For Father’s Day: Unlike Brad, This Pennington Finds Home Plate

Billy Martin: Baseball’s Flawed Genius Bill Pennington New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2015 530 pages They say that baseball is about fathers and sons. They say a lot of tripe, but there is some truth in that. I rewatched a few episodes of Ken Burns’ Baseball over spring training in preparation for this year’s baseball […]

Tools of Ignorance

The essence of baseball is the matchup at home plate.  One man stands alone in a box against a battery.  The pitcher is the howitzer of the battery; firing from the heights at enemy hitters.  But nothing happens until the forward observer makes his call for fire.  That forward observer is the catcher.  They are […]

This Daly On Baseball History

The Red Sox and Braves just collapsed this year.  Where they the worst collapses?  I’m a Red Sox fan and I’ve felt worse.  Maybe it is because the 2004 and 2007 World Series titles added a psychic cushion.  1977 and 2000 were probably the most disappointing Red Sox seasons for me.  I know that they […]

It’s A Small World

Old Business 1. A big shoutout to Dr. Memory.  Glad ya liked last week’s edition, Doc.  Your comments mean a lot to me. 2. Buck Turgidson.  That was George C. Scott’s role in Strangelove. New Business Al* and Tipper Gore are splitsville.  There’s an old joke going around that he claims to have invented the […]

Don’t Leave Home Without It!

Bruce Markusen recently wrote about George Scott. The Boomer, as he was sometimes called, battled with the scale as a player. One of his managers said that he went sight-seeing in a supermarket. He was a key member of the “Impossible Dream” Red Sox of 1967. Folks of a certain age may remember that “The […]

Outgoing Is Incoming To The Other Side

March brings Spring Training- and Madness. Jamie Moyer is trying to play this year. He is the Phillie in Winter. There were a lot of retirements over the past few months: Smoltz, Glavine, Frank Thomas, Garciaparra. It’s like the state offered an enhanced severance package or something. But Moyer keeps plugging along. If he does, […]

Billy The Kid

People talk about coaching trees in other sports, but I don’t hear much about managerial trees.  Leonard Koppett and Bill James did touch on the subject in their seminal books on managers.  By the way, there is a new book on managers that just came out.  It’s by a longtime friend of mine named Chris […]

The Owner Was a Spy

One of the bigger Renaissance men in baseball was Mike Burke.  And when I say Renaissance man, I don’t mean that he went to fairs, got stoned and LARPed on weekends.  He didn’t need to do that.  He was a veteran of the OSS and the CIA.  Before that, he was a football star at […]

The Nexus Of The Baseball Universe

It was 1994.  Kurt Cobain and Richard Nixon died.  There was no World Series.  And Craig Fass and two of his buddies at Albright College in Pennsylvania invented a popular game about the actor Kevin Bacon. The object of the game was to start with an actor or actress and connect them with Bacon in […]