Books by Ted Leavengood Outta the Parkway Podcast
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There are so few players who can lift the average fan from his seat during batting practice. It most commonly takes one of those leviathan sluggers like a Frank Howard or Mark McGwire to send ball after ball rocketing into the stands. So I was taken aback when in Kissimmee, Florida for a game between the Astros and the Nationals, Ryan Zimmerman stepped into the cage and began hammering every pitch thrown his way into the nether confines of Osceola County Stadium.
I have seen Albert Pujols and Prince Fielder take batting practice, but I do not remember them …
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We arrived back from Spring Training last night, three games in three delightful mad dash days that left us wishing there was time for one more. When I got home there was a wonderful surprise: a copy of the new biography of Bill Veeck by Paul Dickson. I went to sleep reading it. Yes I was disappointed not be in a hotel room full of snoring baseball fans. It hurt to be alone with my wife sleeping quietly beside me, not a sound to distract me from the story of one of the game’s great innovators who Dickson describes …
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In 1968 baseball’s golden era did not go gently into that good night of historical lore and remembrance. It went out with the bang of Bob Gibson and Mickey Lolich fighting it out in one of the great pitching duels ever, one that played out in the final game game of the ’68 World Series. It was a time when the sporting world was still glued to a television set hanging on their every pitch. Tim Wendel’s book, The Summer 0f ’68, The Season that Changed Baseball and America, does that watershed moment justice and I found it deeply …
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Spring Training is a time of hope, it is said. But of course there is hope and then there is the stuff they sell on the sidewalks in Chelsea packaged as hope. Maybe Bryce Harper really will hit ten home runs during the Spring and make the Opening Day roster. And that dude actually is selling a Rolex on Canal Street for $40.
Spring Training is full of oversell. There are plenty of nostrums and carney’s to bark them out. But they will hardly pass muster, like the notion that 37-year old Mark Derosa is part of the answer …
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Tony LaRussa retires and Davey Johnson returns. It might seem that the trade off leaves the managerial ranks about the same, but there is a changing of the guard occurring in the leadership of Major League Baseball. LaRussa’s 33 years as manager is unequalled except by Connie Mack–whose 53 years in the dugout is one of those records no one will break.
LaRussa joins Joe Torre and Bobby Cox as long-tenured managers who have hung it up. Their names were synonymous with winning baseball and there are few names of equal gravitas to replace them. Those three retirees account for …
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In 1956 a monument was dedicated to Clark Griffith outside old Griffith Stadium just months after the former owner of the team and stadium died. His passing was marked by every major newspaper, his funeral attended by every official of the game. He was recognized as a giant of the game whose place in Cooperstown was richly deserved, based on an amazing lifetime of toil dedicated to making baseball the “National Pastime.”
Yet today that same Clark Griffith monument sits outside RFK Stadium where baseball has not been played for the past four seasons. When old Griffith Stadium–near Howard University–was …
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Early in the day there had to have been excitement about the prospect that Bubba Starling would fall to the Nationals with the sixth pick in the amateur draft. Finding a center fielder has been a vexing problem for the team and Starling playing alongside Bryce Harper was a vision of joy for the DC front office.
Then there were the other possibilities that either Trevor Bauer or Dylan Bundy might fall. It looked possible that there could be another star pitcher to go with a healthy Strasburg and the emerging Jordan Zimmermann.
What no one–not a single mock …
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Brad Peacock continued his rise from obscure 41st round origins on Saturday afternoon as he struck out ten over six innings, winning his sixth game. Peacock posted 14 Ks in his prior start and those eye-popping numbers have brought the Nationals 23-year old right hander a little extra attention. He is pitching at Harrisburg, PA for now, but his 2.01 ERA and 66-9 strikeout-to-walk ratio over 48 innings may earn him a mid-year bump to Syracuse if whatever light has gone on for the young man continues to burn bright.
Bryce Harper hit his 10th homer in Hagerstown and …
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Several years ago I went up to Harrisburg to interview Justin Maxwell, the promising young outfielder of the Harrisburg Senators at the time. He was a warm and sincere young man and I spoke to John Stearns about the Maryland native and came away impressed. Yet truthfully it was another player who caught my eye and really had a much better day at the plate and in the field. His name was Rogearvin Bernadina, a player from Curacao whose first name has been Americanized to Roger.
Watching that day in Harrisburg it was impossible not to see how the …
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Brad Peacock was taken in the 41st round of the 2006 draft as a “draft and follow” pick by the Washington Nationals. For Washington the 2006 draft was a disaster. Conducted when the team was still under management by Bud Selig and MLB, Inc. it might serve as a tutorial on all of the things not to do in building a team from the amateur draft.
There are only 50 rounds in the draft so Peacock was not exactly a name on the lips of every scout in 2006. Tim Lincecum and Evan Longoria were two of the top …
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