Today is the 85th birthday of Hall of Fame baseball announcer
Vin Scully. He will be returning next year for his unprecedented 64th season calling games for the Dodgers, in a career reaching back to the team's Brooklyn days and their move to Los Angeles in 1958. The New York Yankees
tried to pry him away in the 1960s, but he remained with the team and has become an LA institution. In the 21st Century, he has inspired
blog names and
tattoos and even dabbled in the online world himself during a game last season -- as an experiment, he asked fans to get a topic trending on Twitter about Dodger catcher A.J. Ellis, "a nice boy." Later in the broadcast he announced sheepishly that Ellis was
trending across the U.S. This coming Monday, he will be
taking over the team's Twitter feed to answer questions -- tag your tweets
#askvin.
[more inside]
posted by Celsius1414
on Nov 29, 2012 -
23 comments
"We have little trouble recognizing that a chess grandmaster’s victory over a novice is skill, as well as assuming that Paul the octopus’s ability to predict World Cup games is due to chance. But what about everything else?" [
Luck and Skill Untangled: The Science of Success]
posted by vidur
on Nov 20, 2012 -
16 comments
"I'm just looking for a second chance. Other people get second chances. Alcoholics. Drug addicts. Spousal beaters. Not gamblers, though. But, if you want to put something on my tombstone that was very important to me, it’s 1,972. That’s how many winning games I’ve played in. So that makes me the biggest winner in the history of sports. No one else can say that." Here, Now is a short documentary that looks at baseball legend Pete Rose, as he lives his life today.
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posted by zarq
on May 23, 2012 -
45 comments
Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities.
So wrote John Updike in his
moving tribute to Red Sox legend Ted Williams -- an appropriately pedigreed account for this
oldest and
most fabled of ballfields that saw
its first major league game played
one century ago today.
As a team
in flux hopes to recapture the magic with an
old-school face-off against the New York
Highlanders Yankees, it's hard to imagine the soul of the Sox faced the
specter of
demolition not too long ago. Now
legally preserved, in a sport crowded with corporate-branded superdome behemoths,
Fenway abides, bursting with
history,
idiosyncrasy,
record crowds, and occasional
song.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Apr 20, 2012 -
48 comments
The 50 Greatest Sports Gifs of 2011:
Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue
on Jan 4, 2012 -
135 comments
Here's the deal: If you don't play for, or you are not an employee of, the team in question, "we" is not the pronoun you're looking for.
"They" is the word you want.
Why
"We" is the most overused term in sports.
posted by The Gooch
on Oct 20, 2011 -
154 comments
The recently retired Manny Ramirez was one of the most inscrutable players in recent history. Ben McGrath of the New Yorker attempted to figure out Ramirez's motivations in
this 2007 piece.
posted by reenum
on Apr 11, 2011 -
32 comments
Today, Deadspin
leaked financial documents detailing the finances of several MLB teams, including a few that are getting revenue sharing money. They show that several of MLB's "poorest" franchises turned a profit due to these cash infusions.
[more inside]
posted by reenum
on Aug 26, 2010 -
56 comments
Chelsea Baker throws like a girl. Of course, she is a 13 year old girl, so that is to be expected. She is a pitcher that went 12-0 with 2 perfect games in the Plant City FL Little League this season. She hasn't been tagged with a loss in 4 years. Her secret is the knuckleball that was taught to her by a former coach, retired MLB pitcher
Joe Niekro.
posted by COD
on Jul 26, 2010 -
142 comments
Joeurt Puk (aka Joe Cook) is the father of Cambodian baseball. In
this feature by ESPN, Patrick Hruby looks into Cook's background and finds that Cook may not be the tireless philanthropist he claims to be.
[more inside]
posted by reenum
on May 19, 2010 -
6 comments
When people think of the pitfalls of the baseball draft, it is hard not to remember the story of
Matt Harrington. Harrington was drafted in the first round of the MLB draft by the Rockies and the Padres in successive years, only to go back into the draft after failing to reach an agreement each time. As the years went by, his stock kept falling.
[more inside]
posted by reenum
on Nov 3, 2009 -
50 comments
