Sixty years ago today, baseball saw one of its least likely home runs. At the plate was a 28-year-old rookie Giant stepping into a major league batters box for the very first time. But it wasn’t just any 28-year-old rookie, but a 28-year-old rookie pitcher. Yeah, that’s someone unlikely to homer in his first at-bat. […]

“Uncle Shane, what if a player hit a home run every time?” I’ve been hearing questions like that a lot lately. My sister just moved up to Asheville with her two children. Among doing other things, this has thrown me in pretty close with my nephew Holland, who is a pretty fair ballplayer for nine. […]

Yankees 7, Twins 6: Curtis Granderson hit three bombs and went 5 for 5. If you just followed this game on Twitter, though, you’d think the storyline of the game was Phil Hughes stinking. The Yankees fans I follow are a surprisingly neurotic bunch despite following the most dominant team in American sports history. But […]

Exactly 100 years ago today, two of baseball’s longest-lasting stadiums hosted their first official major league baseball game: Fenway Park in Boston and Detroit’s Tiger Stadium (which back in 1912 was called Navin Field and for a stretch was Briggs Stadium). Today, Fenway Park becomes the first active big league stadium to make it a […]

Twins 6, Yankees 5: Justin Morneau hit two homers. That’s four homers in six games, which hopefully means that Morneau is back to his mashing ways. Jason Marquis, who missed most of spring training when his daughter was seriously injured in a bicycle accident, made his first ever start in Yankee Stadium and got the […]

Rangers 18, Red Sox 3: The Rangers were definitely physically and emotionally into this game. In fact, they did a Gashouse Gorillas-style conga line around the basepaths. Josh Hamilton drove in five, Mike Napoli drove in four. Rockies 5, Padres 3:  Jamie Moyer wins and thus becomes the oldest pitcher to ever win a game. […]

Competition breeds creativity. One of the outgrowths of the court decision that ended Topps’ monopoly over producing cards of major leaguers was the emergence of the Fleer Company. In the early ’80s, Fleer displayed the kind of creativity and imagination that had been missing in recent sets of Topps cards. In particular, the 1984 Fleer […]

Fifty years ago today, Milt Pappas proved himself to be a pretty effective one-man team. On April 18, 1962, the then-Orioles hurler didn’t need no stinking teammates. On the mound, he held the opposing team scoreless. That was especially impressive given that the opposing team was the Yankees, defending world champions who would win yet […]

Orioles 10, White Sox 4: Matt Wieters homered twice, the first one coming in the eighth, which kicked off the O’s comeback after finding themselves down 4-1. The second one: a 10th inning grand slam which put the game out of reach. Twins 7, Yankees 3: Joe Mauer had three hits and Justin Morneau played in […]

120 years ago, the battle between morals and profit reached one of its periodic climaxes, and—as often is the case—profitability won. On April 17, 1892, the National League did something it had steadfastly refused to do for its first 16 years of existence: It had a game take place on Sunday, a.k.a., the Lord’s Day, […]