Notes toward a Supreme Fiction: My Sport Could Beat up Your Sport
As this is the 500th blog generated by the Right Off the Bat project, in the spirit of collegial, international, and inter-sport collaboration, we thought we’d put our heads together (ouch) in doing...
View ArticleBaseball and African-American Life
Is baseball different from the other sports?Gerald Early’s meandering yet compellingly honest essay, “Baseball and African American Life”, asks, “Why have Negroes not truly accepted baseball?” The...
View ArticleLittle Red Scooter
Herb Score: one of the great Might Have Beens in baseball historyTo Martin’s Broad Agonistes, I note two Major League Baseball parallels: and our Right off the Bat is thus chockablock, many being...
View ArticlePriceless
Yogi Berra came out of retirement as an official player-coach of the New York Mets in 1965, teaming with pitcher-coach Warren Spahn to form “a dream battery” as the team yearbook had it.As the 2015...
View ArticleGetting All Political, but Not What You May Think
Mapmaker bites dog: the Tampa Bay Rays play the Cuban National Team For several dozen reasons, President Obama’s historic visit to Cuba on the first day of spring 2016 is historic. We at Right off the...
View ArticleHome-run Boom in June
Mickey Mantle challenging John Glenn et al, May 1963: They don’t make ’em like this anymore…or do they? What gives? Has it something to do with $$$? Yuh think? Elias Sports Bureau registers 1,101 home...
View ArticleStreaking
Popular performance art in the heyday of Bobby Riggs: This type of streaker perdures. Like the proverbial first-small-step of the longest journey, record-MLB streaks begin innocently enough. Each...
View ArticleTab, Joe, Joe, and Joe
The original Mike Trout: Joe Hardy played by the late Tab Hunter The synchronicity of nostalgia. Events that rhyme in time. A circling of the sun. The revolution of the cold-blooded moon. Fantasy and...
View ArticleGood-bye, Mel
A class act One of my (Evander) heroes, Mel Stottlemyre, is gone. With a 2.97 ERA and possessor of one of the great sinker balls, Mel was headed for the Baseball Hall of Fame if not for shoulder...
View ArticleJoe DiMaggio’s Second-longest Hitting Streak at 70 Years
Joe DiMaggio barnstorms (and instructs) in Japan following the 1950 World Series. As I (Evander) write this on July 16, today is 79 years since Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak reached its 56th and final...
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