Month: September 2017

You have no doubt heard that Major League Baseball players set a record this year for most home runs hit in a season. Alex Gordon was the guy who hit the homer that broke the record set in 2000, an irony that we can save for another day. The home run explosion started in mid-season…

There’s a famous sports story that probably goes back to Atlanta’s legendary columnist Lewis Grizzard. It seems that he was covering a Georgia football game, one that was disastrous for the Bulldogs. He led his column with the line, “My mother always told me that if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say…

The temptation when following an NFL team is to think of a football season the same way you would think of a television series over a season. That is to say, you want there to be a plot, or at least the semblance of a plot, to follow each week. These two are beginning to…

The 1916 New York Giants, managed by the great John McGraw and carried by two-time Federal League batting champion Benny Kauff, five-time runs leader George Burns and Hall of Famer High Pockets Kelly, won 26 games in a row. You should know up front: All 26 games were played at home in the Polo Grounds….

This nutty Browns diary began with an idea. When I was a kid, the Cleveland Browns were the most important thing in my life. The Browns were also the second most important thing and the third most important thing. I thought about them constantly. I spent my time in classes writing Browns previews. I spent…

In honor of J.D. Martinez’s four-homer game on Monday, I’ll post a couple of relates pieces … starting with this one on one of the most unlikely men to have had hit four home runs in a game. On July 19, 1948, first game of a doubleheader, the craziest thing happened: A guy named Pat…

Sometime late in the fourth set of Monday’s grueling, mesmerizing, intoxicating and, yes, agonizing match between Dominic Thiem and Juan Martin del Potro, my wife walked in — she had heard me screaming relentlessly for at least an hour — and she asked me a question: “Who are you rooting for, anyway?” In a lifetime…

So, I may or may not have mentioned this before, but I’m writing a book about Harry Houdini, and that means that I spend a few hours every day thinking about wonder. That is really what the book is about, more even than Houdini himself, it’s about wonder: How can a man who died 90…