Category: Sports

On vacation, in faraway places, the reports we read about our sports teams are small and so based on the pure essentials that they are nearly meaningless. USA Today has made a fortune out of trying to provide an adequate sports report for every team–the few people I know who bought it or buy it […]

Hitters’ personalities rarely change. When they do, they evolve like those of our friends; hitters mature, they age, they grow old. A young singles hitter is likely to end up an old singles hitter, although he may hit a few more homers toward the end, while a home run hitter will keep hitting home runs […]

Late Thursday night, early Friday morning we left town for Wisconsin’s Door County. There were the inevitable problems with packing, a brief episode in which we thought the keys were locked in the trunk, and then a not-so-brief detour in which we dropped off a friend of my traveling companion at an O’Hare hotel. Then, […]

The baseball season is off to a strange start, in which opposites collide and throw sparks. In the six games I’ve scored this young season, home runs were a team’s first hit seven times. Now, that includes the Wrigley Field outing of the Montreal Expos’ Bob Sebra, who gave up a homer to Leon Durham […]

Already, baseball has reasserted its rhythm and tempo upon those of us who call ourselves baseball fans. Each year, it seems a little more amazing that we have survived for months without something that now seems so essential. The persistent and echoing cracks and pops of batting practice, the slow building of tension between pitcher […]

They come to us, it seems, fully formed, Venuses rising on shells of hype. When they arrive in town next week, the Cubs and White Sox will seem set, their lineups solid from top to bottom, their pitching shaky but for the moment stable, and, of course, ever optimistic. They’ll seem like the teams we’ve […]