Word: players
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...absent last week, and so it may not be a complete coincidence that baseball's strike was short-lived. Over an amazing prestrike weekend, baseball's Rod Carew, Tom Seaver and Dwight Gooden, football's Joe Namath, O.J. Simpson and Roger Staubach, a runner named Steve Cram, a tennis player named Boris Becker and an amateur golfer named Scott Verplank had got in the first word, not for the players or the owners but for the games: excellence. On dark occasions in sports, the President and both houses of Congress can vouch for this inessential industry as an essential reverie...
...everything we do, we talk of honor," says Colonel James Anderson, the master of the sword (director of physical education). When an instructor orders "Cease work" in an exam, cadets literally throw down their pencils, as if they had become instantly hot to the touch. A cadet tennis-squad player who hurls his racquet in a match is off the team...
...hero of World Series Game 3 in St. Louis was Veteran Second Baseman Frank White, Kansas City's most thoroughly homegrown player, who moved up to fourth in the batting order for the American Leaguers' odd year of nine-man baseball, when "Hired Hitter" Hal McRae became a designated sitter. A graduate of the defunct Kansas City Royals Baseball Academy, White was raised in the shadow of the old ballpark at Second and Brooklyn, but not to be a cleanup hitter. "When I hit a home run, I'm as surprised as the next guy," he said after smashing...
Imagining White as the Most Valuable Player was an enjoyment for a moment, but no more pleasant than the next instant listening to the Cardinal understudy turned star Tito Landrum modestly describing the latest of his outlandish heroics. Landrum's opposite-field homer in Game 4 (3-0) left St. Louis just one victory from its tenth championship in 14 World Series. A minor league drifter who once was essentially traded for himself, Landrum took over during the National League play-offs for Rookie Left Fielder Vince Coleman, stealer of 110 bases, who was gobbled up by an accidentally loosed...
...copies in print, is the publishing sleeper of the year. Keillor has written memorable humor pieces that have nothing to do with rural Minnesota, including a lovely, raunchy story that ran in The New Yorker a few weeks ago, about the troubles of the first woman major-league baseball player. (Twenty-seven of his magazine pieces were collected in 1982's Happy to Be Here, which sold 210,000 copies.) But it is the Lake Wobegon imaginings that raise comparisons with the Midwestern bedfalls and dogaclysms of James Thurber and, further east, with the work of the late E.B. White...