The Brooklyn Nets. Only people around here who are my age or older can quite appreciate the significance of those words. My age is 62. On October 8, 1957, I was eight, and on that day Red Patterson, spokesman for the Brooklyn Dodgers, read a brief statement to the press...

Being a linguistic curmudgeon, I tend to lose my patience with trendy words and phrases. These days I have to bite my lip, for example, when someone comments, "It is what it is." In that way I avoid responding sarcastically with a phrase such as, "How perceptive!" or "What an...

They played more than half a century ago, so most of them are gone, the Brooklyn Dodgers that I knew. Gil Hodges and Jackie Robinson, so soon and only months apart. Jim Gilliam, Carl Furillo. After decades of brave endurance, Roy Campanella. The captain, Pee Wee Reese, and Johnny Podres....

Now here was an interesting juxtaposition. On Saturday afternoon, and into the early evening, the annual Army-Navy football game, which used to be one of the major sporting events of the year, was contested in Philadelphia. Then, a couple of hours later, the 76th Heisman Trophy was presented in a...

This blog fits into the very narrow category of "Dreams and Baseball," two subjects that interest me and sometimes intersect in my unconscious life.

A year ago I published a book, After Many a Summer, which chronicled the long, sad sequence of maneuvers, deceptions, schemes and arguments that led to...

When it became obvious a few years ago that the record-smashing performance of Barry Bonds was the biggest lie contributing to what Pete Hamill recently called "the filthy deception of steroids," I composed a limerick that rhymed the "fountain of youth" he had searched for with a phrase that located...

Since the death last September of William Safire, the presidential speechwriter and political columnist who wrote the regular "On Language" feature in The New York Times Magazine, no one whom I know of has taken on the mantle of America's leading linguistic watchdog. I am not at this time a...

As Christmas Week begins, The New York Times leads its metropolitan section with another piece about sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests. Being Catholic educated through college in church-sponsored schools, I can't complain, nor can I resist the morbid appeal of such articles.

Having, as I do, a lingering...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...