Joe Posnanski

Well, folks, it looks like the blog may be down periodically for the next couple of days because the crazy increase in traffic here has has forced me to move the whole kit and caboodle* to a faster server. *It’s a shame that nobody ever uses the word “caboodle” without throwing kit in front of it. It’s like the Lou Whitaker of words -- Whitaker was a really good player on his own, you shouldn’t have to throw Trammell in front of his ... Read More

You know how sometimes someone will say, “You won’t believe this,” and then they say it, and the thing ends up being a huge disappointment. Like they will say: “You won’t believe this, but I gained 10 pounds the last month.” Now, why wouldn’t I believe that? There is nothing in that statement that is especially hard to believe, especially if I have seen you stuff your face with McDonald’s fries and a nightly frozen custard. And I have. No mystery here, ... Read More

Atlanta, 1996 was my first Olympics. You might recall that there were a few problems with that Olympics. The complex and multi-layered bus schedule, apparently, was designed by forest animals. Everybody had a bus story before the end*. A terrorist set off a bomb. There were the constant and creepy pronouncements from organizer Billy Payne and his bunch about how the Olympics “were going according to plan.” The Southern humidity wore everyone down. The horrendous Izzy Mascot was everywhere you turned. And ... Read More

I’m here in beautiful Cincinnati getting ready for the emotional “Cesar Geronimo going into the Reds Hall of Fame” weekend. It should be great ... lots of Big Red Machiners coming back. Hey, did I mention I was writing a book on those guys? One thing I know I mentioned is that Geronimo is not really the headliner this weekend ... Cincinnati native Barry Larkin will also be inducted into the Reds Hall. And it reminds me that I’ve long meant to put ... Read More

I don’t like breaking news on this blog because that’s a small part of my actual day job, and anyway breaking news is, like, a whole lot of work. Really. Did you see how hard Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman worked to break Watergate? It took them well over an hour. They had Max Dugan down their throats the whole time. They had to file through all those cards in the library with that crazy music playing in the background. Hoffman had ... Read More

I will begin here by linking to my my wife Margo’s blog because she too has weighed in on the question that is sweeping the nation, Costner vs. Cruise. What a race! * * * I have mentioned this before: I don’t listen to talk radio. This goes back to my brief and spectacularly unsuccessful run as a sports talk show host back in the 1990s. I can’t tell you a lot about those five or six weeks how because I’ve blocked them out, ... Read More

One of the more common emails I get in my day job will go a little something like this: “Oh yeah, like you know. When was the last time you bought a ticket to a game? When was the last time you paid for parking? When was the last time you sat in crummy seats? You sit up there in the press box feeding your fat face, drinking beer on the ballclub’s dime, you have no idea what it’s like to be a ... Read More

I don't often link to stories on the Internet here because, for one thing, I usually find those stories months and years and decades after everyone else. Then I say to my wife something like, "Hey, did you see this Jay Leno memo to America about being more positive?" And she will say, "That was debunked like TWO YEARS AGO, what have you been doing the last two years anyway?" And I'll say, "Uh, writing blog posts about Duane Kuiper and my ... Read More

Well, I probably missed it because there were roughly 10 million Tim Russert tributes in the days after he died, and honestly after a while they all started to run together -- he was a Bills fan, great guy, a Bills fan, a modest person who couldn’t believe all the success he had, a Washington Nationals season ticket holder, a question asker, a good friend, a Bills fan, a decent man, a hopeful guy who believed in family and faith, a Bills ... Read More

OK, you know how Mark Twain popularized the phrase, “There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies and statistics?”* *The quote, apparently, was first spoken by the famed British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, but nobody would have ever heard of it unless Twain mentioned it. Here’s a tip I think I have mentioned before: Anytime you want to make one of your quotes a little more popular, you should attribute it to: [print_this] 1. Mark Twain. 2. Abraham Lincoln. 3. The Bible. 4. Satchel Paige or Dizzy ... Read More