Memorial Day weekend marks the first distant and fog-bound turn in MLB’s long, pokey, and relentless regular season and thereby the first valid occasion for offering tentative suggestions about where we’re at and where we might be headed. At this point... Read more
Clark Booth on Sports
First off you must appreciate – and most of us fail to – how desperately important this mere game is to our dear neighbors to the oft-frigid North.
When the current round of passion plays commonly known as the Stanley Cup playoffs got under way... Read more
Have some bits and pieces from the sporting scene for you to chew on while we all gird for the garrison rush to a conclusion for the Stanley Cup playoffs. And if this glorious bash were to last until August, that would be fine with me.
Now... Read more
The issue, friends, is injuries. They are all the rage in baseball as never before, and we begin with a question:
What do Kris Medlen, Jarrod Parker, Carl Luebke, Josh Johnson, Brandon Beachy, and Peter Moylan have in common other than the fact... Read more
Some morsels for you to chew on while waiting breathlessly to see how the Bruins evade being ambushed by the Red Wings in Round One of the Stanley Cup fandango. When and if, of course, they manage to do so.
By the way, the NHL’s new... Read more
What team in any sport might openly disdain finishing first in the endless, relentless, thankless ordeals of what nowadays pass for “regular seasons”?
In the NHL, the brutal grind from early October to mid-April is a ragged slog through mindless... Read more
In sports, there is a certain nobility about the art of losing well and it should command much greater respect than our contemporary, over-wrought culture begrudgingly allows.
You can hate to lose and should; fight fiercely to avoid it. But... Read more
Waxing lyrical about the pristine joys of Opening Day is a bit more of a stretch this year. Technically – and if you are a baseball nut, is there any other choice? – we didn’t have one, the season having started half a world away nearer the middle of... Read more
We are veering on the 67th anniversary of one of the quaintest and most touching moments in all of New England sports history. In retrospect, it seems a tale almost too good to be true.
Yet if I give you the rest of the week to figure out what... Read more
The countdown has begun. Or is it the “shakedown?” Hard to tell the difference sometimes.
The long, grueling baseball season lumbers from the blocks in just a couple of weeks. Deals are done. Rosters have been pruned. Expectations set.
... Read more
Back in the good old days, in the glorious era of the so-called “Original Six” (although there was never any such thing), the National Hockey League strove to have its winter game – including the run for the precious Stanley Cup – entirely over and... Read more
Herewith we clear the notebook of idle, stray, and perhaps fairly pointless “disa and data” with apologies to the late, great John “Bud” Gillooly of that long gone but still dearly missed tabloid, The Record. It was good old Bud who coined the term and... Read more
It is well known that Avery Brundage, that legendarily bitter despot who memorably bullied the Olympic movement for about a half century, deeply despised the Winter Games.
He thought they were corrupt, and as an expert on such tricks, he could... Read more
Out of the ultimate winter rears the most welcome of springs.
Eternally seminal, baseball’s spring training this year glorifies the promise that lies beyond the next snow bank or patch of black ice.
As harbingers, the groundhog and swallow... Read more
Sporting life does not utterly suspend during the fortnight (and change) of the quadrennial Winter Olympics, nor plunge into a deep freeze. It just seems so.
But the NBA will press on with its essentially meaningless regular season. More’s the... Read more
