Curt Flood: The Pioneering “Well-Paid Slave”
Jeff Berger — In 2016, Colin Kapernick began a protest against social injustices experienced by African Americans when he “took a knee” during the playing of the [...]
Sports
An Uncomfortable Truth: Tackle Football and CTE
Ron Berger — As another season of the National Football League (NFL) comes to an end, I have been thinking about the football fans who live with a peculiar form of [...]
Baseball’s New Analytics
Mark Richardson — Baseball is played very differently today than when I was young. There has been a revolution going on for several years that has fundamentally changed [...]
Peach
Mark Richardson — Ty Cobb has long been considered by many to have been the greatest hitter, and possibly the greatest all-around player, in major league baseball [...]
Baseball and Murder Mysteries
Mark Richardson — Mickey Rawlings is a baseball player. He’s also a sleuth. He does not solve murders because he has a yen to be a detective. Rather, he has [...]
Baseball and the World Series: Context and Contests
Bob Bates — Two months after the first “World’s Series,” Wilbur and Orville Wright made their first flight at Kitty Hawk. Baseball’s only rivals [...]
Baseball’s Ol’ Perfessor
Mark Richardson — Marty Appel, author of Munson, the acclaimed biography of former New York Yankees catcher Thurman Munson, has done it again. This top-notch profiler [...]
Jeanie’s Hope
Bob Bates — Mark Richardson’s moving essay entitled “My Mom, Baseball, and Me,” published previously on Wise Guys, is my motivation for posting this [...]
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Bob Bates — In his epic tour de force, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams has his all-knowing, all-wise Grand Computer named Deep Thought delve [...]
Lefty, Scooter, and Hankus Pankus: Three Baseball Legends
Mark Richardson — My late fall/early winter reading has recently focused on classic fiction, Tolstoy and Mann, but I have found time to squeeze in three baseball [...]
My Mom, Baseball, and Me
Mark Richardson — I came to baseball, or baseball came to me, as a very young boy. My dad was never much of a baseball fan, at least until he was in his 60s and he [...]
Faith and Baseball
Mark Richardson — Every now and again one stumbles upon a book that addresses issues which have flitted through one’s mind throughout his/her life, but which [...]
Wrigley Field
Mark Richardson — I made my first visit to Wrigley Field as a 12 year old boy in 1968. I entered through the street gate and found myself in a large, dank cement [...]
A Carefully Crafted Life
Mark Richardson — “Moe could speak twelve languages, but he couldn’t hit in any of them.” Such was the scouting report on Moe Berg, the subject [...]
Baseball and the Literati: Runyon, Lardner and Farrell
Mark Richardson — We are all aware of Ernest Hemingway’s expression of affection for Joe DiMaggio in The Old Man and the Sea, of Phillip [...]
For the Love of the Game
Ron Berger — I share Mark Richardson’s interest in nonfiction baseball books (see Wise Guys, February 17, 2016) and thought I’d take the opportunity to also share a [...]
Baseball in America: Two Books
Mark Richardson — The Summer of Beer and Whiskey, a riveting history of the early days of professional baseball, tells the story of the American Association, [...]
