In the long history of major league baseball there have been a lot of effective pitchers who carved out Hall of Fame careers, but there has also been a special breed who combine talent, competitiveness and a mean streak to become experts in the art of not only pitching effectively, but striking fear in the … Read More
Baseball
MLB – American League 2012 Season Preview
Each season in the American League, the question is which big-money club, the New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox, will make it to the World Series. But this season, the signings of Albert Pujols by the Los Angeles Angels, and Prince Fielder by the Detroit Tigers, have catapaulted those two teams to the top … Read More
MLB – National League 2012 Season Preview
The major league baseball season is right around the corner – actually, it’s already started with a series between Seattle and Oakland in Japan – so it’s time to preview the races in both leagues for 2012, starting with the National League. The balance of power looks like it’s shifted from the NL to the … Read More
MLB – Playoff Updates
Major league baseball’s regular season ended recently with an exciting final night that saw the Atlanta Braves and Boston Red Sox let playoff spots slip away. Meanwhile, the St. Louis Cardinals took advantage of the Braves’ fold to grab the National League wild card, and the Tampa Bay Rays staged a monumental comeback from 7-0 … Read More
MLB – Indians Still Alive
You can look at where the Cleveland Indians are at this point of the major league baseball season in 2 different ways. A pessimist would say that after being swept by the Detroit Tigers and dropping to 4 1/2 games behind in the AL Central, that this is the point where they come crashing back … Read More
MLB – Five Players Who Changed The Game
In picking five significant players who changed the game in major league baseball, I broke my usual rule of only including those who I’d actually seen play. The contributions of the players included on the list from before my time were just too great and too significant to leave them off. Here are five players … Read More
Top 5 Baseball Managers of All Time
My top five baseball managers of all time will not include legends like Joe McCarthy, Connie Mack or even Casey Stengel. McCarthy and Mack don’t qualify since they managed way before my time, and Stengel doesn’t make the list because I only remember him as manager of the hapless expansion Mets in the early 1960s … Read More
MLB – Top 5 Left-Handed Pitchers of All Time
One of the most valuable commodities for any major league baseball team to have is good left-handed pitching. Today I am listing my choices for the five top left-handed starting pitchers of all time. I did not include players from baseball’s old “dead ball” era like Eddie Plank and Lefty Grove, since their stats are … Read More
Happy Birthday, Yogi Berra!
When you’re a sports fan, over the years you develop a “love” for the teams you follow in each sport, and almost as much of a “hate” for the teams that are their rivals. As more and more time goes by, however, you come to realize that that “hate” grows into what is more of … Read More
MLB – Surprising Cleveland Indians
Pitcher Carlos Carrasco (left) and OF Shin-Soo Choo. At the start of every major league baseball season there are a few teams that unexpectedly come out of the blocks flying high, only to crash land at some point over the long 162-game season, settling back into their losing ways. This year, one team … Read More