In high school I wrote an essay on baseball and my teacher told me I had to rewrite it on a more serious topic. So I wrote an essay about the World Series and my teacher gave up.

... there’s almost nothing worse than spending an entire day anticipating watching a Yankees vs. Red Sox game, only to have the score be 9-0 in the third inning.

If there are any curses left in baseball, they are all on the north side of Chicago.

Ortiz is now synonymous with walk-off homers. After all, he hit a total of nine game-ending blasts from 2002-07. And that was just in the regular season. It was his blasts in the 2004 postseason that cemented his legacy in Boston.

Baseball really is a glorified game of throw and catch. And if you don’t have guys who throw it really well, you can’t compete for long.

...it was one at bat during October 1975 that defined his [Joe Morgan's] place in baseball history and secured the legacy of the Big Red Machine, all with one swing.

Rose worked and played so hard that kids all across the country—not just in Cincinnati—were emulating him on sandlots everywhere, proud to dirty their jerseys doing a headfirst “Pete Rose” dive into cardboard boxes used for bases … whether they needed to slide or not.

[George] Foster lacks the name recognition outside of Cincinnati that other members of the Big Red machine maintain, but that doesn’t diminish his contributions to the club—he followed his MVP campaign with three more seasons of 20-plus home runs and 90-plus RBIs, never mind the fact he batted .326 during three trips to the World Series. And just like Rose and Morgan and Bench during their MVP seasons, Foster can say, if only for that one summer, he was the best in the game.

There's a reason diehard fans get to the ballpark hours before game time. It’s not for better parking. It’s not for extra time to find our seats. It’s not so we’ll have time to down an extra hot dog, heavy on the mustard, prior to the first pitch. It’s called BP.