World Football

In life, and in sports, nearly everyone experiences prolonged periods of both success and failure. Of course, the 2014 sports year was far from different, as fans were treated to some truly memorable performances, of both the good and bad sort.

Madison Bumgarner, for example, had a downright iconic year, establishing himself as one of baseball’s all-time greats with the type of postseason pitching we’d never seen before.

I really hope Mike Napoli didn’t put a down payment on a house in Toronto.

Where would the Yankees bullpen have been last season without Alfredo Aceves? Probably right about where they are right now without him. And LHP Manny Banuelos is one of the top pitching prospects in the organization.

What do these two players have in common? The Yankees signed both of them out of Mexico.

They actually have a third player they signed out of Mexico, and he could do for the bench what Aceves did to the bullpen.

Dorothy “Dottie” Kamenshek was the Babe Ruth, so to speak, of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, the only women’s professional baseball league in baseball history. 

She passed away on May 17, 2010 at age 84.  The Gina Davis character in A League of Their Own was named after Dottie and loosely based on her.

The AAGPBL lasted 12 seasons from 1943 through 1954.  At its inception, the “girls” played a game that was closer to fast-pitch softball than what we think of as baseball. 

Well it's that time of the year. Players rest. Minds are eased. A meaningless game is televised by Fox as fans listen to McCarver rant.

In every sport, there’s at least one team that seems to “stack the deck,” meaning rack up all the talent so that no one else can have any and the stacked team wins championship after championship. Sometimes, the team has so much talent, that great players languish on the bench, and they could be starring someplace else. When I say “broken up,” I mean that the teams should get rid of some of their talent so other teams have a chance at having a good team. McMullen’s Musings takes a look at teams that should do just that.