07.16.2005 
Clemens has been the best pitcher in the league this year. Besides giving up half as many runs as Martinez, he’s given up one run on the road all year long, and two or fewer runs in 16 of 18 starts. Clemens has a good shot at winning consecutive Cy Youngs in a third decade.
07.9.2005
As good an idea as next spring’s World Baseball Classic is — and it is an excellent one — a good idea poorly executed is worth no more than a bad one and it looks as though the inaugural tournament may prove a disaster.
07.2.2005 With long, lean limbs and the handsome, slightly weathered mug of a boxer turned movie star, Pavano like someone you’d see in an old photograph with his arm draped over Joe DiMaggio’s shoulder. If he had the same statistics, the same injury history, and the same physical ability, but stood 5 foot 9 inches tall and had a face like a fire hydrant, he would not have been signed to a 4-year, $44 million deal this past winter.
06.25.2005 Sorting through players and failed prospects and seeing what’s there is exactly what the Mets should be doing this season; Mets management (and, of course, Heilman himself) should be given credit for putting him in a situation where he can succeed, not damned for holding him back from more four-inning, five-run starts.
Sports 06.20.2005
Black and white culture are inextricably bound, rising as they do from the same common American experiences. In America, race is arbitrary: A white kid fascinated by hip-hop is fascinated by himself.
06.14.2005 
Some people claim it's swamp gas, while others say it's the fault of the airport but all agree that down toward the field in Flushing, everything looks as if it's being seen through a haze. Add in the that batters have long complained the batter's eye in center field is
inadequately blocked out, and you have an environment that does more than any other in the majors to make it difficult to see the ball.
04.21.2005 
The three of us wound up in a booth meant to barely fit one person, passing a bottle. We fed quarters into a slot and a corrugated metal screen went up, revealing an enormous and gap-toothed woman without a top snoring atop a three-legged stool. The manager picked up a long, thin stick, opened a hidden door, and prodded the woman in the side. She burst into vivid life, wriggling and gyrating even before she had fully opened her eyes. When she finally did see us, her eyes goggled. "Oh, snap," she said. "What you want to see?"
03.24.2005 Sante is such a good stylist, in fact, that it is hardly noticed that he does not merely describe, but implicitly glorifies the century-old equivalents of the South Bronx housing project or the Brownsville crackhouse and their attendant pathologies.
03.15.2005 No one would call for a congressional inquiry into the scuffball or into cocaine use in baseball. How is steroid use any different?
03.8.2005 "We can help kids understand that steroids aren't cool," said Rep. Davis, as if kids mainline testosterone for the same reasons they listen to G-Unit. "Steroid use in America is a significant problem," said Rep. Waxman, apparently confusing steroids with crystal meth. This hearing is a hastily assembled farce.
03.5.2005 Schuerholz's protestation that he didn't ignore the drug problem because it benefited him doesn't seem to be worth much, especially when contrasted with San Diego GM Kevin Towers's raw honesty.
02.18.2005 Yhe Yankees have essentially traded away an entire league-average team since 1997.
02.11.2005 The 21st-century Yankees don't need to bring up prospects when they can scoop up veterans in the free-agent market or from other teams. But with the farm system in the state it's in, the Yankees are going to have problems making trades.
02.8.2005 Marsalis's Unforgivable Blackness has less to do with Jack Johnson, whose rise as a boxer happened to coincide with the rise of jazz, than it does with the musical tradition Marsalis believes to have been brutally, irretrievably corrupted in the 1960s.
02.4.2005 Unlike Ripken, Sosa comes off as a calculating, self-obsessed phony, whose shtick works while he's belting 55 home runs but seems rather contrived when he isn't. You can take this trade as proof.
01.25.2005 A foundation is being laid with the potential to make the way we follow the game today seem as outmoded as watching men with sticks push figures representing runners around bases on a big board, as was done in the 1920s.
01.20.2005 Chemistry is always ahead of enforcement. The only reason anyone knows about THG is because an anonymous person sent a sample of it to an anti-doping group. But basbeball has as last made a good faith effort: there is no mistaking this for another attempt to quiet critics while giving free reign to juiced-up cheats.
01.10.2005 Following through on a decision doesn't necessarily mean it was a good one.
12.28.2004 By playing at once the con and the mark, MLB has scammed itself out of a gold mine.
12.14.2004 While it's true that Pedro isn't the pitcher he was in 1999 and 2000, that's a silly standard to hold him to. In those years he was better than Lefty Grove, Bob Gibson, Sandy Koufax, Roger Clemens, Tom Seaver, and Greg Maddux were in their best seasons.
