By George Kimball The Boston Phoenix April 1971 Years ago—only a few years ago, actually, but still years before the miracle year of 1967 and years before it became chic to root for the Red Sox—the centerfield bleachers at Fenway were traditionally the habitat of the...
By Alex Belth SI.com December 22, 2008 It was almost one o’clock in the morning but the scoreboard clock was frozen at 12:21. The last game at Yankee Stadium was over, and nobody was in a rush to leave. Sinatra had finally stopped singing “New York, New York,” and...
By Michael Paterniti Esquire September 1999 I give you Thurman Munson in the eighth inning of a meaningless baseball game, in a half-empty stadium in a bad Yankee year during a fourteen-season Yankee drought, and Thurman Munson is running, arms pumping, busting his...
By Alex Belth Bronx Banter May 13, 2010 Every so often, you run into a kindred spirit, a guy you aren’t envious of, just proud to know. Todd Drew was like that, and so is Josh Wilker (pictured above, on the left with his brother Ian). When I first read Josh’s work at...
By John Lardner Newsweek 1949 The St. Louis Browns have hired a professional psychologist for the spring training season to currycomb their inferiority complex. The Boston Red Sox, on the other hand, have chosen a simpler way of treating their own psychological...
By Alex Belth Bronx Banter March 21, 2003 I’ve have been working on a proposal to write a biography on Curt Flood for a Young Adult audience. Needless to say, I’m pretty jacked up about it. And who better to talk about Curt Flood than Marvin Miller, now 86, the former...
By David Maraniss From Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero 2006 There was something about Clemente that surpassed statistics, then and always. Some baseball mavens love the sport precisely because of its numbers. They can take the mathematics of a...
By Peter Richmond GQ October 1992 Nighttime in Los Angeles, on a quiet street off Melrose Avenue. An otherwise normal evening is marked by an oddly whimsical celestial disturbance: Baseballs are falling out of the sky. They are coming from the roof of a gray apartment...
By John Schulian Deadspin August 1, 2014 Dizzy Dean was baseball’s one-man free speech movement. There were big names with untamed mouths before him, of course, Babe Ruth being the obvious example, but the Babe was only too happy to take time out for the occasional...
By Lawrence Wright New Times June 12, 1978 … The sun was a golden globe, half-hidden, and as we drove along it appeared to be some giant golden elephant running along the horizon and I felt so good I remembered something Johnny Sain used to talk about. He used to say...
By Larry Merchant From Ringside Seat at the Circus 1976 Paul Simon, the Simon of Simon and Garfunkel, was invited to Yankee Stadium yesterday to throw out the first ball, to see a ballgame, to revisit his childhood fantasy land, to show the youth of America that...
By Joe Flaherty The Village Voice August 26, 1972 When Willie Mays returned to New York, many saw it—may God forgive them—as a trade to be debated on the merits of statistics. Could the forty-one-year-old center fielder with ascending temperament and waning batting...
