Although every year April brings the start of baseball season and tax season, this year the two events seem more commingled than coincidental. In New York, two new taxpayer-subsidized stadiums are opening. One, the home of the New York Mets, is Citi Field, Citicorp having bought the naming rights back before the crash, when its …
Is It the ‘Roids or the Records? I don’t like cheaters and I don’t like perjurers and I couldn’t care less if Alex Rodriguez spends the next nine years getting booed (if you’re sympathetic, envision Madonna giving him a nightly cuddle to soothe his bruised ego and saying “Now now, Alex, it will be all …
If I were a Steeler fan, I’d be pretty damn proud right now, not only for winning the Super Bowl, and not only for the tough, hard-nosed way they won the Super Bowl, but for the way they played their entire season. Something like a third of their games were won in the final period, …
Today, as you prepare your enchiladas and brats, consider this: Super Bowl Sunday is really the last holiday in America’s prolonged interdenominational, generic Holiday Season. This season begins on Thanksgiving, and includes Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, that conjoined celebration of God and Mammon, Christmas, the Nobody Does Any Work in the Week After Christmas Week, New Year’s …
A highly eclectic, hardly systematic accounting of what I liked best in 2008: 1.) THE ELECTION. What a tremendous drama. The characters were strong and well-drawn–too-good-to-be-true Barack Obama, the redoubtable Hillary Clinton, the indomitable and gracious John McCain, and the brilliantly imagined Sarah Palin, among others–plus the well-plotted series of upsets and comebacks, culminating in …
Among the earliest things I ever knew about myself was that I was from Baltimore, home of the Colts. This was a matter of considerable pride, since the Colts were led by Johnny Unitas, the best quarterback in football and even at what would turn out to the early middle of his career (the years 1960, …
I watched the ceremonies marking the end of baseball at Yankee Stadium, and as pleasant as it was to wallow in nostalgia, it all felt a little manufactured to me. I’ve always enjoyed going to Yankee Stadium; coming out of the concourse into the grandstand and beholding the field is really a special thing that …
My friend David Jensen treated me to a day at Shea yesterday, where the first place New York Mets showed that poor relief pitching and a lack of timely hitting will ruin the Sunday afternoon of many a fan. Of course, whether the Mets won or lost wasn’t really relevant, since Dave and I had …
Ah, the smell of horsehide and fresh-mown grass—and that was just on the bus! Yes, it was Tuesday night at the ballpark, as about forty or so Playboy staffers headed off to Shea Stadium on an office outing to see the hapless Seattle Mariners play the even haplessier New York Mets in an inter-league struggle …
Schooled in football in Baltimore during the era of the peerless Unitas, I am properly reverential towards the special attributes of the great quarterbacks. And yet, over the years, it has been defensive players that I have found especially exciting–Rick Volk and Bobby Boyd, Mike Curtis, Jack Lambert and Jack Ham, Ronnie Lott, and the …