For all those who said that baseball had no precedent for overruling the blatantly erroneous call of umpire Jim Joyce and validating the perfect game that Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga had so obviously pitched, please travel with me back to Yankee Stadium on the sultry afternoon of July 24, 1983, when a two-run home run …
Ginny and I spent a pleasant hour Monday night watching the HBO documentary about the Philadelphia Flyers of the mid-seventies, the famous Broad Street Bullies, whose adventures Ginny and I much enjoyed. Indeed, some of the footage was a little like seeing home movies. The famous fog game in the Cup Finals in 1975? That …
The Final Four is in full swing, hockey and basketball playoffs are virtually moments away, and baseball’s Opening Day is in the air. So let’s talk a little football. This week the NFL meets to discuss changes in the overtime rules. Specifically, they are meeting because they can no longer ignore the complaints that sudden …
Last Wednesday, the sports pages of The New York Times had two wonderful anecdotes, one about managerial leadership, and one about the art of negotiation. In the first, by William C. Rhoden, Emerson Boozer, a star running back on the Super Bowl II-winning Jets, told a story about the key role played by the team’s …
You can’t say a bad word about Peyton Manning. The very model of the modern managerial quarterback is as heroically cool as the statue of him that the Hoosiers will no doubt erect in front of their football palace the day after he retires. But Manning, like Joe Montana, like Bob Griese, is the kind …
In this week’s issue of The New Yorker, Roger Angell offers his customary valediction to the baseball season–the year’s not over until Angell sings. Although he rightly singles out Johnny Damon‘s at-bat in the top of the ninth of Game Four as the pivotal moment of the series, the great Angell punts the description a …
A baseball season is a novel. At its heart is a cast of characters–guys with hopes, goals, ambitions, problems, flaws, things to prove. The characters individually create a character that is a team, and over the course of the season, as the individuals succeed and fail and as the team succeeds and fail, dramas are …
Let us now praise Johnny Damon, the ballplayer’s ballplayer, the crucial man in last night’s 7-4 Yankee win. In the first, he doubled and scored; in the fifth, he doubled and drove in a run; and in the ninth, he won the game. With two out in a 4-4 game that the Phillies had just …
Last night was a tale of two ballgames. After three innings, Cole Hamels was working on a no-hitter and Andy Pettitte had given up three runs and looked like the Bad Andy from years ago who occasionally showed up in a big game and exploded. But then Andy found his groove, A-Rod homered, Nick Swisher …