Free Republic

As a kid I used to read stories about how Babe Ruth (or was it Ted Williams, maybe both) visited a terminally ill child, promised to hit a home run in his honor in the next game, and delivered. Were these stories true? I don’t know, but I enjoyed them. Something close to this scenario occurred in Baltimore last night. Trey Mancini plays first base for the Orioles. ... Mancini missed all of last season. He was diagnosed with stage-three colon cancer and underwent surgery and lengthy recovery/rehabilitation. During the rehabilitation process, he got to know Mo Gaba, a terminally...

MAHA, Neb. – Whit Merrifield knew he had to make simple contact. The junior outfielder stood at the plate in the bottom of the 11th inning of a tie game with the biggest potential run in the history of South Carolina baseball standing on third base. And on a 2-0 pitch, Merrifield brought that run home with a sharp single to right-field, a hit that delivered a 2-1 win over UCLA and the program’s first NCAA championship Tuesday night in the final College World Series game at Rosenblatt Stadium. "It was just elation when I saw it go through. I...

There was always a game going on in my neighborhood....... We didn't have a real ball field; we cobbled one together from a couple of backyards, a vacant lot, a garden, and a dog pen. My back yard was the infield in spring; I remember a man my father used to work with coming by and being greatly distressed at how we neighborhood boys had worn base paths into the grass. "Those boys are killing your yard," the man said. And I remember my father's answer: "Those boys will be gone someday, that grass will grow back."