History

As spring training gets underway, wide-eyed rookies share time with wily veterans, battling for a spot on the big club. 

If the young men do earn a place on the team, they have to fight for a starting position and even then, only the best get nationwide recognition. In the end, only two win the Rookie of the Year award.

In gearing up for another season, let’s look back at the 15 greatest rookie campaigns in the history of the award.

Videographer and film maker Tom Molito's most successful production was The 500 Home Run Club, hosted by Bob Costas and Mickey Mantle. Mr. Molito and Mickey Mantle became good friends and remained good friends until Mantle passed away. Tom was at Yankee Stadium the day Mickey hit one of his most dramatic home runs.

One summer evening, many years after he had retired, Mickey recalled that day.

According to many baseball prognosticators, the Philadelphia Phillies have the best starting rotation in the history of mankind, making the team preseason odds-on favorites to win the 2011 World Series.

Wagering on the World Series is as American as hot dogs and apple pie. The mother of all World Series bets came in 1919, when gamblers led by Arnold Rothstein paid such Chicago White Sox players as Chick Gandil, Swede Risberg, Eddie Cicotte  and ("Say it ain't so") "Shoeless" Joe Jackson to throw the Series against the Cincinnati Reds.

Great players do not always mean a winning team. The 1962 New York Mets and the 1928 Philadelphia Athletics are prime examples.

The 1962 Mets, one of sports' most beloved teams, lost a record 120 games. Mets' management decided to select mostly "name" players in the expansion draft, which resulted in the team obtaining many great players whose skills had eroded.

Last week, I compared Pedro Martinez and Walter Johnson to determine who the greatest pitcher of all time was. My answer was Pedro—and it wasn't even close.

A day following the announcement of Chuck Tanner’s death, we have read what a wonderful man he was.

This praise is most deserved. He was always positive, always helpful. From nursing his wife back to health after a stroke to seemingly befriending everyone he met, Chuck Tanner was a truly wonderful person.

Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays and Duke Snider rank among the greatest center fielders in baseball history.

It happens every year.

Minor league players, sometimes as young as 18, are hyped up to be the "next big thing" in baseball. 

As fans and fantasy baseball participants, we either watch these young talents blow up and become stars or unfortunately bear witness to them being thrown into the fire.

Performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) have tarnished the last twenty years of Major League Baseball, and that is sad.  After witnessing perhaps the greatest era of individual performance in the game’s history during the last twenty years or so, we are forced to live with the reality that a lot of those accomplishments are tainted.  The problem now faced by those who love and respect the game is their lack of full knowledge of which of those accomplishments, of the records attained, are tainted and which are clean.  And

“Hey batter batter batter! Swing batter! He can’t hit, he can’t hit, he can’t hit, SWING batter!”

Ferris Bueller’s best friend Cameron Frye yelled these words at a Chicago Cubs game the day they took off from school in the 1986 comedy “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”