Free Republic

The Bambino stands in the center of the stage, untouchable, uncatchable, unbeatable. He is Newt Gingrich, and he has become the Sultan of Swat. It is Saturday night at yet another Republican debate and — wham! wham! wham! — Gingrich keeps blasting them out of the park. Mitt Romney claims he should be president, because, unlike Newt, Romney is not a “career politician.” “Let’s be candid,” Newt replies. “The only reason you didn’t become a career politician is that you lost to Ted Kennedy in 1994.” Wham! Newt, like the real Bambino, Babe Ruth, is a man of appetites. For...

It's now or never for the New York Yankees. The Yankees open a five-game series at Fenway Park on Friday with their alter egos in the American League East, the Boston Red Sox. Just 1 1/2 games will separate the two teams when that series begins. Since the All-Star break, the Sox have slipped considerably, going 16-17 with problems surfacing with their starting pitching, relief corps and hitting (with the exception of David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez). The Yankees, meanwhile, seem to have righted themselves after a long year of struggles with injuries and under-producing pitchers such as Randy Johnson....

10/17/2003  3:28 AM ET--They had tears in their eyes as they spoke about friends, not just teammates. Baseball players talk about the family inside the clubhouse all the time, but this is a team that lived it like few others in recent memory, hugging their way deep into October.The band of brothers inside the Red Sox clubhouse was hurting as one, feeling pain they'd never felt before at the end of a baseball season like none they'd ever experienced before.After all they'd been through together through an amazing run in 2003, the Red Sox were one big, sad family in...

OCTOBER 17--It's not exactly "Dewey Defeats Truman," but The New York Post made a colossal error today on its editorial page. The paper somehow printed an editorial bemoaning last night's Yankees loss to the Boston Red Sox, noting that the "Curse of the Bambino boomeranged this year" and that the Bronx Bombers "couldn't get the job done at home." The editorial concluded, "Wait'll next year!" Obviously, the Post piece was drafted while the Yanks were trailing the Sox, but was--unbelievably--not yanked when the club tied the game in the eighth inning and won it on Aaron Boone's walkoff home run...

1918

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Yankees (81-51) at Red Sox (76-56), 7:05 p.m. ET The stretch run officially begins Friday for the Yankees, when they play the first of three weekend games against the Red Sox at Fenway Park. New York enters the weekend with a 4 1/2-game lead over Boston in the American League East, having defeated the Chicago White Sox, 7-5, on Thursday to avoid a three-game sweep. The Yankees have won 10 of their last 14 games, though they are just 3-4 in their last seven. The Red Sox enter the series winners of six out of seven. "This is the best...

The Boston Red Sox's Grady Little models the new 2003 uniform for the start of the Major League Baseball Training season pre-season camps which begin February 9 and 10.

In the first ever speech to the Italian parliament by a head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope John Paul II has called on Italians to have more children. He described Italy's declining birth rate as a crisis, and said politicians should take action to make parenthood easier, both socially and financially. The speech also touched on the hostility between the Vatican and Rome in the last century, saying that this had long since given way to co-operation and mutual respect. The Vatican was left with only a small fraction of its territory after the foundation of the Italian state...