GIANTS WILL HAVE A TOUGH TIME REPLACING THEIR POWERFUL #2 HITTER IN THEIR LINEUP.

RICH AURILIA: HE WILL BE MISSED

By Amaury Pi-González

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By Ernie Montella

Check out philadelphiaathletics.org for original story.

I suppose you could say that it was the scripted “A’ on the players uniform I noticed as I handed the dealer $6 for that packet of musty looking newspaper clippings tucked into an equally tattered plastic bag. It was May 1998 and I was out of town at a sports memorabilia convention just browsing around hoping something would catch my eye. For some reason out of thousands of collectibles in the room I was drawn to a bag of old newspaper clippings. [Read more →]

THE LOST ART OF KEEPING SCORE

BY ALAN GOLDFARB

As someone who covers baseball, I take a fat white-covered, spiral-bound book with me to every game. It’s a small book really, but when one peruses its pages, wonderful stories are revealed. The stories are told, however, not in words, but in symbols. The symbols are so cryptic, that in another time, they could very well be mistaken for hieroglyphs. [Read more →]

THROUGH THE WINDOWS OF MY MIND

BY ALAN GOLDFARB

When I was a boy growing up in Brooklyn, I spent half my life — or so it seemed — at Ebbets Field. Someone asked me the other day, how many games did I attend? I earnestly tried to remember. It was probably 10 games a season, some of which were doubleheaders (yes they played two games, in those days, usually on Sundays. See: Ernie Banks). [Read more →]

By Charlie Danrick

My wonderful wife Iris and I raised a son and a daughter, now both in their 30s and many years gone from the “nest.”

Rick was born in Apr.1968 and we subcribed to cable in 1975 so obviously the kid was quite baseball conscious at age seven. But something went awry. We live in North Jersey and within not too great a distance lie Yankee and Shea Stadiums. So it would figure that the kid would favor at least one of the corrersponding clubs. No such thing-Cable dictated otherwise because one of the stations being piped down here was WSBK, Channel 38,the Red Sox flagship. [Read more →]

By Charlie Danrick

It happened in the summer of 1957-the Dodgers last year in Brooklyn. I doubt if it was the last time I saw the Brooklyn team in person since I used to go into Jersey City to watch them in Roosevelt Stadium. Peter O’Malley simply wanted to prepare the people of Brooklyn in ’57 that their beloved Bums were on shaky ground in their Ebbets Field temple of great times. Never had there been greater treachery in our national pastime; never will we see anything as treacherous. [Read more →]

By Bruce Markusen

Today’s major league players freely make bold fashion statements. Many players wear goatees. An increasing number of players wear earrings, some featuring more than one on each ear. And players have worn mustaches and beards for years. Such practices have become so commonplace that they might not seem newsworthy anymore. [Read more →]

BY ALAN GOLDFARB

INSIDE THE PRESS BOX — WHICH WAY IS UP?

In the immortal words of Mr. Science — that ’70s icon of intelligent thought — Everything You Know is Wrong.

Can it be any other way after picking up the paper the other morning? [Read more →]

DAVE STEWART MUST NOW STARE DOWN DAVE STEWART

BY ALAN GOLDFARB

This is how the telephone conversation must have gone between Bud Selig — the father of baseball — and Brewers’ president Wendy Selig-Prieb — the daughter of the father of baseball — last Wednesday night:

“Wendy? Dad here.” [Read more →]

Alan Goldfarb writes: Upon my return after being away from baseball for about a season-and-a-quarter in order to write about other subjects during My Midlife Crisis, I immediately realized the press box had become a very different place, while it remains the same — all at once. [Read more →]