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Columbia Workshop: The Plot to Overthrow Christmas (CBS, 24 December 1942)One or another way, Christmas Eve broadcasts over classic (1927-62) network radio will survive to be heard by generations who weren't alive when radio was the world's primary conductor of home entertainment. These can be considered some of the finest gifts the era bequeathed, even unto generations jaded enough by video and cinematic excess and ubiquity that you fear their inability to appreciate what one radio show's customary introduction called "the theater of the mind." The offerings range from the sublime to the ridiculous and back to the absurd and...

OverturePeanut Brittle Brigade (March)Sugar Rum Cherry (Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy)Entr'acte (Mini-overture)The Volga Vouty (Russian Dance)Arabesque Cookie (Arabian Dance)Chinoiserie (Chinese Dance)Toot, Toot, Tootie, Toot (Dance of the Reed Pipes)Dance of the Floreadores (Waltz of the Flowers)

Yes, I would rather be thinking aloud about such things as Jeff Samardzija’s slightly ridiculous contract. (Shades of Bud Black.) About whether John Lackey’s and (especially) Jason Heyward’s signings with the Cubs really do make them a 2016 World Series entrant. (Berra’s Law still applies, as the 2015 Nationals can tell you.) About how much financial flexibility Michael Cuddyer’s retirement leaves the Mets. (Some, but maybe not quite enough to think about re-signing Yoenis Cespedes.) Or Johnny Cueto signing with the Giants. Among other things. But commissioner Rob Manfred has let it be known that Pete Rose isn’t going to...

Before the Washington Nationals lost their final regular season game to the National League East champion Mets, general manager Mike Rizzo promised he wasn’t going to leave people twisting in the wind. Rizzo’s words, not mine. Maybe he thought Nats fans had been forced into doing the twist too long this season already. Monday morning Rizzo kept his promise—and how. He executed manager Matt Williams, just a year after Williams was named the National League’s Manager of the Year. The man who came into the season leading the prohibitive World Series favourites leaves it with his head in a guillotine...

From your ancient baseball history, 1949 to be specific, a little story: In his third major league season, a still very young Yogi Berra has been the target of much veteran needling. Part of it has been due to his squat, homely appearance. But sometimes it has nothing to do with his appearance and everything to do with continuing the young man’s baseball education. Berra has impressed his manager, coaches, and teammates alike with his willingness to listen, learn, listen more, and learn more, but never mind. One fine day he lofts a short pop to center field that falls...

When Yogi Berra turned 90 in May, I wrote, “There are those who walk among us in their twilight and inspire us to think that, warts and all, our world still remains a lovely place to be simply because such people still walk among us.” Unfortunately, our world is now a little more empty by a lot, as the man himself might say, thanks to Berra’s death Tuesday night. It’s gotten late early out here. Sad, but not surprising, alas. It’s too often true that those in great love affairs that last not weeks, not months, but decades, do not...

There is no joy in Wrigleyville. Mighty Ernie has checked out. At 83. Cub fans aren't the only ones in baseball's world who think that, for Ernie Banks, it's still too young to go. Winning with class is easy compared to losing with grace, good humor, and the inner peace of knowing you did the best you could with what you had. But then there was Banks. The prototype of the power-hitting shortstop whose knees turned him into a first baseman who could still hit but had to prove himself every spring, anyway, his sunny nature couldn't be killed by...

Our annual Christmas Day radio listening merely begins with two jewels from a master satirist: The Linit Bath Club Revue: The Mammoth Department Store (CBS, 1932) Here’s a treat for any old-time radio fan—the oldest known surviving program hosted by the singular Fred Allen, in whose spotlight sketch he plays a man with a sometimes unenviable profession: managing a department store . . . on the day after Christmas. Hopefully, without driving himself crazy. Cast: Portland Hoffa, Sheila Barrett, Roy Atwell, Charles Carlile. Announcer: Ken Roberts. Music: Lou Katzman Orchestra, Mary Leaf at the organ. Writer: Fred Allen. Texaco Star...

I’m not convinced that I can possibly improve upon this particular entry from Christmas Eves past, so I’ll continue this journal’s little tradition. For all who celebrate, and for anyone sorely in need of extra cheer this and any such season, today’s offerings are dedicated, as always. Columbia Workshop: The Plot to Overthrow Christmas (CBS, 24 December 1942) Set in hell, delivered in verse (some of it, admittedly, is a little on the awkward side but the archness of the delivery and the quality of the bulk makes up for it), some of history’s most notorious villains to that point...

Lum & Abner: Christmas Story (CBS, 1938) “We try,” co-creator Chester Lauck has told Radio Guide, “to make our program amusing through the situations we build up rather than through the ignorance or obtuseness of any character.” And if you’re looking for an individual episode that proves every word he said is true, even telling a story outside Lum & Abner‘s customary serial style, you’ll find one today. The Pine Ridge philosophickers are just as good in leaving you to imagine a crawl through the worst of the rural winter as a potbelly stove burning and wares occasionally clacking and...

. . . after being even crazier enough to cut them as demos myself. 1) On Time. This one is a little blues I came up with hoping to use it as a kind-of theme for my new blues group. Considering the rhythmic suggestion of clocks and the title I finally decided to use, I couldn't resist setting it to a montage of classic ad clocks . . . Guitar: Gibson Les Paul. Vibraphone, bass, harmonica, drums, bongo, conga, temple block simulations: Casio LK-220 electronic keyboard. Amplifier: Fender Deluxe Reverb. 2) Fremont Ramble. This is a little jam number I...

Try this one, if you will. Umpires can botch home run calls (hello, Angel Hernandez) and get away with it, more or less. Sometimes, they can botch pitching change rules (hello, Fielden Culbreth) with a little help from managers who don’t know the rules quite yet (hello, Bo Porter). But who knew our beloved human elements (aren’t you getting exhausted of that tiresome phrase and its customary accompanying rhetoric?) could miss a no-questions-asked application from the latest inductee into the Salivation Army? In the second inning Monday night, Miami Marlins righthander Alex Sanabia had just been taken into the seats...

Says Tracy Ringolsby, Hall of Fame baseball writer ruminating over baseball’s long enough history of ownership troubles: “There’s been troubled ownership in baseball since at least the days of Babe Ruth, who in 1919 was sold by Boston Red Sox owner Harry Frazee to the New York Yankees for $125,000 because Frazee needed money to fund his Broadway musical No, No, Nannette.” Say I: Aw, jeez, not this crap again. Ringolsby, customarily one of the game’s better writers, seems blissfully unaware that the No, No, Nanette myth (notice he couldn’t even spell it right) was debunked several years ago. As...

We didnÂ’t expect, we merely hoped, that one way or the other Gary Carter would conquer the enemy that finally took him down Thursday. Knowing Carter, perhaps one of the better things we can think of his death at 57 is that at least he was granted that one final ValentineÂ’s Day, to spend with the wife he loved proudly over thirty-seven years of marriage. Until a massive attack of glioblastoma multiforme that was diagnosed almost a year ago, Carter was living proof that living well is the sweetest revenge. The exuberant young man who was considered poison because he...

An acquaintance on another forum (not a political forum) pondered whether believing that man walked on the moon was faith-based. I told my acquaintance that I didn't exactly need faith to believe it, I had seen the coverage on live television in the summer of 1969 (our summer camp's director made an event out of it, rounding everyone to the camp canteen to see it, even though it was way past our bedtimes!), not to mention having seen, in the years to follow, other footages (including Alan Shepard's rather Chaplinesque attempt to play golf on the moon surface) and written...

When Vin Scully and Joe Garagiola called the 1986 World Series for NBC television, their recurring theme harked to Dickens: it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Baseball’s 2011 season–during which it seemed New York, perhaps inexplicably, was anxious to think of anything but the silver anniversary of those rapacious Mets—was much like that. Beginning with the worst of times—the unconsionable beating of a San Francisco Giants fan in the parking lot of a security-challenged Dodger Stadium; the tragic falling death of a Texas Rangers fan trying to spear a ball for his little son...

The Hilton Anatole hotel in Dallas has been there before. That’s where Alex Rodriguez accepted $250 million of then-Texas Rangers owner Tom Hicks’s misspent money, once upon a time. Hicks had a club three-to-thirteen-deep in pitching woes, and he decided the most surefire way of plugging up the leaking runs was to commit the near-equivalent of a solid pitching staff to . . . a shortstop. That was then, this is now. The Los Angeles Angels aren’t exactly trying to plug leaks by committing to a first baseman. But they didn’t exactly leave southern California dry by committing ten years...

It is appropriate to set aside this journal’s customary business now and then to pay tribute to class and loss away from baseball. If you think that boxing is a profession, if not necessarily a sport, to which class is an unwelcome intruder, you may not have known Joe Frazier, who died of liver cancer at 62 on Monday. Or, at least, you may not really think that class was beaten out of the profession once and for all by the third and last of his showdowns with Muhammad Ali. “I heard somethin’ once,” Ali told Sports Illustrated‘s Mark Kram,...

If it seemed at times as though Andy Rooney was old enough to have been—God help us!—the Father of His Country, well, you can be forgiven for that. He seemed at least to have been old enough to have been the father of CBS, if William S. Paley hadn’t already done the job. For a decent amount of time, he may have been America’s favourite grouse. For an indecent amount of time, he may have seemed just like a grouse with an air-tight contract. For once upon a time, he might have been the model for a certain one among...

Their 25th anniversary seems to be more sober than an awful lot of the team was. But Allen Barra is right. Twenty-five years ago tonight launched the 1986 World Series, which the New York Mets would win in rather dramatic fashion. There was and remains nothing wrong with that. The 1986 Mets may have steamrolled the National League on the regular season, but there was nothing like a pair of hair-raising postseason sets to remind people that even teams as good as those Mets have to work, good and hard, for their prizes. Yet it seems as though even Met...