Babkins

I will forever and always hate every single member of that 2014 Royals team. I’ll be rooting for the Rule 5 guys.

We can agree on that.

I think the "Oh" is absolutely perfect: a single, breathless syllable that articulates the wonder Magee beheld as he soared to the brink of the troposphere in his Spitfire. What better word do we have in the English language for rapture than "Oh"? It's exactly the right word to begin that poem.

Illuminating! Thanks for that analysis.

I’m infinitely more impressed by Eliud Kipchoge, who ran a 2:01:39 marathon in Berlin last year, or by Alex Honnold, who scaled Yosemite’s El Capitan without ropes in 2017 than I am by any of the tens of thousands of people who have collected a hit in professional baseball.

Thought I would throw Cal’s age-38 season into the conversation. It was 1999, the first year after he’d ended the streak, and the first time in his career that he’d spent time on the DL. A nagging lower-back issue limited him to only 86 games; he missed about four weeks in late April and early May, the entire month of August, and the season’s final stretch at the end of September. He was looking pretty hobbled at the beginning of June, but his bat heated up as the days did. (He was particularly lethal in the 22–1 victory over Atlanta on June 13, going 6-for-6 with a two homers, a double, and six batted in. Irrelevant personal-history note: I was studying abroad in London that summer, and one of the networks happened to carry that game. I was so pleased to see the Orioles on TV in England that I stayed up all night to watch it.) For the season, in 354 PA, Cal posted his highest-ever OPS at .952. Remarkably, he drew only a Schoopian 13 walks, but still managed a .368 OBP on the strength of a .340 BA (I’ll always be a sucker for batting average). Thanks to 18 home runs and 27 doubles, he slugged a career-best .584. Juiced-ball era or not, it was the last time Cal was awesome, and I was just young enough not to realize it was the end.

False. As GoldGlove21 indicated above, New York has "the best of every kind of food." Except pizza. New Haven has the best pizza, and it's not close.

The background music in sports highlight reels is one of the most serious problems facing us today.

Sounds as though they're trying to occupy the hipsterish niche that Grantland once did. I haven't read anything on The Athletic. Do the articles have footnotes?

Mike “That Was a Bomb” Bordick Mike “Center-cut” Bordick Mike “One of the Best” [pause] ”in the Game” Bordick Ugh, I can’t go any further with this.

I’m pretty sure that the guy who free-soloed El Capitan would be tickled at the idea that the hardest thing to do in sports has anything to do with baseball or golf.

The Onion weighs in on Manny: Manny Machado Denies Playing Dirty After Late Slide Into Pitcher’s Mound

So many people want to bash Cal Ripken, Jr. for his broadcasting transgressions in the 2012 playoffs. But people—that was Carl Ripken, Jr. who said all that nonsense about Brooks and A-Rod.

Meanwhile, down in Atlanta, our old friend Brad Brach inherited two runners and one-run lead. He left six pitches later with his team at a one-run deficit.

This blurb was buried in David Laurila's Sunday Notes round-up on Fangraphs. If the moderators feel it would be more appropriate in the MLB forum, so be it, but it mentions Baltimore's approach to analytics and I thought it germane to the board's discussion of the club's leadership and direction.