After years of riding the high tide of burgeoning revenues, the feudal lords of baseball find themselves at loggerheads with the serfs, their grandee ball playing field hands. After Covid, internal political turmoil and now inflation and the war in Ukraine, their timing could not be worse. Major League Baseball’s battle over the Game’s immense […]
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The St. Louis Arena
The St. Louis Arena hosted its’ final feature on this day in 1999: Her own destruction. A series of rapid explosions, and the edifice collapsed. Afterwards, a dejected crowd who came to watch the dynamited demolition dispersed as though they had just witnessed the home team’s heartbreaking defeat. Only quieter. For several days afterwards, a […]
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A Better Day for MLK
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lived his life in accordance with his words, and his conscience when he said: “There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.” He was neither politic nor always […]
Santa has come and gone, having left behind his Christmas toys of forever joy. Cars and planes, games and trains; a princess and gnomes, with castles and homes for them to slumber; army men and guns to decimate our numbers; a thousands Lego blocks to trip over in blunder, making one fall hard asunder. Toys […]
Kyle Beach’s sexual assault and harassment charges for events that occurred 11 years ago led to the axe for Joel Quenneville, the second winningest coach in the history of the National Hockey League. Beach—a then 20 year-old professional hockey player—was called up from the minor leagues to serve on the Chicago Blackhawks hockey team’s ‘taxi […]
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‘Gates’ To Amtrak
Ominous clouds hung over the grey November sky when the car stopped in front of the Kansas City train station. A wind gust off the Plains scattered leaves in a chaotic counter-clockwise swirl to the east, my direction home to St. Louis. My friend thought it natural to arrive an hour before the […]
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1968 World Series
Baseball evolves at such a languid pace that a retrospective look at the sport 50 years later reveals a strikingly different game. In 1968, major league baseball consisted of only ten teams in both the American and National League vying for the pennant, with the team with the best record over 162 games earning […]
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Sweet Sixteen
Hell-o again, everybody. Harry Caray here floating above Wrigley Field waiting for my old pal, Jack Buck. Ah, here he comes now, and he’s singing a song. “Oh what a Beautiful Ballgame, Oh what a beautiful day, I have a wonderful feeling, everything’s going our way.” Jack, you sound as chipper as a Red Bird […]
Hamlet’s Covid Soliloquy: To Vax, or not to Vax? With apologies to Shakespeare, Hamlet’s paraphrased soliloquy “to vax, or not to vax”, retrofitted for presumed freedom fighters challenging the government’s mandate for all to vaccinate against the coronavirus: To vax, or not to vax; that is the question?Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to sufferThe […]
In December, the “Golden Days Committee” will vote to add former players who performed between 1950 to 1969 to the Hall of Fame. The late Curt Flood, a perennial all-star on three pennant winning St. Louis Cardinal teams, should top the list. At a time when true heroes remain hard to find, Flood’s selfless fight […]