Colin Powell called Barack Obama a "transformational figure" on Sunday, and it's hard to disagree. He's already pulled together a large, diverse swath of our country, much of it from what was thought to be immutable apathy, and transformed it into the most efficient campaign apparatus in American history. Along...

When baseball season begins, a nation of sports journalists trot out the clichés about new beginnings. They write about how on opening day, every team has a fair shot at the pennant; about how all fans, even the ones in Tampa Bay, Kansas City and Pittsburgh, have equal claim on...

As I lurched along the 5 freeway, gagging on the torpor of another rush hour in Los Angeles, the call-in shows were going on about the Obama race-religion-and-now-patriotism flap, and I felt tired. Not just of pundits and their discontents, not just of moral midgets with loud mouths, not just...

Disgraced New York governor Eliot Spitzer, in his brief statement before the media yesterday, said that politics was "about big ideas." I'm sure his enemies in Albany's Republican-controlled State Senate, Joseph Bruno for one, agreed. In the wake of the revelations linking Spitzer to a prostitution ring, they likely had...

The morning of Sunday, February 3, was handicapping heaven. Nearly every channel save for Bravo and Animal Planet was broadcasting some spirited punditry or other about one of two Superthings: Super Tuesday, on which their speculation (and votes) could conceivably effect the outcome, and Super Bowl Sunday, which excludes talking...

And so it was, accompanying the first round of deep-sixed production deals at ABC-Touchstone, that TV writers' assistants who thought their at least theoretical jobs secure, were treated to a very different reality. And so it was that one of them was me.

Now don't get me wrong. I...

Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter said this about Roger Clemens: "I didn't like him too much when I played against him because he has always been very competitive. But he's always been a great teammate."

While it's likely that only Clemens'...

This Sunday, squarely between the Iowa Caucus and the New Hampshire Primary, The Wire enters its fifth and final season on HBO. But thanks to the God-given miracle of On Demand, I sat down with some friends and watched it two days ago. I...

Now that the Mitchell Report is almost two weeks old, the fabled Grimsley Affidavit has been unsealed, and the field of our national pastime is littered with urine samples, it's fair to ask what baseball fans have gotten out of all this.

After all, it's the fans who paid...