Bob Collins
There are some photographs you can waste a Friday afternoon staring at. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Sports
Sometimes the rain delay is more entertaining than the baseball game. Read more →
In Fertile, Minn., Ryan Strem has built a baseball field in the shadow of a corn field for the local kids to play ball for free.
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An all-time catch
There has likely never been a better piece of advice than this ancient directive: Don’t be stupid.
Just ask Ken Pagan, whose life will never be quite the same since he did something stupid.
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Chicago Cubs fans are patting themselves on the back today for supporting a franchise with enough class to give Steve Bartman a World Series ring.
Winning a World Series can make bygones be bygones, but it doesn’t erase history in which many of the same Cubs fans made Bartman’s life a living hell. Read more →
Surely on a list of the most interesting people who ever landed in flyover country, Ila Borders must rank pretty high. She was one of the first women on a professional baseball team (women played in the Negro Leagues) when she signed with the St. Paul Saints in ’97.
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Golf’s decline is illustrated this week with word that two urban golf courses are on death’s doorstep. The Minneapolis Parks Board will vote next month on a plan that to close the Hiawatha golf course because of continuing costs of pumping groundwater will likely curtail 18-hole golf at Hiawatha Golf Course. And the Pioneer Press Read more →
A triple play is one of the more rare events in baseball and a triple play in which a run scores must surely be among the most impossible feats.
Last night, however, Todd Frazier of the dastardly New York Yankees accomplished it.
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Maura and Bobby Marko are the type of parents who can make you think you raised your kids wrong. Or maybe you didn’t make many concessions in your life when kids came along and maybe you didn’t listen to the people who told you that you couldn’t do things because you have kids now, and maybe you, too, did the things with your kids the Marko family does. Read more →
College sports is awash in money but most of it is lavished on men’s programs. The women? It’s the tin cup, at least for women’s hockey.
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Oh, you think you can hit a Minnesota high school girl’s fast-pitch softball delivery?
You probably can’t and if you do, it’s probably luck.
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In his early years in the U.S. Senate, Al Franken tended to avoid comedy. When his book came out this year, Franken dared to be funny again, discovering that comedy is great storytelling and great storytelling is part of the art of politics. Read more →
When NYPD officer Miosotis Familia was assassinated on July 5, her friends in the department were ready to cancel the outing to Boston’s Fenway Park that she and the others in the 46th Precinct had planned to watch the Yankees play the Red Sox. After all, her funeral was just last week. Read more →
The Trinidad Triggers play in the Pecos League, where players get about $50 a week to chase a dream that will elude almost of them. Oh, it’s not all baseball romance by a lot shot.
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