My personal spring training
Reading “The Baseball 100.” Watching “Bull Durham.” Remembering John Feinstein.
All posts tagged: John Feinstein
Remember this fact: Baseball owners just want to make money
The Nationals commit the unforgivable sin and trade Juan Soto. It is always all about the money.
My Own Personal Spring Training
As I post this, the clock on Spring Training Countdown (motto: Winter Bad. Baseball Good.) reads: 4 days, 7 hours, 37 minutes, 7 seconds. It is clear I don’t have much time to get in shape for the season! My own personal spring training generally consists of reading a new baseball book and re-watching Bull Durham (best baseball movie ever). However, our tape/CD player is broken (I know, we’re old school), and so I had to improvise and instead read two baseball books. It is tough duty, but sometimes you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do to get into shape. I began with 2015’s Big Data Baseball: Math, Miracles, and the End of a 20-year Losing Streak by Pittsburgh writer Travis Sawchik. This is a terrific book about how the 2013 Pittsburgh Pirates, stumbling along in a 20-year losing streak (remember Sid Bream and Barry Bonds and Skip Carey’s classic 1992 “They may have to hospitalize Sid Bream” call) turned around their fortune as a baseball club. The Pirates did it using big-data …
Basketball Couch Potato
There are few advantages to having a cracked bone in your shoulder…but there is at least one: I can be a total couch potato during the weekend of the college basketball tournament championships. Yes, I know that college basketball has lost its soul. Yes, I despise the one-and-done culture that Kentucky has mastered so well, and for that I “hate” John Calapari almost as much as I hate Christian Laettner. (I don’t really hate either one, but you have to admit it is a great film title to kick off this season’s 30 for 30 on ESPN.) But given all of that, I still enjoy the game. Especially this weekend and next weekend, before the elite big boys take over. On these two weekends, you can see teams that no one expects to go anywhere, suddenly get hot and destroy the best laid plans of the big boys. You can see Albany hit its only three-pointer of the game to beat Stony Brook for a one-point win, in today’s first game. My alma mater, Middle …
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