While Early, Attendance Is Strong With Numerous Crowds of 7,000

Joke all you want about how everything seems bigger in Texas, but there is a certain truth in the early weeks of the Independent Baseball season with El Paso luring the biggest single game crowd (7,823) and Sugar Land reaching the 7,000 plateau in each of its first six home games. Lone Star State teams [...]

Crosstown Crisis?

Not A Crowded House Normally the annual “Crosstown Classic” series between Chicago’s Cubs and White Sox are an automatic sellout at U.S. Cellular Field as Sox fans love nothing more than to see their team whip up on the Cubs and also impugn the testosterone of all Cubs fans who dare to wander down to [...]

First Year at the New Ballpark

In 2010, the Minnesota Twins were the only team in the Major Leagues to play in a new stadium. In front of 3.2 million fans at Target Field, the Twins went 53-28, the third-best home record in the major leagues and a 4.5-game improvement over 2009, the last season at the Metrodome. This raises the [...]

Touring the Bases With…Dave Baldwin

The confrontation between batter and hitter defines baseball.  No one understands the scientific dynamic of those opposing forces better than Dave Baldwin, late sixties bullpen stalwart for the Washington Senators, a geneticist and engineer who studies batters and pitchers as mechanical and neurological entities.  His insights are fascinating and offer some important instructive insight into [...]

Fun Facts about the 19 (no, 20) Perfect Games in MLB History

A while back I completed a project of chronicling most of major league baseball’s perfect games. What fun is that if you can’t make out a list of trivia about the games? So yes, the following list (updated to include Braden’s feat, and Halladay’s) is trivial—but then, much of life is trivia, and sometimes trivia [...]

Can’t Get No Satisfaction

Five days in the Florida sun watching baseball without commuting on Metro, conference calls from hell, or stereo political rhetoric.  How can the crowds be so small down here when the grass is so green?

A Proper Frame for Stephen Strasburg

Hall of Fame pitcher Walter Johnson left southern California in 1907 a shy young man who was uncertain why the Washington Senators thought he was going to be a star. Manager Cantillon had heard from scouts the kid was a unique talent-77 straight scoreless innings, 166 strikeouts in eleven games. Now, a century later, another [...]