Out of Left Field

Words matter. Donald Hall, the old Poet Laureate of the United States, knew that as well as anyone. “To appreciate the word,” he once wrote, “writers and readers must first realize that no words can be exact synonyms. Some words are close to each other in meaning, close enough to reveal that they are not the same.” It’s ironic, then, that one of the words in Hall’s classic collection of essays on...

Sixty-four hundred people were in the building and saw it for themselves. None of them could believe their eyes, but they saw it. Countless others watched the highlights on SportsCenter or stopped their scrolling long enough to read gobsmacked posts about what had happened. Oh, it happened. Even if the record books—some of the record books, anyway—will have you believe that it didn’t. At least not...

Join us for a new season of Out of Left Field . . . coming soon!

On December 12, 2020, Jasmine Harrison climbed aboard Argo and started rowing. She has not stepped foot on dry land since. The 21-year-old swim instructor/bartender-turned-adventurer is competing in the 2020 Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge, a 3,000-mile race from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean. There are 21 boats in this year’s TWAC, and Jasmine is the only woman among the eight solo...

The mainstream sports fan probably only spends about six minutes watching horse racing in a given year — the combined running time of the three Triple Crown races. A smaller subset will follow the 14 million-dollar races run over Breeders Cup weekend. Fewer still will watch the graded stakes races that lead up to the Kentucky Derby. Almost no one pays attention to the claimers, the largest s...

As you’re sitting around this Election Day, waiting for results to come in, sports might be the furthest thing from your mind. Just as when you watched your favorite college football team play on Saturday, electoral politics probably were the last thing you wanted to think about. But what if there actually is a relationship between the two, a link between the outcomes of Saturday’s gam...

It was a baseball game that originally was not supposed to be played. By the time it was over, it was a game that 16 seniors from Rhodes College and SUNY Oneonta — and their teammates, coaches, and families — will never forget. Officially, their seasons had been cancelled a few days earlier, as the spreading coronavirus began to rewrite the Spring of 2020. But the Lynx and Dragons were...

The NFL likes to tell college prospects that the size of their school or the level of competition they play doesn’t matter, that if a player has talent, they’ll find him. But small school prospects know the reality: exposure to NFL decision-makers is extremely limited, and there just aren’t many opportunities to catch an eye. Especially in a world shut down by a global pandemic....

Opening Day is about many things: The return of baseball season. The end of winter. Most of all, it is a day of hope and possibility. The caliber of gameplay might not yet be in midseason form, nor is the weather; still, Opening Day arrives with the promise of better days to come.  Not this Opening Day. In 2020, Opening Day of the Major League Baseball season came and went, without anything a...