Yankee slugger Joe DiMaggio faces Cleveland fastballer Bob Feller, who died Wednesday. “I don’t think anyone is ever going to throw a ball faster than he does,” DiMaggio predicted. Feller was a 17-year-old high school student when he pitched his first game for the Indians and struck out 15 batters. Three weeks later he struck out 17, tying Dizzy Dean's Major League record. "By the end of his brief rookie season," the New York Times reports, "Feller was the best-known young person in America, with the possible exception of Shirley Temple." In 1937, with his picture on the cover of Time, he opened his first...

16 December, 2010

Our post on Vin Scully, 81, who just wrapped up his 60th season calling play-by-play for the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers (and plans to stay on through next season), elicited some wonderful reader comments. First, Frank MacDonald (yes, that Frank MacDonald, the other Inverness County writer who deserves a Giller): Enjoyed your reminder of the Koufax perfect game. In my own writing during the baseball season, the game plays the role for me that music plays for many others. Even when it is televised, as it mostly is in this house, it is two rooms away, and the sound of the...

13 November, 2009

Frank MacDonald also sent us a song he wrote "many years ago." "There has never been a musician I could interest in it," he writes. "Not being a singer myself, I converted into a talking blues that I entertain myself with from time to time in the car, As a old Brooklyn Dodger fan, you may enjoy it. As a Cleveland fan my chances to enjoy things have been few and far between since 1954." SANDLOT KID He lived on a park bench, reading baseball box scores And paid his way doing odd and end chores. But he loved to remember when baseball was magic, And...

13 November, 2009