The Boston Red Sox did some more crazy stuff over the weekend that ties in with the 20-run game I wrote about on Thursday.

On Thursday night, I decided to treat myself to some home theatre, the Red Sox against their nemesis at Yankee Stadium II in the first of 4 games, they’re always like Troy vs. Sparta. It was a four-and-a-half hour marathon with everything except flying elephants and a public beheading. The Sox won 9-8 after being …

On Wednesday night, the Boston Red Sox beat the Detroit Tigers 20-4 in Fenway Park. This is what’s known in baseball as a laugher, so called because these kinds of games are inherently farcical. It’s rare for any team to score as many as 20 runs and usually in these cases the losing team stops wasting pitchers and will use some bench/position players to pitch. This also gets pretty funny, often because these guys are not half-bad and stop …

Don’t look now, but after twenty straight losing seasons, the Pittsburgh Pirates entered August with the best record in baseball at 65-43, two percentage points ahead of the Red Sox. True, they’ve teased their fans the last two seasons by flirting with contention this late, only to collapse down the stretch like a straw suitcase. This year feels different though, for a few reasons to be examined later.

Their last winning season was 1992, the last of three 90-win …

The following article could be seen as a rant or attack on Jays’ catcher J.P. Arencibia, but is not really intended as such. It’s just that his struggles this year and his attitude about these bring up some larger issues about baseball – what’s important in it, how it should be played and so on – that I wanted to comment on. Before going any further though, I want to make two things clear:

1) I don’t dislike Arencibia …

Generally, the ballplayers who hold single-season records in various hitting categories are famous, and rightly so.

Take for example home runs, maybe the most glamorous of these categories. For a long time the single-season record was the 60 home runs hit in 1927 by Babe Ruth, still the most famous ballplayer who ever lived. Just for good measure, The Bambino also holds the all-time seasonal records for total bases, slugging average and extra-base hits. Then along came Roger Maris …

At the end of my last post I wrote, with tongue mainly in cheek, that I wish I could have played major-league ball, but that the chances of this happening were a big fat zero. My friend Ted O’Reilly commented that this was just as well, that my career in music has been much longer than any ballplayer’s, with the possible exception of Minnie Minoso, who managed to play in parts of seven decades. This is true and a …

With over 350 sets of brothers and more than 100 father-son combinations, major-league baseball has had far more family acts in its history than any other sport. This doesn’t include the rarer examples of nine sets of twins who played the game or the four instances of players over three generations – grandfather, father and son. There’s even a very rare case of baseball spanning four generations (while skipping two) as in the case of Jim Bluejacket, who pitched …

Most baseball fans know that Miguel Cabrera of the Detroit Tigers did something last year that no ballplayer has since 1967. He won the batting Triple Crown, which means he lead his league in batting average (.330), home runs (44) and runs-batted-in (RBI), with 139. Oddly enough his teammate Justin Verlander won the pitching Triple Crown – leading in wins, ERA and strikeouts – in 2011. This is not talked about nearly as much and for good reason, the …

Given their dismal record of losing and being almost continual baseball chumps from 1946 to this very day, it might strain belief to suggest the Chicago Cubs had a second decade of success nearly equalling that of the 1904-13 teams. Nevertheless, in the Depression years of 1929-38, the Cubs came close to matching the great run of their predecessors. True, the later teams didn’t win any championships or nearly as many games, didn’t concentrate four pennants in a five-year …

I’ve been reading The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract off and on for over two years now and it just keeps on giving. It’s not the kind of book you read from cover to cover, it’s far too big for that. It has to be digested in small portions, but, even so, I’m still coming across things I’ve missed. It continues to yield surprising and thought-provoking information, such as the following from a short piece about the Chicago …

I wrote this after first making a baseball trip to Buffalo in August of 2011.  With the Blue Jays’ AAA farm team now located there, the piece has new relevance, so I thought I’d revive it.  Besides, given how awful the big club has been so far, Buffalo may be the nearest place for Toronto fans to actually see something like major-league baseball being played.　

While thousands of Canadian baseball fans made the pilgrimage to Cooperstown yesterday to witness …

On the subway the other day I saw someone wearing one of those sweatshirts that say “Member of the All-Harvard Drinking Team”. It got me to thinking of how many drinking men there have been in baseball through the years, so I thought I’d put together an All-Star team of the game’s notable boozers. Generally, it seems that excessive drinking was more widespread in the past, and since professional baseball began around 1860 or so it has always reflected …

Many are familiar with songwriter Dave Frishberg and his baseball songs, the most celebrated of which is “Van Lingle Mungo”. Those who haven’t heard it, should. It’s a delightful masterpiece. The lyrics are all old ballplayer’s names, arranged so artfully and rhythmically that they become poetry, with the pitcher’s name Van Lingle Mungo repeated throughout the song as a kind of haunting refrain and link.

Being a retro-maniac, a mental collector of old ballplayers’ names, I was familiar …

Sometimes history shows us that everything old is new again, and that the roots of what we consider new issues or developments actually go far back in time. This is certainly true in baseball in the case of an old ballplayer named Earl Averill. He’s interesting because at a crucial point in his career he took a gutsy stance on a salary issue which led to a proposed change in baseball’s policy regarding player sales. This change was never …

In the years since I wrote this piece about the underachievement of great pitching staffs, the starting pitching of the Philadelphia Phillies from 2010-11 became another case in point.  They assembled a starting rotation that many saw as invincible and was described in some circles as maybe the best ever, consisting of four aces – Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, Roy Oswalt and Cole Hamels – plus some other decent starters in Vance Worley and Joe Blanton.  They didn’t manage …