Tag Archives: sports and outdoors

Memories from the Microphone

Posted on May 19, 2025 by smellincoffee

Memories from the Microphone is a history of baseball broadcasting that begins with primitive radio and follows broadcasting into the maturation of radio and television networks. In this, it’s also a partial history of how radio and television developed as … Continue reading →

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Fenway 1912

Posted on May 13, 2025 by smellincoffee

Fenway Park in Boston is the oldest continually operating major-league ballpark in the United States, and has developed into a character or an attraction in its own right for that reason.  Fenway has not lasted as long as it has … Continue reading →

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Baseball Between the Lines

Posted on May 12, 2025 by smellincoffee

Baseball Between the Lines is a direct sequel to Don Honig’s Baseball When the Grass was Real, being an oral history of baseball in the 1940s and 1950s,  recounting interviews with ballplayers of the era.  This was an time of … Continue reading →

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Dark Sky

Posted on May 1, 2025 by smellincoffee

Joe Pickett has been asked by the governor to do something he’d….really, really, rather not do.  The governor wants him to take Elon Musk hunting. Well, not really:   the character’s name is Steve-Two, and he’s an eccentric techbro who … Continue reading →

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Images of America: Fenway Park

Posted on March 25, 2025 by smellincoffee

I’ve read three previous entries in the Images of America cities, but this is the first that takes me out of state, deep into the heart of Yankeedom: Boston’s own Fenway Park, home of the Red Sox. Fenway is the … Continue reading →

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Sidetracks

Posted on February 15, 2025 by smellincoffee

Gary Oberg grew up in Minnesota hunting and fishing, and has continued to do so for seventy years — mostly for fun, but sometimes for business as he was also a mechanical engineer who designed reels and other sporting equipment. … Continue reading →

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Double play: science-y baseball and Tokyo teenage touristing

Posted on May 1, 2024 by smellincoffee

Diary of a Tokyo Teen is a graphic memoir of a Japanese-American teenager’s visit to her relatives in Japan, after an absence of five years. They live in an area not far from Tokyo, and the memoir covers her visiting … Continue reading →

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Summer of ’49

Posted on March 29, 2024 by smellincoffee

In the summer of 1949, young David Halberstam was fifteen years old, facing a father in declining health and thankful for the distraction that was baseball. The Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees would provide it in spades, … Continue reading →

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Tales from the Diamond

Posted on March 27, 2024 by smellincoffee

The Greatest Baseball Stories Ever Told is a mixed collection of fiction, nonfiction, and in-between pieces inspired by America’s game. The subtitle, “Tales from the Diamond”, makes it sound as though these are stories about amazing plays, games, etc, which … Continue reading →

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Ballpark

Posted on March 26, 2024 by smellincoffee

Regardless of one’s personal beliefs about the origins of baseball, there’s no getting around the fact that the game as we know it is a product of the cities, particularly New York: the cities were where the people were, and … Continue reading →

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