Category: Great Games

  • 2019 ALCS Games 4 and 5: Tale of Two Nights

    I’m writing this in the car on the way back to Massachusetts after the Yankees slayed the dragon known as Justin Verlander. It’s 2:30 in the morning, and this dark drive would be very different if they had lost the game. We did this drive the night Joe Torre’s career as a Yankee ended, with…

  • A Series of Miracles (2017 ALDS Games 3 and 4)

    It struck me as we were walking from the parking lot to the Stadium today, for the second night in a row, that most successful postseason runs appear, in hindsight, to be a string of miracles. Sometimes they seem to be a series of small miracles, other times one or two big miracles come in…

  • The 2017 AL Wild Card Game

    It was very freeing, somehow, to go into a winner-take-all postseason game with low expectations. Or maybe no expectations would be a better way to put it? We were expecting a rebuilding year. We weren’t expecting Aaron Judge. We weren’t expecting Brett Gardner to have a career high in home runs. We got excited about…

  • Here Comes the Judge

    I’ve been pressed for time lately (okay, for the past three years thanks to my own book deadlines plus SABR deadlines) so I haven’t blogged about all the fantastic baseball things I’ve experienced. Just a few of them. One I did have time for was seeing the debut last year of Aaron Judge and Tyler…

  • Double Historic Debut for Austin and Judge

    It’s a cliche because it’s true. When you go to the ballpark, you never know if you’ll see something historic, something that’s never been done before. Last night was “out with the old,” and the retirement of Alex Rodriguez. Today was “in with the new.” In our latest chapter of “the metaphors write themselves” the…

  • An Angelic Weekend at the Big Ballpark in the Bronx

    Thank you, Yankees, for another lovely weekend at the ballpark. Now that I’m not actively covering the Yankees or MLB as a member of the media, I get to be “just a fan.” This means I get to do fun stuff like enjoy the perks of being a season ticket holder at Yankee Stadium for…

  • Jeter Walks Off Into the Sunset

    The scene is a conference room, shades drawn, coffee cups scattered across the table as the scriptwriters gather for a brainstorming session. “Okay, how about this?” one of them says. “The kid, totally green rookie, gets a shot because a veteran player goes down, and then he hits a home run in his first game.”…

  • SABR 44 Ends With a Flourish: A Fantastic Time at the Ballpark

    Today was the last day of the SABR convention in Houston. I think this might have been the best one I’ve been to since Boston in 2002, which was my first and therefore special. Every convention has had some outstanding things about it–Jim Bouton’s keynote in Seattle comes to mind–but this one was on a…

  • Fannish karma: everyone and no one deserves a win (ALCS Game 1)

    Fans are as much a part of the game of baseball as stats are. Without the fannies (no pun intended) in the seats, the RBIs, ERA, and wins would mean nothing. Part of being a fan is having an emotional connection to the game and your team, and emotional reactions which don’t always reflect logic….

  • Flashback: Oakland vs. Yankees September 14, 2000

    (I figure since MONEYBALL is still in the theaters, I would finally get around to re-posting some of my old posts about the A’s of those days. This was originally published at Why I Like Baseball on August 14, 2001, on the events of the game August 12, 2001. Just to be sure, I checked…