This Was Once a Rivalry?

In the Mets’ tiered ticket pricing plan, only Opening Day, the Subway Series and the final regular season game at Shea Stadium cost more than a ticket to any of the three games this week, a series New York swept with a 5-4 walkoff win last night.

While in years Read More

These Braves Look Like a Spent Force

Heading into the 2008 season, the Atlanta Braves were the fashionable pick to win the National League East. Seven different ESPN writers had Atlanta on top, with one picking them to win the World Series.

That’s nothing new, particularly. Atlanta is expected to be successful, having won 14 consecutive division titles from 1991-2005, a feat Read More

Young Iraqi Translator Longs for U.S.

DAMASCUS, Syria, Feb. 13—I first met Nash a little over two years ago, in the crowded courtyard of a Damascus high school that was being used as a voting center for Iraqi refugees participating in their country’s first free elections.

He wore an Atlanta Braves baseball cap at a jaunty angle, and he practically bounced Read More

The Boies Recipe Distilled: Clarity, Simplicity, Accuracy

Courting Justice: From New York Yankees vs. Major League Baseball to Bush vs. Gore, 1997-2000, by David Boies. Miramax, 416 pages, $25.95.

When titans of industry, attorneys general of the United States and Democratic Presidential candidates needed to lawyer up during the last 10 years, they all turned to David Boies. Son of a Midwestern Read More

What Makes Walter Run CNN?

Walter Isaacson has a problem. As chairman and chief executive of CNN, he commands the biggest and most influential news network on the planet, a sprawling entity as vital in Karachi, Pakistan, as it is in his hometown of New Orleans. Mr. Isaacson oversees 4,000 employees and 42 bureaus, 31 of them scattered outside the Read More

Return to Normal? It Won’t Be Soon

A Battery Park City resident was wondering when her life would return to normal. There were armed soldiers in the streets, she told a radio reporter. Soldiers and military checkpoints-in downtown Manhattan. When would life be normal again?

The resurgent New York Mets played what was, in parochial baseball terms, a critical series with the Read More

John Rocker Is the Latest Hero for the Web’s Far-Right

John Rocker, the Atlanta Braves’ relief pitcher whose opinions about New York and its citizenry has earned him a monthlong suspension from baseball, may seem to be one of the sporting world’s great villains. But if baseball’s commissioner, Bud Selig, really believes that Mr. Rocker’s comments “offended practically every element of society,” he doesn’t know Read More

Giuliani Still Quiet About Austrian Racist

The Commissioner of Major League Baseball, Bud Selig, finally has suspended Atlanta Braves pitcher John Rocker, an ignoramus whose bigotry is an annoyance but hardly a threat to anyone but himself. Politicians, pundits and activists excoriate him with vigor; his miserable fate–a one-month suspension and a fine–is front-page news, especially in New York City’s tabloids. Read More

Forget John Rocker! Where’s Hulk Hogan?

How many times has some romantic poet of the Ken Burns-George Will school reminded us that somebody once said that to understand America one must first understand baseball? The sentiment is generally ascribed to either De Tocqueville, Lincoln, Oscar Wilde, one of them flinty New England philosophers who ate roots and stuff, Bill Veeck or Read More

Now Batting for Bernie Williams: Superagent Boras Squeezes Yanks

“Joe Torre is here,” said George Grande, “and Scott Boras is here, too.”

A banquet hall full of amateur and professional baseball players, coaches, writers, players’ association officials and mayoral advance men stiffened a little when Mr. Grande, the master of ceremonies for amateur baseball’s Golden Spikes Award dinner on Nov. 11 at the Waldorf-Astoria Read More