Brooklyn, Baseball, and Broadway

Jackie Robinson has inspired an abundance of portrayals in popular culture, unsurprisingly.  Examples include Blair Underwood in the 1996 HBO tv-movie Soul of the Game, Chadwick Boseman in the 2013 movie 42, and the man himself in the 1950 movie The Jackie Robinson...

A Capital Forfeit

Washington, D.C. is a city often laced with discord, evidence by the combative nature of politics.  Baseball, too, is combative, but rarely on the level witnessed on September 30, 1971. In the last game of the second incarnation of the Washington Senators, a melee...

The First Fan

William Howard Taft invented—unintentionally—the seventh inning stretch, Franklin Delano Roosevelt urged Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis to continue Major League Baseball during World War II, and George W. Bush skyrocketed American morale after the 9/11 attacks...

Matthau, Madison, and Buttermaker

In the 1976 movie The Bad News Bears, Walter Matthau plays Morris Buttermaker, a former minor league ballplayer with the unenviable task of managing a team consisting of loudmouth Little Leaguers.  Matthau’s rumpled persona matches the Buttermaker character like...