For a boring sport, baseball sure produces a lot of interesting writing. Maybe because writers have a lot of time to think, take notes, nap, and so on waiting for […]
Category: sports history
Kind of Blue
With the Cubs shocking the monkey in the early going, the cry goes out: Kris Bryant for president. Or Anthony Rizzo. Or Jake Arrieta. Alas, they are all too young and, […]
New from the Press: Sex Testing
In future years, when the 2010s become a matter of nostalgia and the “What were they thinking?”-related wonder enjoyed by every generation, people will laugh about the neckbeards, and the […]
Reno’s little helper
As winter turns up its final furies on the Northern Hemisphere, those snowbirds in stirrups depart for Florida and Arizona, there to prepare body and soul for the baseball season […]
Q&A with Team Chemistry author Nathan Michael Corzine
Nathan Michael Corzine is an instructor in history at Coastal Carolina Community College. He recently answered some questions about his book Team Chemistry: The History of Drugs and Alcohol in Major League […]
Throwbacklist Thursday
In Figure Skating in the Formative Years, historian James R. Hines traces the sport’s long history from its earliest days to the mid-twentieth century, when women helped turn it into […]
Sports games and you
Consider the NCAA the only pure athletic sphere in our cash-on-the-barrel head culture? Or do you prefer to think of the NCAA as a cesspool built on a tripod of corruption, […]
Throwbacklist Thursday
Why does Sylvester Stallone wanna make more Rocky Movies? Because he can’t sing or dance. Also, Rocky movies usually strike money. (Not that everyone is a fan.) Creed, the most recent […]
RIP Grantland
Late Friday, when all of our institutions bravely shunt their bad news out the door, ESPN announced that it would shutter its prestige site Grantland, effective immediately. Founded in 2011 […]
Sing in the sunshine
By the grace of the gods and the bulging forearms of Kyle Schwarber, the Cubs have advanced to the National League Championship Series, there to face the New York Mets. […]
The story of Cappy Harada
Baseball had been a popular pastime in Japanese American communities for years prior to World War Two. When the incarceration of people of Japanese descent finally ended, players and fans […]
Grid-iron or grid-gold
Big contracts getting signed. Free agents wrangling with owners. Preseason games just over the horizon. Pro football, the most popular of all of America’s homegrown religious faiths, is revving up again. […]