A Yankee season that was by turns surprising, lousy, exciting, and disappointing has a sweet and affectionate close as New York said goodbye to two stalwarts of the team’s most recent golden era. The peerless Mariano Rivera–the Great Rivera, of 19 seasons and 652 regular seasaon saves and 42 postseason saves with an astonishing 1.34 …
Last night at the All Star game, baseball paid homage to the greatest relief pitcher of all time, the peerless Mariano Rivera. It was the 13th time he has made the team; he has never given up an earned run. For another scoreless inning, Rivera was named the game’s MVP
Molly took me to the ballgame yesterday. It was a very hot Sunday afternoon, and we had excellent seats, in the shade the whole game. The Yanks played well, with Hiroki Kuroda pitching seven scoreless innings. We did not hit much, but we did manage to nudge across one little run. As the game went …
A couple of years ago, half paying attention to the ESPN Sunday Night Game of the Week, I noticed that the announcer John Miller kept referring to Mariano Rivera, the peerless closer of the New York Yankees, as “the great Rivera.” I don’t think he meant the words to be capitalized, as though we were …
After a middling October in which key players struggled and the team gave away a first-place finish in the standings, I didn’t have a great feeling about the Yankees’ chances this October. Now, after a three-game sweep of a very good Twins team–one which was accomplished without much from Alex Rodriguez and only a very …
I finally cashed in the fabulous Father’s Day gift I received in June, as Ginny and Molly and Cara took me to see the Yankees beat the Toronto Blue Jays, 7 to 5, on a picture-perfect end-of-summer afternoon in the Bronx. We sat in Section 306 in the Terrace, which put us in a prime …
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 …
After Cliff Lee and Chase Utley got the World Series off to a memorable start for the Phillies on Wednesday, the Yankees evened things up with a crisp, methodical 3-1 victory last night. Like Game One, the game was well-pitched on both sides, and just as C.C. Sabathia was a smidge worse than Lee, the …