Mary Tyler Moore, WJM, and the NFL

Her smile turned the world on, her accessibility proved that love is all around, and her personality made nothing days worthwhile more suddenly than Marcia Brady saying something came up in order to break a date with nice guy Charlie for Doug Simpson, the big man on...

What If the Dodgers Had Stayed in Brooklyn?

What if the Dodgers had stayed in Brooklyn?  Further, what if migration in the modern era had never taken place, thereby forcing expansion in Kansas City, San Francisco, and other MLB cities. My paradigm assumes the following: Tampa, Toronto, Arizona, and Montreal do...

What if…

What if… Charlie Finley hadn’t broken up the 1970s Oakland A’s dynasty? Bob Uecker hadn’t appeared in Major League? there was no Designated Hitter position? the Mets had never traded Nolan Ryan to the Angels? Yogi Berra had played for the...

The Last Eagle

Once upon a decade—the one that introduced Elvis Presley, car tail fins, and McDonald’s franchises—a ballplayer blessed with speed, grace, and athleticism rivaling Orsippus’s climbed to the apex of baseball, popular culture, and media. The year was 1951....

“Ball Four Goes Hollywood”

When Jim Bouton’s book Ball Four hit bookshelves in 1970, it exploded myths, revealed secrets, and offered tales of baseball, theretofore kept protected from the public.  If reporters knew about Mickey Mantle’s alcohol problem, for example, they...