...one of the most gripping at-bats in baseball history was a ten-pitch war, with hitter and pitcher like two boxers slugging it out at the bell. Stanley versus Wilson for baseball's 1986 heavyweight title.

One of them would hit the canvas. Wilson was like the boxer with his back to the ropes, fending off blows that would knock out the Mets. The crowd was screaming on each delivery. This was the pitch sequence.

1. The first delivery was high and outside, but Mookie Wilson was a free swinger and took a cut at it. 0-1.
2. Ball one. 1-1.
3. Ball two. Outside. 2-1.
4. Foul ball, strike two. 2-2 count. Again, the Mets were down to their last strike. Several of the Red Sox were poised with one foot in the dugout and the other up on the field ready to charge and begin the celebration.
5. Mookie fouled off a breaking ball. 2-2. The New York crowd was screaming for him to stay alive.
6. Mookie fouled off another breaking ball. 2-2. Tension was mounting with each pitch.
7. Stanley decided to throw an inside fastball that would tail away from the batter, toward the plate. Just one problem--it didn't tail. The ball stayed inside, heading for Mookie's rib cage. Wilson jackknifed out of the way. (He's still hovering in mid-air, in my mind.) The ball glanced off the mit of catcher Rich Gedman. Kevin Mitchell scored from third standing up. Incredibly, the Mets had tied the game.
8. The count was full. Wilson, perhaps thinking his bat had only foul balls in it, went and got a new piece of lumber. No matter; he fouled off another pitch, back behind the plate. 3-2.
9. Foul down the third base line. 3-2.
10. Stanley threw a fastball on the inside corner. Wilson swung and topped a crazily bouncing grounder up the first base line. Mets first base coach Bill Robinson said to himself, "Go foul, ball."

In our culture relatively little importance has been given to body awareness. The emphasis is on achievement rather than on awareness.

Yet it is only those athletes who have a highly developed muscle sense who ever achieve high levels of excellence. One simply can't play any sport well lacking the ability to focus carefully on the subtle body sensations which indicate the difference between balance and off-balance, timing and mis-timing, too tight and too loose.

Body awareness is directly related to body achievement. In Japan, most children are introduced to one form or another of the martial arts, and all of these place great emphasis on alertness to subtle body sensations.

The human body is a magnificent instrument that is constantly sending us subtle messages which, if heard and heeded, would keep us healthy and operating at the highest level of efficiency. But when we become too goal-oriented and excited about the results of our actions, we begin to lose touch with our bodies. Lacking awareness of its messages, ultimately our performance suffers.

One of baseball's impenetrable mysteries is the origin of the term "bull pen." Some historians believe it comes form the fact that around the turn of the century relief pitchers (to the extent that there were any) often warmed up in from of Bull Durham tobacco signs that were painted on many outfield fences.

But as early as 1877, the roped-in area in foul territory (where late-arriving fans were hearded like bulls) was call the bullpen by the local Cincinatti press. Bill James says he has solved another mystery. He knows who invented relief pitching: Napoleon.

No joke. Napoleon believed that every battle tended, for reasons of its own, to resolve itself into immobile, equal positions. He believe, in essence, in the law of Competitive Balance as applied to a battle.

So on the day of a battle he would take two or three regiments of crack troops and sequester them a distance from the shooting, eating and sleeping and trying to stay away.

Over the course of a day or several days, the troops in the field would take positions and lose them and retake and relose them, growing ever more and more weary, their provisions in shorter and shorter supply, and their positions ever more and more inflexible.

Finally, at a key moment in the battle, with everyone else in the field barely able to stand, he would release into the fray a few hundred fresh and alert troops, riding fresh horses and with every piece of their equipment in good repair, attacking the enemy at his most vulnerable spot.

He did this many times and with devasting effect--and if that's not relief pitching, I don't know what is.

...I was so zeroed in when I pitched, I like to work fast, which was another reason I despised catchers and infielders huddling with me on the mound. Pace was part of my game--getting into a rhythm and going at the hitters hard and aggressively, taking command of the action by pouring the ball in before they had a chance to get comfortable.

Working quickly kept the fielders on their toes--often the difference between a play being made and not made--and helped my control because it kept my mind focused. Control is largely a function of concentration, and as a result mine got better as my concentration improved with maturity.

Young pitchers: try to make the batter hit the ball as soon as possible (but without authority). When you start a hitter off with a pitch you want him to miss, you often times over-throw and ball one in the result.

Most hitters take the first pitch anyway, and even if they don't, you learn quite a bit from their reaction. If a right-handed hitter fouls the ball off into the right-field stand, you know he hasn't caught up with your fastball. The percentage are greatly in your favor when you start a hitter off with a good fastball, even if it's right down the middle. Try it. You will rarely get hurt using this strategy. (Another advantage of throwing the first pitch down the middle is that you don't have to rely upon getting a marginal call from the umpire.)

Control is not as precise an art as it's often purported to be. An easy idea to to simply concentrate on your catcher. Not the catcher's glove, as you might expect, but the catcher. I always thought that the glove was too small a target and I would end up missing it half the time.

For my target, I picked out a big square between the catcher's knees and shoulders and tried to deliver the ball into the middle of it. That way, I found I usually hit the glove without really trying.

"Reputation," says Iago, the bad guy in Shakespeare's Othello, "is an idle and most false imposition, oft got without merit and lost without deserving. You have lost no reputation at all unless you repute yourself such a loser."

The adage that "the reputation precedes the person" holds true in umpiring as in any profession. The reputation might be fair or unfair, but it exists nonetheless. It's up to the umpire to make sure, everyday, that he deserves a good reputation.

An umpire must be decisive, objective, consistent, and courageous. An umpire must hustle, anticipating what will happen during a play. An umpire must be a disciplinarian, but must also be understanding about players' frustrations and be willing to accept pointed criticism. He must also, from time to time, listen to players and coaches. (Occasionally, an umpire can teach players and coaches a thing or two!)

In 1995, MLB began the three rounds of play-offs format. Exciting stuff. One silly thing, however, was the decision to call the first round The Division Series. This is not logical, since teams competing in the first round never play against a team in their own division.

It makes a lot more sense to simply call the first round The Round One Series. That name more accurately describes what is being played.

And while MLB is at it, change the format too: the Round One Series should become a best-of-seven games series.

One more thing: If MLB either reduced the regular season to 154 games or scheduled six doubleheaders per team (one a month) during the regular season, the play-offs and World Series could be completed by October 31. Remember, The World Series is the October Classic!

Eighth inning. Two outs. Tie game. Runner on first. Number three hitter at the plate. The count: three balls, one strike.

Question: As the manager, do you:
A. give the runner the steal sign, or...
B. play hit-and-run, or...
C. give the batter the take sign, or...
D. do nothing, i.e. just "let 'em play'"?

Rob Lanario, the manager of the Enfield Spartans, the team I play for, chooses C. Here's why:

"A pitcher faced with a 3-1 count with a runner on first will most likely be concerned with throwing a strike. I flash the take sign here, because I want the count to go full. That way, with two outs, our runner will be going on the pitch and might score on a long single, and surely will score on a double.

If the 3 and 1 pitch is ball four, we then have our clean-up hitter coming to bat with runners on first and second."

The Enfield Spartans have won five championships in Great Britian over the last decade largely because we think about (and execute) the little things--things like the above described situation. Winning is, after all, in the details.

Space allotted to sports, on the increase in the 1870s, was stepped up appreciably in the 80s when, under the influence of Joseph Pulitzer, who organized the first separate sports department when he purchased The New York World, the leading penny newspapers began devoting an entire page or more to the subject.

From 1878 to 1898 space assigned to sports jumped seven fold. Day in and day out, baseball got the lion's share of this increasing sports coverage.

The above info comes from the late Harold Seymour's classic book, Baseball, the Early Years, published by the Oxford University Press.

Dr. Seymour, one of baseball's leading historians, based this book in part on his PhD. dissertation at Cornell University, which was the first doctoral dissertation on baseball accepted by a history department.

The body is unique when it comes to pitching. Its first line of defense against injury is muscle. Its second is tendon or ligament. Its third is bone.

Pitchers with tendinitis don't have the muscle strength or muscle balance to support their mechanics or the number of pitches thrown. Bone chips reflect long term problems with muscles, tendons, ligaments, and mechanics for whatever pitching workloads were done.

Resistance training does the opposite. Muscle density builds quickness, then tendon and ligament strength, and finally bone density. In other words, conditioning puts it in the bank, throwing takes it out.

It makes sense to have a "ready reserve" available through resistance training. Remember, though, that when you are thinking about muscle tissue, bigger isn't necessarily better.

Pitching involves neuro-muscular memory, and nerves work best in dense muscle tissue (where cells are about equal in size). If you bulk up, you reduce the efficiency of your nerve work.

Muscle strength builds faster than tendon, ligament, and bone strength. This must be taken into consideration with any program design for each pitcher's conditioning base, arm pathologies, and age.

Young pitchers should not lift heavy weights because their muscles will gain strength at the expense of connective tissue, and actually tear themselves out of a joint. These pitchers should lift their body weight instead, with push-ups, dips, pull-ups, chin-ups, and sit-ups.

Remember this: the biggest reason for poor results or injury occurring from strength training is a lack of understanding of how to use resistance properly.

Now that Major League Baseball has gone to six divisions, a new rule might make the post-season more exciting and more fair. Call it the 501 Rule:

If National League team X wins its division with a winning percentage of less than .501, team X is declared that division champion--but team X in not invited to play in the post-season.

Instead, the National League would invite two wild card teams, who would play in the Division Series against the two NL teams who did win their divisions with winning percentages better than .501.

Same in the American League.

If MLB implements the 501 Rule, fans are more likely going to see the best teams competing in the play-offs. Each player on a division champion would still receive a financial bonus--even members of a team like team X described above. But to allow a team like team X to play in the post-season is a bad idea.

Reporting on the 1942 Yankees, Dan Daniel told his New York World Telegram readers that the Bronx Bombers might go with Ed Whitner Levy at first base.

As Daniel told it, club management urged Whitner, an Irish Catholic, to use his Jewish stepfather's last name as a means of appealing to the numerous Jewish clients of the Bombers.

Shirley Povich, another Jewish sportswriter, writing in The Washington Post, was even more precise on this point. As he reported it, Ed Barrow, president of the Yankees, told the young outfielder, "You may be Whitner to the rest of the world, but if you are going to play with the Yankees, you'll be Ed Levy."

Although the Yankees' ruse failed, the pursuit of Jewish ballplayers by baseball's establishment first announced by John McGraw in the early 1920s continued apace in the following decades and helps account for the increased presence of Jewish Major Leaguers.

McGraw left the Giants as manager at the tail end of the 1932 season...but the Giants kept up their search for Jewish talent. Phil Weintraub and Harry Danning both arrived at the Polo Grounds in 1933. Harry stayed longer--a career that lasted through 1942 and that marked him as one of the premier catchers of his time. Over a ten-year career Harry the Hack, as he was called, played 890 games, batted .285 and appeared in two World Series and two All-Star games.