Monthly Archives: October 2014

Now that I’m commissioner …

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I know, there’s a lot of things that need fixing. Ebola. ISIS. Global warming. Racism. Sexism. Rush Limbaugh. But saving the world can come later. First we have to fix baseball. Because priorities.

We’re coming off a good World Series, and a great Game Seven. The baseball season ended with the tying run on third and a kid named Madison Bumgarner standing on the mound, proving that you don’t have to have a great baseball name to be a great baseball player.

So let’s hear it for the World Champion Giants, the last team standing. They deserve to wear the crown. And hooray for the Royals, too. The Little Engine That Could came oh-so-close. Continue reading →

Game Seven, and nobody’s watching

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Baseball is the greatest game on earth. It isn’t perfect – it would be if you didn’t have to refinance your home to take the wife and kids to the ballpark, and if they had a better selection of beer, and if they played the blues between innings instead of those hideous pop tunes – but, hey, it’s awfully damn close.

And tonight the greatest game on earth gets its signature moment, its pinnacle, it’s Ray Charles singing Georgia on My Mind:

Game Seven of the World Series.

A season that began on the first day of April will end tonight, seven months and some 175 games later. One game, winner take all. One guy gets to sip champagne. The other guy goes home and cries in his Bud. It doesn’t get any better than that.

Too bad nobody will be watching. Continue reading →

Bronx cheer, 10/08/14

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It’s been a delightful news week, once you get past Ebola and the Islamic State and all the other little things that threaten our existence on this planet, not to mention the assorted threats to the planet itself. But I say we all should try real hard to stick around for a while, because there’s so much fun stuff out there, none the least of which is that Sarah Palin can’t find the White House (though I’m sure she can see it from her home in Wasilla). Continue reading →

Stop the plane? Not a prayer

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where's waldo

Rockland County, N.Y., where I’ve lived for nearly 40 years, is home to the third largest population of Hasidic Jews in the world, trailing only the entire nation of Israel and New York City. Which explains why, in a previous millennium, when I was the Page One editor of The Journal News, the newspaper of New York’s northern suburbs, a reporter and photographer were assigned to cover what was either the bar mitzvah or the wedding of the grand rebbe’s son in New Square, N.Y.

Bar mitzvah or wedding. I’m not sure which one, because I wasn’t invited. On the other hand, I didn’t have to buy a gift.

New Square is a small hamlet (are there large hamlets?) accessed by a single road off a main road that runs through the county. Drive in a block or two and it suddenly feels like you’ve time-traveled back to 18th century Europe. Drive in on a Saturday – Shabbos – and you’re in the only car in town that’s moving. And that guy who looks like he just dropped in from Mars – thats you, because you’re the only guy in town who isn’t sporting a full beard and a long black coat and a wide-brimmed black hat. Continue reading →