In 1960, Boston Globe cartoonist Phil Bissell, working for $25 a day, was handed an assignment that would change his life—and the lives of fans of the brand-new AFL football team coming to Boston. “Sports editor Jerry Nason came to […]
Ask most people what the most-visited national park in the United States is and their minds will almost certainly go first to one of the iconic sites out west. But the answer to that question is not the Grand Canyon […]
The Triple-A baseball club in Rochester, New York, has a remarkable history. Founded in 1899, it lays claim to being North America’s longest continuously operating non-Major League franchise. It also lays claim to being part of the longest baseball game […]
The town of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, sits at the southern tip of Lake Winnebago—its name, translated from French, means “bottom of the lake.” (Lake Winnebago, I was sad to realize as I started writing this article, is not to […]
The Idaho Falls Chukars, a Kansas City Royals affiliate in the Rookie-level Pioneer League, are not named for the most intimidating bird out there. “No, in fact, it’s essentially a little partridge,” said the team’s longtime president and general manager […]
The city of Lynchburg, Virginia, is surrounded by hills—seven of them, to be exact. The identity of the city’s minor league baseball team, the Lynchburg Hillcats, High-A affiliate of the Cleveland Indians, has been tied to those hills for more […]
Like many industrial towns, Niles, Ohio, has had its share of ups and downs. The town thrived with the iron industry in the late 1800s, then struggled through an economic depression and a flood in the early 1900s. The steel […]
Baseball goes way back in Lexington, Kentucky. But after playing host to a handful of teams dating back to the 1800s, the city went without baseball for most of the second half of the 20th century. After the Negro Leagues’ […]
I had never been to Greenville, South Carolina, before last Thursday, when I rolled into town in a van with eight longtime friends to kick off a four-day minor league baseball road trip we call “Baseballpalooza.” Greenville pops up a lot […]
Vancouver, Canada, is a fascinating, beautiful city. More than half of its population claims something other than English as a first language. Vancouver’s population density is Canada’s highest and North America’s fourth highest, but it also has the 1.5-square-mile Stanley […]
The Single-A Delmarva Shorebirds play in Salisbury, Maryland, a town of roughly 30,000 residents that bills itself as the crossroads of the Delmarva Peninsula. This raises the important question, what in the world is the Delmarva Peninsula? While most sports […]
Let’s be honest, of all the sharks out there in the world, hammerheads are one of the few that can be described as goofy looking. They have tiny mouths under their big, crazy noggins (technically called cephalofoils), which they use […]
