#baseball

#baseball

"That's what kept his arm in shape because he hammered, and did everything that he had to do, and he used the saw, and it kept his arm in the condition he kept it in, that's what he always said," Jackie, his younger sister, said.

Pitchers' duels are tense - one pitch can end up carrying enough win expectancy to crystallize the final result. Slugfests are tense, but in a different way: the long-tailed cat and room full of rocking chairs way. (Side story: the reason why we stopped taking our cat on long trips with us is because one time, we were forced by an ice storm to get off the road and make an unplanned day-long stop,

Hello and happy Monday, friends. It's not just any regular Monday, though...it's Truck Day! Did Wally leave you any baseball equipment under your Truck Day Tree this year? Hope your work gives you the holiday today. If not, I guess time-and-a-half ain't so bad. While the rest of the sporting world will have its eyes on the Super Bowl in a few days, we're more concerned about the fact that baseball returns in earnest this month.

The 2028 Summer Olympics will be held in Los Angeles, with baseball already being announced as one of the sports on the schedule. It marks the seventh time that baseball will be featured in the Olympics and the first since the 2020 games, when Japan defeated the United States to win the gold medal. Unlike previous years when mostly collegiate and Minor League players represented the United States baseball team, there is growing optimism that Major Leaguers will be able to participate in the 2028 Summer Olympics.

The Los Angeles Dodgers splashed in free agency Thursday, signing All-Star free agent Kyle Tucker to a four-year, $240 million deal. The team is still yet to officially announce the signing and hold their introductory press conference with the outfielder, but there's still plenty to learn about L.A.'s newest addition. With the Dodgers' announcement imminent, here are five fun facts about their newest outfielder.

Good morning! Boston saw its first significant snow storm of 2026 yesterday, and it's well below freezing today. In other words, it very much does not feel like baseball season here. But baseball is being played all around the world, including in the Dominican, where a spot in the LIDOM championship series was decided by a walkoff walk: Game 1 of the championship series is on Wednesday and you can stream it on MLB.TV.

My dad and I got to the stadium early to watch players warm up and get autographs--we were in the stands down the right field line. It was drizzly... There were almost zero fans in there at the time. It had rained the night before, but neither team was outstanding by any means, so attendance was low as a result. I got the full attention of the players.

Mario is no rookie when it comes to baseball, having taken to the field with Mario Superstar Baseball on GameCube and again with Mario Super Sluggers for the Wii. He's now returning to the sport with Epoch Games Super Mario Stadium Baseball, a tabletop game that has him and his friends swinging for the fences. It's a cute-looking game--and right now you'll find it for just $51.49 (was $60).

When Barry Bonds shakes my hand, he squeezes my metacarpals like he's gripping one of his old maple-wood bats. Then he looks directly at me and past me at once, like I'm some journeyman pitcher whose changeup he's about to take deep. He's no longer the 228-pound slugger you remember - a decade of cycling has made him much leaner than the previous time he was in the public eye.

Xavier Allen will be soon walking around Carson High showing off the two City Section championship rings he earned helping the football and baseball teams win titles. Last spring, he hit a walk-off home run in the City Division I semifinals, then saw Carson rally to win the Division I title over Banning at Dodger Stadium. On Saturday, he played linebacker for a Carson football team that defeated Crenshaw 36-0 in the Open Division final and allowed just nine points in three playoff wins.

It is a beautiful, late autumn morning as I sip a cup of coffee and watch the lingering, golden yellow leaves of a maple tree fall gently to the ground. The smell of banana bread completing its final minutes of baking wafts through the air. For this, I am thankful. This is the fifth consecutive year that I've been fortunate enough to publish this editorial here at Battery Power.

To the fans, perfection is not only boring, it's useless. It defeats the purpose of caring in the first place. The reason that baseball is interesting at all is because it's hard, because it can never be played perfectly. The value of sports is not in watching perfection, but in watching players try to achieve perfection while inevitably failing, just like the rest of us do in real life every day.

Baseball, perhaps more than any other sport, competes with its own deep mythology. So many of its highlights are in black and white, and so many of its GOATs are ghosts, that the former national pastime is easily dismissed as past its prime. It isn't. The 2025 postseason, which ended when the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Toronto Blue Jays in the 11th inning of the seventh game of an ulcer-inducing World Series, stands with any in baseball history.

There is a somewhat prevalent belief among fans that baseball should be boring. That is, baseball is a sport best suited for the interminable regular season grind of 162 games, and is best viewed at noon with a beer in hand, not in discrete odd-numbered series. Even though dismissing the euphoric potential of postseason baseball is straightforwardly outrageous, there are certain truths to this school of thinking.

The point of pitching management is to make the opponent's best hitters look their worst when it matters most. Everyone knows this. I was not yet in Kindergarten when this came out. But I do have some small disagreements with that Baseball Prospectus Basics piece. As it states, before the invention of the closer, managers used 'firemen' to try to get out of jams their other pitchers got into.

Baseball is extremely hard and extraordinarily rich in ways for things to go wrong, and firing a manager when things go wrong is the simplest way for an organization to signal to fans that it is addressing those things. It doesn't work, really, because managers only do so much, and are generally not the reason why bad baseball teams are bad.

As the World Series approaches, fans might take a moment to appreciate an era that has given us baseball players, like the Yankees' slugger Aaron Judge and the Dodgers' pitcher-hitter Shohei Ohtani, who will go down in history with Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, and Mickey Mantle. Some things have changed between the eras. Aaron earned about two million dollars in his career; Ohtani's current contract is worth seven hundred million.