Here's Your 2020 Name Of The Year Bracket

Tag: mlb (page 1 of 1)

How ‘Ball Four’ Changed Everything

The ability of Ball Four to resonate unlike any sports book that had come before led to the swift and furious response to it as soon as excerpted sections hit the newsstands in the June 2, 1970, edition of Look magazine. Even before. The book’s title itself cued readers into the idea that this would be a baseball book like no other. “Sports books always had these upbeat titles, ‘Running to Daylight,’” Bouton said a few years later. “You never heard of a sports book called ‘Running to Darkness.’” During the season he experimented with various titles: “There’s More to Baseball than the Score,” “Take Me Out of the Ballgame,” “View from the Pitcher’s Mound,” “Bullpens I Have Known,” “Hiya Baseball,” “How’s Your Old Tomato?” and a direct reference to Jerry Kramer and Dick’s Schaap’s 1968 football diary—Constant Replay—were a few of the dozens he contemplated but never settled on. But when a drunk woman at the Lion’s Head bar on Christopher Street overheard Bouton and New York sportswriter Len Shecter debating possible downbeat titles (the working title for the book as described in the publication agreement with World was “Baseball Journal”), she slurred her way to literary gold by suggesting a title that evoked failure rather than success: “Whyyyyy don’t you caaaauull it Baaaaaallllll Foooouuuuuurrrrrr?” After rejecting it out of hand, they realized she was on to something.

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My Dumb Major League Baseball Sons, Please Use This Break To Practice Bunting

There are so many things I miss so much about baseball. I miss the deep breath the crowd takes in when the shortstop throws the ball a little too softly to second on a double play. I miss the way a pitcher throws over to first so obviously that the runner is diving before he even lets go of the ball. I miss the snap of the catcher’s glove echoing through a packed stadium as the team closes in on a win. What I do not fucking miss at all is watching my favorite players absolutely deteriorate when asked to bunt.

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Slowly But Surely, Baseball Is Creeping Back Into The World

This, my friends, is a sight for sore eyes:

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The Rockies Are So Damn Embarrassing

If you run a baseball team, it’s never been easier to project competence. The Astros just got caught in the corniest, most brazen cheating scandal in recent history; the Red Sox are inexplicably hellbent on not employing Mookie Betts; the Mets still exist. It feels like half the teams in the league can’t stop stepping on rakes, and all any franchise needs to do to look good in comparison is walk in a straight line.

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If Anyone Is Going To Make You Like The Astros Again, It’s Dusty Baker

Lost in the detritus of the week is the very bizarre and very delightful hiring of Dusty Baker as the new manager for the New Evil Empire. Even the picture of him on the Astros’ own Twitter feed says volumes about the team’s existential crisis.

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