THE DREAM LIFE It all began when Leonard, just past the age of 70, began to dream in color. He’d dreamt in bits and spatters of color for decades, of course (we all do), but now the colors were becoming quite vivid, red jackets and green-and-yellow…

I've been trying to archive various columns that were written for Bill James On Line, some by me (most of which are on Authory already) but most of them by Bill James. I've hit several snags, but I've gathered quite a few of them which I'll make…

Among the myriad loads of garbage cluttering up my mind are baseball players’ birthdays, refusing to eject themselves, no matter how I try. I’ve given up trying. This load entered my mind without the least effort. As a boy, I read every fact,…

A question was raised on Quora recently that got me thinking. The question concerned why Elston Howard and Thurman Munson have not been elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame, and the answer was the same for both, and so gobsmackingly obvious that it’s…

This story begins with a curious, almost morbid, coincidence. In the mid-twentieth century, two of America’s most prominent cultural arbiters, William F. Buckley Jr. and Truman Capote, each became deeply entangled with convicted murderers who shared…

The 1927 season had not started particularly well for Babe Ruth. Here it was, the fourth game of the season, and he hadn’t hit a single home run so far. It was April 15th, a cool, overcast afternoon reaching into the mid-50s, and so far, in the first…

I don’t want to seem too obsessive on the subject of the Mets signing/not signing Pete Alonso to a long-term contract, especially because my last two articles on that subject might appear to have been totally wrong-headed about Alonso’s future. Here…

I’m working on a new baseball book, and it should be in print within a year, so get your wallets ready for this epochal event. It’s partly made up of the tracers I ran during my stint on Bill James On Line, but augmented by the tracers I’ve run here…

Reversals. That is my entire essay on the writer William Goldman, in one word. Reversals. Also “in one paragraph.” Goldman had a peculiar prose style, charming in its way, deceptively so. He would write one-sentence paragraphs, which violates the…

This is ostensibly a review of The Baseball Talmud: The Definitive Position-by-Position Ranking of Baseball’s Chosen Players, a book that purports to depict every Jew who has ever played Major League Baseball, although I’m not really interested in…

Let me ask the question in a more focused way: Following this season, how many more seasons of excellent baseball do you expect Pete Alonso to have? He’s averaged 3.9 WAR, an .861 OPS, a 136 OPS+, 44 HR, 115 RBI per 162 games throughout his MLB…

Hate to say this about Pete Alonso, whom I admire, but I think the Mets might do themselves good if they avoid a bidding war for his services after this year. It’s agreed that Scott Boras will start the bidding at around six years, probably more like…

…and oddities. In my spare time, which is to say “all of it,” I sometimes look at BBREF’s “splits” breakdowns, mainly because I’m fascinated by randomness. Why did Willie Mays bat so well in the month of May (.982 OPS+, 131 HR) yet so relatively…

I was one of John Williams’ graduate students in the doctoral program in creative writing at the University of Denver in the early 1980s, and he and I coincided in the sense that I took my Ph. D. in 1985, the year he retired from teaching. He was…

Valentine’s Way: My Adventurous Life and Times By Bobby Valentine and Peter Golenbock. 376 pages. Permuted Press ISBN-10: 1637580940 ISBN-13: ‎9781637580943 Bobby Valentine thrives on conflict, which is the heart of a strong narrative, so his new…

Prefatory matter Most of the essay below was composed in response to Bill James’ article entitled “Wertz and Cash,” https://www.billjamesonline.com/wertz_and_cash/ , which I encourage you to read if you haven’t read it yet (my essay will make much…

I’m referring to the (former?) poster on BJOL known as MarisFan61, who stopped posting just about the same time I did, though for vastly different reasons. Or so I speculate. The last I heard, no one understood what happened to Maris. He just stopped…

I announced, perhaps prematurely (one never knows, does one?), the severing of my lifelong ties to baseball a few weeks ago, before negotiations between the owners and the players broke down, threatening a delay if not a cancellation of the 2022…

My brother phoned me with a big announcement last week: “You remember how my favorite sport when we were kids,” he said, “was Baseball, and then Football, and then Basketball, and then Hockey?” I did. He went on to announce that as of this week, that…