The distinguished class of 2017 is led by Milton Conrad Schmidt, who came to us from Kitchener as the D’Artagnan of the fabled Kraut line and became the face of a noble hockey franchise for 80 years. Rarely has a great athlete more entirely embodied... Read more
Clark Booth on Sports
‘Tis the season for counting our blessings, and if you are devoutly the fan of the professional fun and games we revel in hereabouts all four seasons, it doesn’t get much more satisfying. Face it. You’ve never had it so good. Nor has any town, maybe.... Read more
Baseball has two more “immortals.” Hurrah! Neither of them is named Marvin Miller. Boo!
Somehow they’ve done it again. They’ve managed with the customary and clever corporate gymnastics to once more insult the equally irascible and brilliant... Read more
The heat is arising on the Hot Stove! With the countdown to the winter meetings under way, Baseball’s winter season is upon us. For the game’s charter member nerds who groove on its byzantine inner-workings – such as your host –this season within the... Read more
It’s that time again. A 16-man committee of distinguished keepers of the American pastime’s flame is about to gather in Cooperstown to decide who should be canonized this time, or, more precisely, who will be rebuffed again in what oft amounts to... Read more
This being the beginning of the special time in the year, and because it seems to me to have been insufficiently noted or appreciated, let’s begin with the inspirational tale of Charlie Morton, dauntless but improbable World Series hero. It’s wonderful... Read more
Whither goest, Bruins? That is the question. And it is not even Thanksgiving yet. Maybe it’s too soon to kiss off an entire hockey season, but not too early to wonder if, when all’s said and done, Bruins fans will have much to be thankful for.
... Read more
There is a season for everything, the Good Book tells us. But Major League Baseball alone boasts of a season that is endless. Seamlessly, we now slide from the torrid on-the-field action in a World Series that was simply bonkers to the Hot Stove... Read more
Catching up with a bit of this and that while waiting for the leaves to turn and ponds to ice:
Managerial sweep-out
Unprecedented is this business of the World Series being upstaged by managerial merry-go-rounds... Read more
The sixth, and last, in a season-long series of reflections on the 50th anniversary of the “Impossible Dream” Red Sox season of 1967.
Rarely if ever has a World Series been as anti-climactic as the 1967 Red Sox-Cardinals Octoberfest. At... Read more
What we have upon us hereabouts once again is another autumn of our discontent. Elsewhere, the music of Baseball’s Octoberfest plays on joyously. But here in Mudville, it has dissipated into a dirge.
It’s a song we’ve heard before, of course.... Read more
It was only one day, but it ought to be enshrined in the annals of epic New England sporting festivals, or at least accorded a footnote. The day was Thursday, the 7th of October, 2017, when in a gluttonous rage we were obliged to bounce from the Sox-... Read more
And so here we go again! After six grueling months, plus a couple more for tune-ups, with a total expenditure for performers alone exceeding five billion bucks, featuring roughly 6,000 homers and more than 40,000 strikeouts in 2,430 games incurring... Read more
When the legendary pug Jake LaMotta – better known as the “Raging Bull” – died the other day at the tender age of 95, my first reaction was to wonder how such an incomparable rascal and incorrigible roughneck could have possibly survived 95 years.... Read more
On the chance you didn’t see it, believe me when I tell you it was just marvelous. When their mainstay, Francisco Lindor, brilliant throughout their epic surge, flailed wildly at a bad pitch in the dirt ending a ninth inning threat against Kansas City... Read more
