Baseball crooner

I’ve read ol’ crooner Bing of yesteryear may have been a cold sonuvabitch and rotten to his wife and kids and had really dark moods but, hell, the guy loved baseball –the world’s only legitimate sport  – so in my book that makes him better than any soccer-loving crooner: “How a near pristine black-and-white reel of the entire television broadcast of the deciding game of the 1960 World Series — long believed to be lost forever — came to rest in the dry and cool wine cellar of Bing Crosby’s home near San Francisco is not a mystery to those who knew him…” Here (NY Times)

Related: The Times has a pretty good baseball blog, called Bats. To wit: “At one of the seats in the first row of the press box at Camden Yards in Baltimore, a printout of a bull’s-eye is taped on the tabletop. This, in hindsight, should have been a warning [to his laptop, i.e.]. Here.

11 straight hits…

OK ,I don’t post sports but this game will go down in baseball history, and most of it takes place in the eighth inning: Rockies VS Cubs…Rockies win. Watch the video. This is way soccer eats dog shit.

Stoning season

In the U.S., during the start of the  baseball seaosn each spring, the President comes to the stadium and throws out the first pitch. I wonder if they do this in Iran during the start of the stoning season, where President Ahmadinejad comes out and throws the first stone?

Yankees’ Steinbrenner kicks the mound

“When strangers met George Steinbrenner socially, maybe at a charity dinner or by chance at a restaurant, they would rave about what a nice guy he was, how pleasant and friendly he was, how he certainly was not the ogre they read about as the Yankees’ principal owner. And in a social setting with strangers, he was a nice guy, pleasant and friendly. But if you worked for Steinbrenner, who died Tuesday at age 80, in the three decades before his health deteriorated several years ago, as any Yankees employee of that era would confirm, you were an almost daily victim of his impatient bluster and bombast. He fired managers and public-relations directors and anybody who didn’t get his lunch order correct…” Here.

Update: Saw the memorial game. Fantastic (the game; not the memorial). Long live Nick Swisher.

Baseball, a monkey wrench–and tuna

“…A new book by a former employee of Alcor, the company that froze Ted Williams’ remains, alleges the baseball Hall of Famer’s body was mistreated by the company. Larry Johnson says in the book ‘Frozen: My Journey Into the World of Cryonics, Deception and Death’ that he watched an Alcor official swing a monkey wrench at Williams’ frozen severed head to try to remove a tuna can stuck to it. The first swing accidentally struck the head, Johnson contends, and the second knocked the tuna can loose…” Article here.