#baseball

#baseball

Baseball, perhaps more than any other sport, competes with its own deep mythology. So many of its highlights are in black and white, and so many of its GOATs are ghosts, that the former national pastime is easily dismissed as past its prime. It isn't. The 2025 postseason, which ended when the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Toronto Blue Jays in the 11th inning of the seventh game of an ulcer-inducing World Series, stands with any in baseball history.

There is a somewhat prevalent belief among fans that baseball should be boring. That is, baseball is a sport best suited for the interminable regular season grind of 162 games, and is best viewed at noon with a beer in hand, not in discrete odd-numbered series. Even though dismissing the euphoric potential of postseason baseball is straightforwardly outrageous, there are certain truths to this school of thinking.

The point of pitching management is to make the opponent's best hitters look their worst when it matters most. Everyone knows this. I was not yet in Kindergarten when this came out. But I do have some small disagreements with that Baseball Prospectus Basics piece. As it states, before the invention of the closer, managers used 'firemen' to try to get out of jams their other pitchers got into.

Baseball is extremely hard and extraordinarily rich in ways for things to go wrong, and firing a manager when things go wrong is the simplest way for an organization to signal to fans that it is addressing those things. It doesn't work, really, because managers only do so much, and are generally not the reason why bad baseball teams are bad.

As the World Series approaches, fans might take a moment to appreciate an era that has given us baseball players, like the Yankees' slugger Aaron Judge and the Dodgers' pitcher-hitter Shohei Ohtani, who will go down in history with Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, and Mickey Mantle. Some things have changed between the eras. Aaron earned about two million dollars in his career; Ohtani's current contract is worth seven hundred million.

In the opening moments of a new film called "Diamond Diplomacy," Shohei Ohtani holds the ball and Mike Trout holds a bat. These are the dramatic final moments of the 2023 World Baseball Classic. The film puts those moments on pause to share the long and complex relationship between the United States and Japan through the prism of baseball, and through the stories of four Japanese players - Ohtani included - and their journeys to the major leagues.

When my household quit cable four years ago and I lost access to Seattle Mariners games on TV, I started streaming the radio broadcast on the Google Home speaker in my kitchen. Honestly? Baseball on the radio rules. You get to walk around and do stuff to the pleasant background sounds of the crowd. Sometimes you hear the crack of Cal Raleigh's bat hammering the ball into the stands one or 60 times. There's just one problem: spoilers.

To borrow a baseball term of art (okay, a cliché), Jane Leavy is an elite spitballer. No one is better built than Leavy, a crafty veteran sportswriter, for between-innings repartee, wry asides, and tossed-off ideas for improving her beloved sport-and maybe even keeping its ever-looming obsolescence at bay for another decade or three. Leavy's suggestions for spicing up baseball reflect the essence of spitballing-a pastime within a pastime.

I don't care about the playoffs. A short-series tournament with few/no adjustments to in-series win probability is a poor fit for a sport where it takes about 70 games for luck to influence a team's record as much as skill. But, on a completely different level, I do care about the players. And the players care about the playoffs. They've been raised and conditioned in a system where there's a tournament at the end, and they want to win the tournament.

Reminders of the New York Yankees' rich history can be spotted at every turn in and around Yankee Stadium. Babe Ruth banners hang outside the venue. Hallways are loaded with framed pictures of pinstriped legends. When Toronto Blue Jays manager John Schneider entered the stadium's news conference room Monday on the eve of Game 3, he walked past several 10-foot magazine posters featuring all-time Yankee greats.

Hundreds of people, young, old and wearing matching commemorative T-shirts, just finished dancing the "YMCA" on the field at Yogi Berra Stadium at Montclair State University. Little League teams, former MLB players and local politicians laugh and clutch their gloves as volunteers hand out souvenir baseballs. Yankees organist Ed Alstrom plays "Charge!" from a stage in center field, and the crowd responds on cue.

Bryce Eldridge, less than a week into his major-league career, remains in search of his first hit. That milestone, among others, should come in due time. While still batting .000, Eldridge has shown small glimpses of the promise that made him one of baseball's top prospects. His at-bats have been good, said manager Bob Melvin of the Giants' top prospect. We'd love for him to get his first hit and get that out of the way, but he has not looked overmatched.

The book is a skillful mix of history, personal connections, and insights based on watching innumerable games as a lifetime fan. She writes about the way baseball has been affected by changes in technology, from "moneyball" math to television cameras intruding on the playing field, the shift in ownership from families to billionaires, even the way stadiums are designed, the shift from "the sun is the pitchclock," keeping the action going to one estimate that there are only 17 minutes of action in a baseball game.

Describe your favorite fragrance: I HAVE FOUR. SEA AIR NIGHT BLOOMING JASMINE, FRESH CUT GRASS, AND MY WIFE, MICHELE 3. Choose an architect to design your dream house: a) Frank Lloyd Wright b) I. M. Pei c) Walter Gropius 4. Circle your preferred fruits: Banana Apple Pomegranate Pear Cherry d) Frank Gehry Pineapple Blueberry Grape e) Louis Sullivan Other: JAMES OTHER No Plum Nectarine CONTEST

1905 - Frank Smith of the Chicago White Sox pitched a no-hitter against the Detroit Tigers in a 15-0 victory in the second game of a doubleheader. The score is the most lopsided margin of victory for a no-hitter in AL history. 1912 - Smokey Joe Wood of the Red Sox, on his way to a 34-win season, beat Washington's Walter Johnson 1-0 at Boston. The victory was Wood's 14th consecutive, two shy of Johnson's AL record of 16 straight.

These losses aren't even funny anymore. They're certainly not fun. Not only have the Twins now lost the season series to Chicago, they snapped the White Sox's 205-game losing streak when trailing after eight innings. Of course it's THIS team. On to the parody, and I don't mean this pretend masquerading as a ballclub. Man, it's a late one,The fall attendance in a downward run,'Cause we find the Minnesota Twins certainly done;The owner's a fool.

The Grid, which challenges users to Remember A Guy that fits into various different categories every day, delivered an efficient if sometimes maddening way to scratch a mental itch that has been with me for more or less my whole life. At the very least, I'll generally do one in the morning to wake my brain up, and while I'm not sure that thinking about what teams Mike Fetters played for before breakfast is right for everyone, it absolutely works for me.

The Yankees survived by inches, maybe thanks in part to catcher Austin Wells trying to blow foul a White Sox flyball to right that looked like a game-winner. "It might have (worked)," Wells said. "I hope other people were helping to blow it, too." The White Sox had the winning run on third base with one out in the 10th inning of a 2-2 game, so Boone opted for a five-man infield hoping reliever David Bednar would get a strikeout, popup or groundball right at someone.

Butler plays Hank Thompson: a former baseball player who can't play anymore; a bartender who, after some of the early events of the movie, can't drink anymore; and a devoted San Francisco Giants fan surrounded by Mets fans. As his not-quite girlfriend Yvonne ( Zoë Kravitz) says, he's "a good country boy" who calls his mom in California every day. They end every call with "Go Giants!"

"In San Diego, people know what .394 is,"

BOONVILLE, Missouri -- The softball field at Boonville Correctional Center has two fences. The first is a standard outfield fence, 275 feet from home plate, stretching from foul line to foul line. The second, about 50 feet farther, is made of taut barbed-wire strands ringed by circles of razor wire, separating the state penitentiary from the world. It's a stark reminder that the field is, quite literally, a diamond in the rough.

The Los Angeles Dodgers aim to even the series against the Colorado Rockies after facing a walk-off loss. Emmet Sheehan is starting for LA with a record of 3-2 and a 3.86 ERA.

The Mariners reinstated Bryce Miller from the 15-day injured list and selected the contract of a fellow right-handed pitcher. Jackson Kowar and Casey Legumina were optioned to Triple-A Tacoma.

The Rockies have improved over the course of the season, but with a 36-89 record, they remain one of the worst teams in baseball.

The Blue Jays have signed pitching prospect Seo-jun Moon from South Korea, addressing their previous lack of pitching depth with a $1.5 million signing bonus.

The current streak of Mets starters hitting at least five innings follows a period where they threw an MLB-low 241 2/3 innings in just two months.