Mitch Nathanson

I’m grateful that we as fans know so much about the players we root for nowadays.  But sometimes I think I’d just prefer to believe that JT couldn’t make the Toronto trip because he had eaten too many hot dogs.

Focusing on the relatively worthless ball, itself, is beside the point. Rather, it’s bringing it home and proudly displaying it on our mantelpiece as a memory-triggering device that constitutes the value. It’s this process that transforms a valueless ball into a priceless artifact.

While I have no issue with any fan who wants to surrender their hard-won foul ball to a kid or anyone else, I find the social enforcement of this newfangled tradition unsettling, telling, and sad.  And I want to explain – right now, so there will be no misunderstanding later – why I’m never giving your kid the ball I catch no matter what.

The Branch Rickey story is a narrative heist that once again leaves the Black men and those in the alternative press who did the hard work to right an entrenched wrong on the sidelines, spectators to their own history.  As baseball celebrates yet another Jackie Robinson Day it might be worthwhile to ask: whose story is it really celebrating?

Yesterday, on what should have been the day after the Hall of Fame’s Golden Days era committee elected him for enshrinement, Dick Allen died at home in Wampum, PA.  It was the final injustice in what for him had been a lifetime of them perpetrated by the baseball establishment.

Ho, Ho, Ho, says Phillies owner John Middleton, Merry Christmas!  Why, it’s not even December and already Middleton and friends have blessed Delaware Valley baseball fans by giving them the gift they’ll put to good use for the next year at least – the gift of not caring about this travesty of a baseball team.

Celebrating yourself for ceasing to inflict a harm you never should have inflicted at all strikes a discordant note in the symphony MLB likes to play for itself

Embed from Getty Images By Mitch Nathanson, Historical Columnist  We do it all the time, whenever we’re confronted with the…

If we’re looking for positives in this 2020 baseball season here’s a big one: the fever grip of stubborn intractability that has had a death grip on the game for over a century has loosened. Who knows what will happen once things return to normal.  But maybe now baseball has been freed to fix itself at last.

MLB has failed in its attempt to return from COVID-19. What can we learn from it?

Embed from Getty Images By Mitch Nathanson, Historical Columnist  In 2003, the final year of Veterans Stadium, my third base…

Embed from Getty Images By Mitch Nathanson, Historical Columnist  Whatever name the Washington football club decides upon going forward we…

Embed from Getty Images By Mitch Nathanson, Historical Columnist  50 games, 70 games, 65 games, whatever. Let’s get this nightmare…

Embed from Getty Images By Mitch Nathanson, Historical Columnist  Until a few days ago I was on the other side. …

Embed from Getty Images By Mitch Nathanson, Historical Columnist  Anybody tells you that I missed practice — If a coach…

Spare me another article on athletes missing out on the last ounce of their privilege due to the coronavirus quarantine

The damage to spectator sports might not be so much that we don’t have them right now.  The damage might very well be that when they return we’ll no longer want them around.

Embed from Getty Images By Mitch Nathanson, Historical Columnist  Regardless of whether you found yesterday's unveiling of a rejiggered Phanatic…

Do you like our new green man?
We do not like him, say Phillies fans.

The Phillies reacted to the death of Kobe Bryant by retiring Roy Halladay’s number. Wait, what?

Baseball’s original sin resides in the chasm between what we want it to be and what it in fact is. When it fails it’s not that it fails differently but that it fails in ways that show that its no different than any other institution in American life

Mike Fiers’s sin was not lying but telling too much of the truth. In the insular world of baseball, he’ll be made to suffer for it.

Embed from Getty Images By Mitch Nathanson, Historical Columnist  ‘Twas the night before Christmas and throughout CBP No one was…

Marvin Miller spoke the words that set the players free. Dick Allen lived them. Cooperstown should take note of that reality.