When John Kruk Was Quiet, Slender, and Attacked by a Grandma

John Kruk was a skinny kid out of Keyser, West Virginia in the summer of 1981, but he had already attracted the attention of several scouts. “A great guy . . . a natural athlete,” remembers Preston Douglas, the head coach that season of the New Market Rebels, the collegiate summer team with whom Kruk [...]

Baseball Passion in Small Town America

We sometimes forget in this ESPN Age the great passion that baseball once inspired on the most local of levels.  Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley has had a long love for baseball and there are two towns, some 20 miles or so apart that are perfect examples.  New Market, which saw the last Confederate victory in the [...]

Touring The Bases With…Doug Gladstone

Doug Gladstone is the author of A Bitter Cup of Coffee: How MLB and The Players Association Threw 874 Retirees a Curve, in which he champions the cause of former major league players who don’t qualify for a pension because they didn’t meet the required service time.  An excerpt from an article Doug wrote for [...]

Touring the Bases with…..Craig Wright

Craig R. Wright was the first of what today would be called a “Sabermetrician” to be hired by a major league baseball team. He was the primary author of “The Diamond Appraised” (1989), and with Texas Rangers play-by-play announcer Eric Nadel has done a radio pre-game show called “A Page from Baseball Past” since 1984. [...]