My perennial problem with any sport’s Most Valuable Player award is trying to guess how sportswriters will measure how “valuable” someone is. In baseball, I always wonder how they determine that a guy who hit 40 home runs but missed a lot of fly balls in the outfield is more valuable than the shortstop with …
Baseball thoughts: — No surprise that Aaron Judge and Cody Bellinger were unanimously chosen as the Rookies of the Year. No one else came close to their performances. — I predict the Indians’ Corey Kluber will win the AL Cy Young Award, to be announced tomorrow night. While the Red Sox ace Chris Sale was …
Today former Mets and Phillies outfielder Lenny Dykstra claims to have blackmailed umpires during his career for favorable calls on balls and strikes at the plate. Seems rather outrageous, but anyone interested in Dykstra’s playing career should pick up Keith Hernandez’s Pure Baseball, which featured Dykstra prominently in his pitch-by-pitch analysis of two MLB games …
There are few experiences in life as exciting as attending a baseball game in October, when the outcome of a marathon season hangs in the balance. Despite the handicap of being a Giants fan of modest means, I had seen two such games in my life prior to last year. The latter, back in 2002, …