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Manny Ramirez Returns
The Oakland Athletics have signed the always-colorful baseball bad boy and dropout Manny Ramirez. After serving a fifty-game suspension for “testing positive,” The Pride of George Washington High School will be in his twentieth Major League Baseball season and active on his fortieth birthday. Way, Manny!
Posted in Baseball
Tagged Boston Red Sox, Major League Baseball, Manny Ramirez, Oakland Athletics
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Another Passing of a Sort: Tim Wakefield
Tim Wakefield, knuckleball (cricket fans: a specialty pitch, with the ball gripped not exactly by the knuckles but at the fingers’ edge, with an inward curl; the grip keeps the pitched ball from rotating so that it floats in an impossible-to-control-as-well-as-predict way toward the tantalized batter) pitcher with the Boston Red Sox, and winner of 200 games (cricket fans: one of those round baseball numbers denoting career excellence), has announced his retirement at forty-five. This not-unexpected passing—to the lean-and-slipper’d-pantaloon set—nevertheless marks further changes for the proud Boston franchise into 2012.
Gary Carter, Whitney Houston, Many Events
The past several days have witnessed a convergence of many events, unrelated perhaps, but like all things juxtaposed by fate, each gives to the other a different and new meaning. There were the untimely deaths of only the third New York catcher to be elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame (although he has gone to immortality as a Montreal Expo): The Kid, Gary Carter. (The others are Yankees: Bill Dickey and Yogi Berra. Don’t get me [Evander] started on Thurman Munson.) The Kid may have had the single greatest, most-improbable in-the-clutch hit I ever witnessed: bottom-of-the-ninth inning, two men out, two strikes, Game 6, 1986, Mets versus the Boston Red Sox. Condolences from Right Off the Bat go to the Carter family. As this gutsy ballplayer left the fields of earthly perception, at the age of fifty-seven, so Whitney Houston, the great voice, left us too soon, at forty-eight. Our prayers go to the Houston family, particularly to gospel-singer extraordinary, Cissy. Yesterday, February 17, also marked forty-six years since the first tracks of “Good Vibrations” were laid. Speaking of good vibes, it was the day New York Yankees pitchers—minus the troubled A. J. Burnett, who is being shipped off to the Pittsburgh Pirates, pending approval by the commissioner of Major League Baseball plus the passing of a physical—and catchers reported to Tampa to begin spring training. Good, good, good vibrations.
Cricket versus Baseball versus Cricket (and I Hope Nothing Bad Is Being Said)
ROTB received a fascinating article from number-one fan of this blog, Ron Kaplan, on the history of cricket in Israel. Noodling around the subject, I (Evander) discovered the video, below. For baseball fans, the footage shows some of the action that takes place in any high-level amateur cricket match, and is therefore instructive. I can only hope that the interviews and dialogue, which I cannot interpret, do speak to the mission of this Web site as well as to one of the overarching themes of our book: viz., these sports keenly relate and can bring our fragmented world together. (The term Tikkun olam comes to mind.)
Posted in Baseball, Cricket, Miscellaneous, Right Off the Bat Book
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Red Sox on the Cheap

New Boston manager Bobby Valentine. To ask the trendy question from the 1960s: Why is this man laughing?
Baseball versus Cricket versus Baseball
Many thanks to Ron Kaplan for the entertaining video, below. It is “baseball-centric” for sure. But it does objectively go into the physics and biology of batting, in each sport. Incidentally, “the news” regarding a baseball batter not being able to see the pitched ball when it is closer than fifteen feet from him is in dispute if Ted Williams (cricket fans: possibly the greatest pure hitter there ever was; certainly the most scientific) could be believed—claiming that he could see the ball as it hit off his swinging bat.
Equal Opportunity Sinners
Because cricket and baseball can be as ignoble as otherwise, this article by Rob Steen on whether cricket can learn a thing or two from baseball in stamping out match-fixing is worth a read. Steen skates over baseball’s less than stellar record when it comes to dealing with illegal drug-taking, but, hey, sometimes there’s only so much corruption one article can cope with. By the way, for those who aren’t up on crooked cricketers, the asterisked name at the end of the piece belongs to Hansie Cronje, unfortunately a byword—like a flanneled Dorian Gray—for a gentleman of fine comportment and ostensible probity who went to the bad and met a tragic end.


