Tagged: Baseball

Baseball star Roger Clemens goes on trial for a second time Monday on charges that he lied to a congressional committee about using steroids and human growth hormone. His trial on perjury and obstruction charges last summer ended abruptly when prosecutors mistakenly showed the jury evidence that the judge had ruled inadmissible.

Clemens won a record seven Cy Young awards during his storied pitching career, but prosecutors contend that he used steroids and human growth hormone to prolong that career.

Author Glenn Stout talks to us about his book, "Fenway 1912."

It was a sold out game on a pure Southern California day.

"Isn't this beautiful? Blue sky, not a cloud in the air, nice little breeze," said Maury Wills, who was the Dodgers shortstop in 1962. "It's warm Southern California."

Wills joined a bunch of his old teammates Tuesday to celebrate Dodger Stadium's 50th anniversary. It's also the 50th anniversary of the Beach Boys. So they sang the national anthem after "Surfer Girl."

Baseball’s spring training is well under way in Florida and Arizona. While players work to make a spot for themselves and prepare for the start of the season, coaches, managers and scouts evaluate the talent they see on the fields; and they increasingly are using something called advanced defensive metrics.  John Dewan is the owner of Baseball Info Solutions, and one of the authors of The Fielding Bible- Volume 3.  The book is a compilation of defensive statistics. We reached him while he was in Arizona to ask him about defensive analysis in the game, and what exactly teams do with that information.

Coaches and managers, as a group, have always been pretty straightforward types. We don't think of generals or preachers as humorists — and, after all, that's pretty much what coaches are, a hybrid of the military and the pulpit.

But at least in the past, there were always a fair complement of coaching characters: old cracker-barrel philosophers, feisty wise guys and even a few sardonic intellectuals.

But the oddballs are diminishing. I think much of this has to do with the fact that sports has increasingly come to depend upon statistics, and so more and more coaches aren't skippers, as they've been, colloquially, in the past, but — for goodness sakes — programmers.

Baseball practice has just begun at many high schools across the country, but this year, the game is different. The National Federation of State High School Associations has adopted a new standard for baseball bats that is expected to change the way the game is played.

The switch involves a change of bat — from a regular aluminum bat to a metal bat known as Batted-Ball Coefficient of Restitution, or BBCOR. The bats are less springy and have a smaller "sweet spot." In other words, they behave more like old-fashioned wooden bats. The idea is that since the balls come off the bats more slowly, there's a reduced potential for injury.

New Bat, New Game?