Robert E. Murphy is a life-long Brooklynite. He was a Senior Writer for The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge and has published articles in The Village Voice, Brooklyn Magazine, Travel & Leisure, New York Business Speaks, The Recorder (published by the American Irish Historical Society), and Brooklyn Bridge Magazine. He has a passion for baseball, New York, and history that is undeniable. Robert’s first book After Many a Summer was published in May 2009 by Sterling Publishing/Union Square press and is currently available wherever fine books are sold.

Blog Entries by Robert E. Murphy

At Season's End, Withering Thoughts on November Baseball, Interleague Play and the Designated Hitter

Posted November 5, 2009 | 08:10 PM (EST)


The temperature in New York is 48 degrees as I begin to write this, three hours before the start of the sixth game of the World Series at Yankee Stadium, and the second game of scheduled November evening baseball -- not accidental November baseball, as we experienced after the September...

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What's Wrong With Baseball? Money, to Start With

24 Comments | Posted October 14, 2009 | 02:53 PM (EST)


Recently a couple of old baseball stars named Gibson and Jackson -- National Leaguer pitcher and American League hitter -- have been pushing a book that they've published, bantering about who would have got the best of whom and comparing the game that they knew with the game they see...

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Vin Scully's Last Innings

7 Comments | Posted August 19, 2009 | 06:00 PM (EST)



The news broke quietly last month in the place that he had identified, at the end of a famous broadcast, as "The City of the Angels." After six decades of expressing the piercing drama of the national game more eloquently and movingly than anyone else ever has, he...

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It's Time to Realize that Every Baseball Player is a Steroids Suspect

3 Comments | Posted July 31, 2009 | 05:15 PM (EST)


In a way I'm sorry to bring this up again, because, having already written about steroids in baseball a month or so ago, I may seem to be getting compulsive about the topic. But the newest revelation, broken yesterday by The New York Times, names the very player who this...

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O'Malley vs. Moses, a Half-Century Later

4 Comments | Posted June 24, 2009 | 01:10 PM (EST)


When I suggested to my agent a book about the Dodgers and Giants leaving New York in the 1950s, he was not keen on the idea. The story was too old, he said. Then in 2005 a fellow who seemed one of the least likely men in America to write...

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Steroid Use in Baseball? It's Often Obvious

33 Comments | Posted June 6, 2009 | 05:10 PM (EST)


Here in Brooklyn, where -- along with Manhattan -- baseball-as-we-know-it evolved, the game remains an inexhaustible topic when boys and men of summer meet and chat along our bluestone sidewalks and in our barrooms both raffish and classy. As the author of a recently published book on the life and...

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