Matt Monagan

The All-Star Game will take place in Philadelphia this summer -- a fitting location for the nation's 250th birthday. It's the city where the Declaration of Independence was signed, where the Liberty Bell rang, where the Constitution was first drafted and, maybe most importantly, a town where Americans have feasted

Longtime Independence, Kan., resident and educator Ken Brown puts his tiny town's big-time baseball history into perspective. "When you study a little bit of Independence history, there's something about a feud we had between two bankers, something about Independence being one of the richest towns per capita, there's the big

Ana Gold is a softball star. She's the all-time home run leader at Duke. She was drafted ninth overall in the 2025 AUSL College Draft. She went on to win Rookie of the Year in the inaugural season of the top softball league on the globe -- leading all rookies

Some say the greatest magic trick of all time is when David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear. Others say it was when Harry Houdini escaped from the water torture cell. My grandpa used to think it was when he found a quarter behind my ear. Sorry. All of

PHILADELPHIA -- Steve Dolan turned his computer around and smiled. There were graphs and charts and all kinds of data sets on the screen. Like something you might see from a financial advisor or some risk-averse manager or on some math test from back in high school that you're inevitably

If you talk to anybody who was there on the night of Nov. 12, 2022, at Empire Ballpark -- the tiny stadium on Australia's southwest coast that houses about 1,500 people (and maybe even more snakes) -- they all have the same reaction. Their eyes widen, like the memory of

"You had the defending World Series champion Red Sox host the game at Fenway Park with Babe Ruth on the mound," author Scott Reich told me in a phone call. "Playing against a galaxy of All-Stars that had gathered from teams around the league. Ty Cobb, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Walter

A version of this article was originally published in July of 2021.

Octavius Catto’s accomplishments in baseball make up just a sliver of his incredible life. “The Martin Luther King Jr. of the 19th century” was a hero in Philadelphia. Along with Frederick Douglass, in the face of generals who disavowed it, he organized regiments of Black soldiers to fight in the

You can imagine how a baseball player, really any professional athlete -- really any human being -- might feel after learning they were traded for 60 cases of beer. That they were worth the same as about 1,440 cold ones. That their in-game talents provided as much value to an