Silly list alert: Here’s my starting five Major League Baseball players who have played in the NCAA basketball tournament:
At point guard is Kenny Lofton, who was a backup (behind starter Steve Kerr) on the 1988 Arizona team that went to the Final Four. After beating North Carolina in the West Region finals, the Wildcats were knocked out in the semifinals by Oklahoma. Lofton played 17 seasons in the majors and …

It’s a grand day for the Irish. Too bad I’m not Irish.
Until I saw this story posted today on MLB.com, I didn’t know that it was former Cincinnati Reds general manager Dick Wagner who, in 1978,  turned St. Patrick’s Day into the unofficial holiday of spring training. Nor did I know that former Morgantown Dominion-Post sports editor Bob Hertzel was covering the Reds for the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1978, and …

Hall of Fame pitcher Nolan Ryan, whose day job is now president of the Texas Rangers, is subtly but forcefully challenging one of the sacred tenets of baseball’s sabermetric mindset — pitch counts.
While the other 29 front offices are adhering to the evidence that says monitoring (and limiting) the number of pitches thrown reduces the risk of arm injuries, the Texas Rangers, at Ryan’s urging, are saying pitchers — particularly …

A good friend of mine, a printer by profession, came across a team photograph of the 1928 Yankees, shot during spring training that year in St. Petersburg, Fla. Knowing my love for baseball in general and the Yankees in particular, he gave me a press sheet of the picture for display in my downstairs Yankee Room. I’m not sure if I adequately expressed my gratitude, because all I could say …

Since starting this blog back in the fall, I’ve ventured to come up with something near and dear to my baseball heart — a comprehensive, easy-to-understand compilation of the state of the art of statistical analysis of the game.
Well, it turns out I don’t have to, because it’s been done for me, and now I share it with you.
On the Web site SocratED.com, Steve Slowinski gives us Introduction to Baseball Analysis …

Let’s see, we had Jackie Robinson integrating Major League baseball in 1947, finally making it America’s true National Pastime, and it wasn’t long before blacks were dominating.
Not long after that, Roberto Clemente became MLB’s first black Latin-American superstar, which opened the doors for another previously untapped talent source that has enriched the game almost beyond measure.
In 1964, the Giants brought up Japanese pitcher Masanori Murakami, the first player from the …

At the risk of sounding snobbish, I believe the most immersed of baseball devotees are those who have a love for and a thirst for knowledge of the game’s history.
To that end, I’ve stumbled on a new documentary detailing the search for baseball’s origins.
On MLB.com, you’ll find “Base Ball Discovered,” a one-hour documentary tracing author and historian David Block’s quest for the baseball’s Holy Grail — documented evidence of the genesis …

I can’t pinpoint the exact year, but sometime during my recent baseball-watching lifetime I noticed that Derek Jeter and Pete Rose were remarkably similar players, at least in terms of offensive production, at similar points in their careers, and I wondered if Jeter could make a run at Rose’s all-time hits record.
It might have been after the 2000 season, a season in which Jeter, at age 26, reached 1,000 hits …

There have been literally hundreds of books written about Negro Leagues baseball, a once-thriving industry that was ironically killed soon after Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey integrated the game after World War II.
From Robert Peterson’s groundbreaking “Only The Ball Was White” in 1970 to Larry Tye’s new “Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend,” Negro Leagues history – the names, the places, the triumphs, the …

If Branch Rickey never got around to it,  it’s safe to assume that some progressive-thinking general manager or owner would have eventually taken the bold but inevitable step of integrating Major League Baseball.
But Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers president and GM  who signed Jackie Robinson in 1946 and brought him to the big leagues in 1947, couldn’t have changed the course of baseball and American history without the help of Wendell …

Other than my father, the man who had the greatest influence on my life was Hal Richman.
Pop taught me the important stuff — how to live, love and laugh.
Hal got me started on my lifelong passion for baseball.
Well, that’s not really true. I was already on my way to being immersed in baseball when, at age 7 in the summer of 1964, I was first introduced to Strat-o-Matic, the baseball …

Since I fancy myself a close follower of both baseball — particularly the New York Yankees — and U.S. politics, it came as quite a surprise when it was pointed out to me that there’s a very strong and interesting correlation regarding the pinnacle of success in both disciplines — World Series championships and the presidency of the United States.
The last nine times the conservative, corporate Yankees have won the …

Following up on yesterday’s screed forecasting another long year of steroids headlines, Mr. Cub has called for the North Side team’s poster child of the Steroid Era to come clean, a la Mark McGwire*, and admit to juicing.
Ernie Banks, who turns 79 Sunday,  said that Sammy Sosa* should come out and admit to using steroids during his 18-year, 609-home run career, and that if he does he’ll be forgiven and …

This is just a guess, but I think the vast majority of us who give a flying fig about baseball are tired of hearing and reading and thinking about steroids, and I’m fairly certain that just about everyone who doesn’t care about the game or the sport finds the steroid issue colossally insignificant.
Then there’s people like me, who still want answers to the questions that will put the Steroid Era …

In 1983, singer-songwriter (and John Prine collaborator) Steve Goodman wrote “A Dying Cubs Fan’s Last Request,” a solemn paean to the pain felt by generations of fans of the team on Chicago’s North Side.
“You know the law of averages says:
Anything will happen that can”
“But the last time the Cubs won a National League pennant
Was the year we dropped the bomb on Japan”
In true Cubs fans’ fashion, the last request wasn’t …

As I wrote yesterday, Mark McGwire’s admission that he used steroids during his career came as no surprise to anyone. It merely confirmed our suspicions.
The surprise came in the aftermath of the announcement, when McGwire tried to convince us that his astounding home run totals and his late-career power surge were not a result of his use of performance-enhancing drugs, but rather a result of his deeper understanding of what …

Andre Dawson’s election into the Hall of Fame brings the pro-sabermetrics vs. anti-sabermetrics debate into pretty clear focus, particularly regarding the pro-sabermetrics argument that a team’s on-base percentage correlates better to scoring runs than any other statistical measure.
The argument goes something like this:
Pro-sabermetrics: Dawson’s career .320 on-base percentage is the lowest among all outfielders in the Hall of Fame, and therefore he doesn’t belong.
Anti-sabermetrics: What are you talking about? He …

For the past month or so, I’ve given my thoughts about who I would vote for if I had a Hall of Fame ballot. My choices would be Roberto Alomar and Barry Larkin among the first-year candidates and Bert Blyleven, Mark McGwire and Tim Raines among the holdovers from previous ballots.
But this isn’t about who I think should get in this year. This is about who I think will get …

(NOTE: This is the 12th in a series of reviews of the candidacies of selected players listed on this year’s Hall of Fame ballot, leading up to Wednesday’s announcement and July enshrinement of the Class of 2010.)
Until he was passed by Trevor Hoffman, Lee Smith was baseball’s all-time leader in saves, but that never seemed to impress Hall of Fame voters. Not enough to get him elected, anyway. His support …

(NOTE: This is the 11th in a series of reviews of the candidacies of selected players listed on this year’s Hall of Fame ballot, leading up to the early-January announcement and July enshrinement of the Class of 2010.)
For a player who was better than anyone in baseball history at timing his jump on the way to a stolen base, Tim Raines had lousy timing.
He had the misfortune of being the …