On David Falk, Nike, and the politics Michael Jordan could not avoid.

A fan’s short-lived, half-hearted, glorious stint working in Madison Square Garden.

A look back at recently retired pitcher Tim Wakefield and his rare gift:

The knuckleball—also known as the knuckler, the fingernail ball, the fingertip ball, the flutterball, the floater, the dancer, the bug, the butterfly ball, the moth, the bubble, the ghostball, the horseshoe, the dry spitter, and, curiously, the spinner—has been around, in one form or another, for nearly as long as professional baseball itself, though for much of that time it has been regarded with suspicion. Spinning is precisely what it does not do. In fact, a lack of spin is about the only identifying characteristic of the pitch. There is no right way to hold a knuckleball when throwing it (seams, no seams; two fingers, three), and no predictable flight pattern once it leaves the hand. “Butterflies aren’t bullets,” the longtime knuckleballer Charlie Hough once said. “You can’t aim ’em—you just let ’em go.” The pitch shakes, shimmies, wobbles, drops—it knuckles, as they say. Which is doubly confusing, because the term “knuckleball” is itself a kind of misnomer, a holdover from the pitch’s largely forgotten infancy.

On Feb. 10, [Evan] Kaufmann finished dressing and skated onto the ice at a tournament in Belarus. With his initial shift, he became one of the few Jews to represent Germany in elite international sports since World War II, the first in ice hockey since the 1930s and perhaps the most visible to have had family members murdered in the Holocaust, according to sports historians and Jewish officials.

“It was almost surreal,” said Kaufmann, 27, a forward who was born in Minnesota and is the second-leading goal scorer here for the DEG Metro Stars of the German professional league. “From an achievement standpoint, it was amazing to represent the country. But it was pretty insane to think about what my grandpa had to survive to allow me to be where I am today and how it’s come a long way from then to now.”

On the making of “Homer At The Bat,” The Simpsons episode that conquered prime time 20 years ago this week.

The Tampa Bay Rays’ Sam Fuld revisits last season’s historic night.

Tyler Kepner, the baseball columnist for The New York Times, had a column on Sunday that attempted to explain why baseball fans love spring training. “Yes, there’s the warm weather, the comfort of routine, the general lack of night games,” he wrote. “But really, the reason is that spring training is the only time when everybody gets to be optimistic. In a game built on failure, there is value in that.” Continue Reading →

Gary Carter didn’t grow up. Oh, he got older, that was noticeable. His body changed. His swing changed. His game changed. But he didn’t grow up. He never seemed to lose his enthusiasm, his zeal. He seemed to love playing baseball to the end — and not love it in some vague, distant way, but love it the way a kid does, all out, like it was the first day of spring training. He called his book ‘Still a Kid At Heart.” That seemed right.

On Barca’s manager, Pep, and Sterling Cooper’s man, Don.

There’s a light coming off that giant horrible Fortune Cookie, and in it, you can see there are two games Lin is playing and winning—one is basketball, the other is the game the American media complex plays in making you think X about Asians. Winning one wins the other—he makes changing the world look as easy as playing ball.

George Plimpton takes his nine-year-old daughter to a Harvard–Yale football game.

Ted Williams’ final moments in Fenway Park.