Joe Posnanski

OK, well, the blog sort of took a hard right turn there with the Royals signing Jose Guillen and the BBWAA zaniness and all. I want to once again thank my good friend, the classy Bob Dutton for taking time to answer some questions. He’s been pretty well besieged with interview requests lately (here’s another one on Maury Brown’s site if you just can’t get enough Bob). I thought he was very generous to take the time to answer questions. Not everyone ... Read More

I always thought Groucho Marx went a few words too far when he said, “I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.” I believe he could have just said: “I don’t care to belong to a club.” Left it there. I am a card-carrying member of the Baseball Writers Association of America, have been for almost 15 years, and it’s a perplexing and contradictory experience. About the only thing I can say for sure about the ... Read More

FIrst off, big thanks to all of you who have bought The Soul of Baseball. Don’t worry -- your bookplates are coming. I will have them out on Tuesday at the latest. Second, here’s the Holiday special offer if you buy a new copy of The Soul of Baseball. I have run out of bookplates, but I have changed the link so that if you click on the book link now, it will take you to my favorite independent bookstore Rainy Day Books. ... Read More

We will soon have a big ol’ BBWAA post up here which, I hope, will include an extended interview with my friend and coworker Bob Dutton, the prez of the BBWAA. In the meantime, I want to finish up on Emil vs. Guillen. * * * One of problems of making any argument is that people will sometimes, as Bill James says, take a secondary or supporting point and make that into the actual argument. Bill calls this a “discussion drift.” There’s really no ... Read More

Everyone here already knows where I stand on the Royals signing of Jose Guillen, so this will be relatively short. I don’t like the move, and it has little-to-nothing to do with Guillen’s supposed attitude problems (I have heard from insightful people that he’s a good guy who has been misunderstood). It has little-to-nothing to do with his steroid suspension (I’m definitely leaning more and more to the idea that the majority of players have been doing something illegal -- steroids, HGH, ... Read More

OK, I’m not a fan of the Royals signing of Jose Guillen. I’m not a fan of it because I have this very real suspicion that the guy is about to go in the tank. I mean REALLY go in the tank. He’s almost 32. He’s been directly linked to some pretty heavy steroid and HGH use. He’s on his ninth different team. Here are the totals from his last five years: .270/.339/.431, 114 homers, 405 RBIs, 357 runs, 50 RCAA Now, that’s nothing special. ... Read More

All the heroes of my early childhood wore capes. Funny. There was Superman, of course, the cartoon, the comic books, mostly the George Reeves’* character on weekday afternoon television, a not-so-muscular Superman who would stand at full attention, hands on his hips, smug look on his face while the villain unloaded his revolver (and then, as the comedians have pointed out, duck when the villain threw the gun his way). There was Batman and Robin, sliding down the poles, to the Batcave, into ... Read More

On November 4, The Ohio State was ranked No. 1 in America by both the Harris Poll people and the USA Today coaches. They were ranked No. 1 by most of the computers that are used in the BCS system as well. The reason for this, apparently, is that The Ohio State was undefeated. At that point, the Buckeyes did not have a single victory over any of the Top 25 teams in the BCS. They had just mauled Wisconsin at home, ... Read More

First off, congratulations to the newest Hall of Fame members -- Billy Southworth, Dick Williams, Barney Dreyfuss, Bowie Kuhn and Walter O’Malley. What a day, eh? This veteran’s committee induction class has made me think a little bit more about what the Hall of Fame really means. Here, without looking anything up, is what I know about these five men: Billy Southworth: Came from Nebraska, I believe, hard ass manager, won a couple of World Series with the Cardinals during the war ... Read More

We’ve got a little Baseball Hall of Fame post coming up -- the first of many, I’m sure -- but first, here’s a thought on the BCS and Ohio State. I grew up as an Ohio State fan. I grew up in the final days of the great Woody Hayes, that brilliant lunatic who might recite Shakespeare to you one minute and strap a pipe bomb to his chest the next. Characters did seem larger than life in those days, didn’t they? It ... Read More