Posts tagged as:

New York Times

Historical Times

October 24, 2021

The New York Times Book Review section celebrates its 125th anniversary this year. As could be expected, they gathered some of the most influential books over the decades, including classics such as The Bell Jar, Ulysses, Roots, The Road, and How to Win Friends and Influence People. With the millions of books that have been […]

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The NY Mets beat the Washington Nationals in the season opener, 2-0. As most baseball fans know, this marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Miracle Mets. Their first opponent that year? The expansion Montreal Expos who moved to D.C. in 2005. Coincidence? There will be no shortage of material about the Golden Anniversary. Just finished […]

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I don’t know how I missed this. Robinson would have been 100 years old on January 31. The Museum of the City of New York recently launched an exhibit titled “In the Dugout with Jackie Robinson: An Intimate Portrait of a Baseball Legend.” And a brand new JR Museum — also located in New York […]

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Here we go again. Man, is this a dull off-season or what? Aside from the Yankees getting richer with the acquisition of Giancarlo Stanton, what is has really rocked your socks? SO, trying to make lemonade out of lemons… Let’s start off with a little shameless self-promotion: Paul Hagen offers this piece — “Looking back […]

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Marty Appel, who knows a thing or two about baseball, New York, and literature, recently contributed this article about the 75 baseball titles that earned recognition as a New York Times best-seller to the online National Pastime Museum. There might be a little local bias here: 33 of the titles were written by or about […]

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In addition to the regular reasons — the signaling of the start of summer, the lazy evenings, the smell of the grass, etc. — I love the beginning of the baseball season because of the previews in the newspapers. These have often come in the form of supplements of substantial length and breadth and tailored, […]

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Moment’s over?

February 16, 2016

There’s a scene in the excellent baseball film Bull Durham in which Nuke LaLoosh, the prodigy pitcher, played by Tim Robbins, exults as he comes into the dugout after a strong inning of work. As he does so, his catcher, veteran baseball lifer Crash Davis, played by Kevin Costner, chews him out for all the […]

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Since I posted the first of these on a Thursday, which is known on social media as a time of reflection, I thought to make it a regular thing under this rubric. These are kind of fun; it’s like a box of chocolates — you never know what you’re gonna get. (Actually, I never understood […]

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Since I posted the first of these on a Thursday, which is known on social media as a time of reflection, I thought to make it a regular thing under this rubric. These are kind of fun; it’s like a box of chocolates — you never know what you’re gonna get. (Actually, I never understood […]

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Apropos to my remarks in the previous “Best-Seller” post about the lack of baseball book reviews in the Times… For some reason, the paper posts to its website on Friday reviews that will appear in the book supplement a week hence. That is, the reviews below (at least according to the time stamp) will appear […]

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I highly recommend Pocket as a way to hold onto links you come that you want to keep. Unlike bookmarks, Pocket keeps the entire page and makes it relative easy for you to find stuff you “pocketed.” I have keepers going back six years — more than 5,000 links — and I’ve decided it’s time […]

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“Birdos” book club

February 26, 2015

The Viva el Birdos blog, a St. Louis Cardinals-centric site, hosts a book discussion from time to time. Their first foray was Ed Achorn’s The Summer of Beer and Whiskey. The current selection is Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris. Intro here; discussion questions here. Bonus: Here’s a review from The New York Times […]

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What? The season is almost over? Where did the time go? Went to the Mets-Marlins game last night. Pretty depressing. The announced attendance was 23,892, or 57 percent of capacity. Seemed like whole sections were empty.  With just three home games left, against the Houston Astros over the last weekend of the season, doesn’t look […]

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A few weeks ago, I believe I was among the first in baseball circles to mention the passing of Jim Brosnan. In fact, I take at least some credit for his obit in The New York Times since Bruce Weber, who wrote the piece, had not heard of Brosnan’s death prior to my e-mail to […]

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Last month I received a copy of Chasing Dreams, the companion volume to the baseball exhibit at the National Museum of American Jewish History. Thumbing through it, I found this  portrait of Bernard Malamud, author of The Natural, one of the highest regarded baseball novels of all time. A few days afterwards, the cover story […]

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“Who’s the Babe Ruth?”

September 24, 2013

In a scene from the film version of Eight Men Out, Albert Austrian, the crackerjack attorney hired by Chicago White/Black Sox owner Charles Comiskey to defend his wayward players, is introducing his law partners to the defendants: Austrian: Their names may not sound familiar, but I’d say that these men are the Ty Cobb, the […]

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The New York Times‘ Ben Strauss published this profile of old-school White Sox broadcaster Ken “Hawk” Harrelson (the subject of a recent MLB Network documentary), who is unabashedly anti-Moneyball (and perhaps, by extension, anti-The Extra 2%). I must admit, I was kind of surprised to look at his stats: Considering he hit 23 homers in […]

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Excellent piece in the NY Times by my neighbor Harvey Araton on the lost art of keeping score. My daughter, Rachel, was manager for her high school baseball team for three seasons, winning the job for her ability to keep score (and take pictures and bake cupcakes). We don’t go to a lot of games, […]

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With all due respect and this is a fascinating, if sad, story, but how else to explain this story about the murder of ex-Pittsburgh Pirate infielder Sammy Khalifa’s father and the psychic toll it took on the ballplayer over the years that starts on the first sports page then jumps to a full-page continuation? Rob […]

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(To borrow The New York Times‘ motto) Marty Appel recently revised his helpful list of baseball titles that have appeared on the Times‘ best-seller list. The article appears on the Sports Collectors Digest website. As Appel, a former PR director for the New York Yankees, notes there are several familiar books that are conspicuous in […]

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