Houston built their championship team on talented youngsters and undervalued castoffs. Other teams are now asking if it’s worth investing in superstarsEven before the last out was made, Carlos Correa proposed to his girlfriend and the Houston Astros poured their champagne a serious question had to be asked in the front offices of nearly every other Major League baseball team.Who needs the big free agent? Related: Astros' Carlos Correa wins World Series, proposes to girlfriend ... gets a yes Related: Is Dodgers v Astros the first all-computer World Series? Continue reading...
Wednesday’s Game 7 between the Astros and Dodgers has the potential to exceed even 2016’s beguiling combination of rich storylines and see-saw scoringGame 7 (* if necessary).Of course it’s necessary. The greatest sporting events do not come with caveats, and it feels right that a World Series as evenly-matched yet helter-skelter as this one should end with the built-in drama of a title-decider at Dodger Stadium on Wednesday. Related: The greatest World Series Game 7s of all time Related: Baseball no longer a supergiant but it is still the most American of sports Continue reading...
The quiet but effective way Kaepernick has created the take a knee movement would resonate with the baseball legend whose brilliance helped combat the terrible racism he encountered in the 1940s and 50sWhen Time magazine conducted a poll in 1947 with the aim of identifying the most popular person in the United States, Bing Crosby came out on top. Close behind was Jackie Robinson, the baseball player who, earlier in the year, had become the first African American to compete in the major leagues. Not everyone had cheered that seismic event. Some teams threatened to strike rather than play against a team including Robinson. Individual opponents greeted his appearance on the field with shouts of “Hey, nigger, why don’t you...
When Houston and Los Angeles take the field on Tuesday their players will have been picked by data and analytics, rather than scouts with years in the fieldThe future of the World Series does not wear Dodger blue or Astro orange. It won’t throw a strike, hit a home run or chase a line drive into the gap, though it can predict the probability of such things occurring with remarkable accuracy.The future of the World Series lives not in the mortal realm, but in mainframes and clouds and flash drives and smartphones carried by men with pedigrees much loftier than half a lifetime in the worn fields of the minor leagues. Related: Baseball no longer a supergiant but it is...
The World Series does not consume the US as it once did. But baseball still offers a window on the best and the worst of AmericaBaseball has long seen itself as America’s game, a game as great-hearted, humble and fundamentally decent as America itself. And for the better part of the 20th-century, at least in terms of the game’s popularity, baseball was indeed America’s game, and its biggest stars were famous in a way that athletes simply aren’t famous anymore. Fans in the 1920s traveled hundreds of miles just to see Babe Ruth, and the New York Daily News hired a journalist to write about Ruth, and only Ruth, 365 days a year. The most famous players of later eras...