Kevin Kernan

This Saturday, July 13th marks the 90th anniversary of Babe Ruth hitting his 700th home run. At the time Ruth hit Number 700, the four men closest to him in home run totals were teammate Lou Gehrig with 323, Jimmie Foxx at 248, Al Simmons at 235 and Mel Ott with 197.

Now that we’ve had a few days to think about it, let’s look at what the trade deadline really told us about Major League Baseball.

With apologies to Peter, Paul and Mary that is my ode to the death of hitting in Major League Baseball. You have seen the numbers; they are beyond frightening. And if not for superstars like Aaron Judge it would be even worse.

Wednesday will mark a Mighty anniversary in baseball history. The iconic baseball poem: Casey at the Bat was performed in public for the first time on August 14, 1888, by vaudeville star DeWolf Hopper at Wallack’s Theater in New York.

With the defending world champion Texas Rangers fading fast, Major League Baseball is all but guaranteed of not having a repeat World Series winner this year. This will make it 24 straight seasons no MLB team has been able to repeat.

On Saturday I rewatched Major League. The changes to the game from then to now are even more startling than I remembered, and really, 35 years ago is not that long ago.

The key to consistency is letting the other team make the mistakes. You are not going to play clean, no one does anymore – because player development has been taken over by The Stepford Wives nerds – but play cleaner than the other team.

Joe McDonald is a gem of a baseball man. McDonald, 95, can rattle off details of his baseball life with the Miracle Mets, later the Cardinals, and other teams as if it were yesterday.

Here at BallNine, history is not forgotten, and this month marks the 60th anniversary of the Greatest Collapse in MLB history. Gene Mauch’s 1964 Phillies were up 6 1/2 games with only 12 to play when the bottom fell out with 10 straight losses, the first seven losses at home.

MLB 2024 likes to play itself off as a brilliant era of baseball because of the overuse of Ivy League analytics and the game’s many sycophants easily falling for that bag of non-baseball BS.