This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,421) on Friday, May 27, 2022. What do you think a librarian does? The answer to that question undoubtedly depends on your point of view, but I think most of us would believe a librarian is someone who keeps books and documents in a particular • Read More »
When Roger Angell wrote about baseball, which he did frequently but not often enough, he could put you in the seat next to him in the ballpark. It would be a good seat, not in the press box with all of the sportswriting swells and television hotshots, but right down there in the stands among • Read More »
When August Wilson was 15 years old, he decided to drop out of school. Several stories about why he made this decision are part of his legend. One is that he had written a 20-page paper on Napoleon Bonaparte, and his teacher—not believing that he could compose so well—accused him of plagiarism. Another is that • Read More »
As happens each year at this time when voting for the baseball Hall of Fame is complete, a fierce debate is set off, not about the people who may have been voted into the Hall of Fame but about those who did not make it. This year’s debate centerss on two people, extraordinary baseball stars • Read More »
The owners of major-league baseball teams in 1941 had a radical plan to change the game. It was not a rule change. Baseball rules have been in place for more than four decades, and they seem to be working well. This was a change of venue. For all of its existence major league baseball head • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,290) on Friday, January 21, 2022. To simply know how something happens, or that it will happen, is not to understand it. That’s the case whenever I walk into the very generous garden that I have been blessed with. Come spring, something will happen, and • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,232) on Friday, January 7, 2022. Happy New Year. With regard to Covid, it seems that as we turn the calendar to this new year, we are little better off than a year ago. Covid cases are surging, and our faith in the vaccines to • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,266) on Friday, November 5, 2021. We didn’t always wear the best clothes or live in the finest houses, but those of us who were lucky enough to receive musical training when we were young were the rich kids in school. We had something special, • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,5xx) on Friday, July 24, 2020. A memory rattled through my brain this week of a newspaper column I read many years ago. It was in the 1960s, and the column was by Russell Baker in the New York Times (I’m pretty sure), and • Read More »
The Guardian has an interesting series in which their writers fill in the blank to “I wish more people would read . . . ” Sam Leith’s blank-filler is Damon Runyan, and he could not have made a better choice. Runyan was a New York City newspaperman in the first decades of the 20th century • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,579) on Friday, May 15, 2020. One of the bright spots we had going for us this spring — among so many spots that were not quite so bright — is the garden, which with plenty of rain and somewhat cooler temperatures had • Read More »
Baseball’s cheating scandal, which I mentioned in the newsletter a couple of weeks ago, seems to have come and gone in the relative blink of an eye. A couple of days of headlines, perpetrators punished, a few days of comment and commentary, and we’re done. Let’s move on. But some of us want to shout, • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,6xx) on Friday, January 17, 2020. {% if subscriber.first_name != blank %} Hello {{ subscriber.first_name }}, {% else %} Hello, {% endif %} News from Major League Baseball in January is never plentiful, and what there was this week was not good: two team managers were fired • Read More »
A journalist or historian needs something to write about — a subject worthy of the time and effort it takes to gather the information and put it into a suitable form. Seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it? Sometimes, of course, stories just don’t pan out. If you’re working in daily journalism, a story like that is • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,666) on Friday, November 8, 2019. Baseball is a game you can share with others. That was the message I got from a large number of emails sent after the special report on my trip to the World Series in the last newsletter. Those emails • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,666) on Friday, November 1, 2019. One of my life-long dreams was fulfilled last weekend when I had the opportunity to attend a World Series game at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C. I have written a long report on it for this newsletter, divided it • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,653) on Friday, October 25, 2019. We got rain again this weekend, and we got more on Monday night. After a two- to three-month stretch with almost no rain at all, the world is beginning to feel good again in East Tennessee. In the • Read More »
The most famous baseball poem in history is Casey at the Bat by Ernest Lawrence Thayer. Its subtitle is “A Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1888.” The poem was first published in the San Francisco Chronicle and tells the story of one game of the baseball team of Mudville and its mighty hitting star Casey. • Read More »
Tags: Casey at the Bat
The story is that Ring Lardner was finished with baseball after news of the 1919 Black Sox scandal came out. Lardner had spent much of his journalism career covering baseball, first for the South Bend Times in 1905 and eventually for the Chicago Tribune in 1913. He knew the Chicago White Sox well. He had • Read More »
My good friend Dan, proof-reader extraordinaire, and I had this email exchange a couple of weeks ago: DAN: Hi Jim, So, what do you think of the Angels Shohei Ohtani? He is 2-0 as a pitcher in two starts and hitting .346 as a DH. He wants to pitch and hit more as he did in Japan • Read More »