. Meanwhile, Kale “Gilly” Gilmore, Pat “The Deacon” Massengil and their friends tried something old–baseball circa 1862. Guess who had the better time. Amid Saturday afternoon cries of “Huzzah! Fine handle!” and “From…
So I say to my agent, I say: Listen, I’m doin’ all the things it takes to be successful. I’m givin’ a hundred and ten percent every day. On D, I’m goin’ to get it in the gaps, hittin’ the cutoff man and usin’ my instincts for the game. So…
Three days before this year’s Kentucky Derby, a TV crew and members of the sporting press visited the witty California trainer Bob Baffert and his dark-gray colt, Silver Charm, at the Churchill Downs stakes barn. When the mob arrived, they found the horse standing backward in his stall, head to…
The peculiarities of the national pastime are, at the present time, running amok, like drunks loose in the outfield. Rupert Murdoch, the Aussie media glutton who swallows newspapers, TV networks and movie studios the way fans at the ballpark eat peanuts, now proposes to buy the Los Angeles Dodgers and…
Having checked with the proprietors of Manhattan’s major nightclubs, opium dens and appliance-repair shops, we have some news: Deep Blue didn’t paint the town red after blowing away Garry Kasparov in the recent Super Bowl II of Chess. Blue didn’t call room service. Didn’t pop a magnum of Dom Perignon…
The St. Paul Saints are full of hope…and mischief. Before the first pitch is even thrown, the team mascot–a live, oinking pig named Tobias–waddles out to home plate carrying a supply of baseballs for the umpire. Up in the bleachers at tiny Midway Stadium, a Roman Catholic nun named Sister…
With twenty minutes to go in the first half, Rapid Man is hunting down the rowdiest fan in the west stands. Not to throw him out of the place. To reward him. The rowdiest fan in the west stands, who turns out to be a guy standing on his seat,…
