Daily Archives: September 14, 2008

It is a muggy day here in the Bronx. The sun is trying to come out and when it does the sky turns a lighter shade of grey. Not exactly autumn weather. The Yanks send Carl Pavano out there today to serve it up to the first-place Rays. Me, I’m going to the movies, gunna check out the Joel and Ethan Coen’s new comedy, another caper about a bunch of bumbling idiots. Sounds about perfect. Hitting an 11:00 a.m. show and will be back to catch most of the game.

Thread away, if you dare.

Hey, even if these are sad times, at least there is baseball today. It’ll be really sad in a couple of months when football, hockey and hoops are all we’ve got on our plate.

So as Aaron Gleeman says, Happy Baseball.

For better or worse, Leonard Schecter helped change the course of sports journalism, and this was before he helped Jim Bouton write Ball Four. Alan Schwarz has a great column on Schecter today in the Times. This is so cool because I was just talking about Schecter with a friend this week as we rated the great Sport magazine writers of the Sixties. He’s really a slept-on figure. Props to Schwarz for giving Schecter some burn.

By Ken Rosenthal

My favorite memory is the Jeffrey Maier game in the 1996 ALCS. I was a columnist for the Baltimore Sun at the time, but I grew up in New York. My father originally is from the Bronx, and when we would play one-on-one basketball or compete in something else, he would always invoke "Bronx Rules." Which is to say, no rules! So, after that game, I explained to the good people of Baltimore the concept of "Bronx Rules." And I wrote that the only way to fight them would be for the Orioles’ crowd to play by "Bronx Rules" when the ALCS returned to Baltimore. In short, I was trying to incite a riot, basically. But of course, nothing changed.

After coming home to Baltimore, I remember sitting at breakfast with my son Sammy, who was five years old at that time. I asked him if he had heard about what happened to the Orioles in New York, about the kid who interfered with the ball. He looked at me and said, "I hate that kid." And I thought, "Awright!"

Ken Rosenthal covers baseball for Fox.