1972-12-31: The saddest of all tragedies: The great & respected Roberto Clemente, only 38, bringing earthquake-relief supplies to Nicaragua, dies in a plane crash. From the 2022 SABR book "¡Arriba! The Heroic Life of Roberto Clemente", contemporary reactions: sabr.org/journal/arti...

Best sport.

Final neighborhood walk of 2025.

Happy to have witnessed the Diego Pavia era of college football. Fun to see how far a New Mexico kid with a chip on his shoulder could go.

Didn’t end up writing as much as I was hoping to in 2025, and we can partially blame Rob Manfred’s decision on a random Tuesday in May. But it did lead to this informative discussion on Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe with some other terrific writers: www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIg6...

That time Ohio State missed a game-winning FG right as the New Year's ball dropped was wild.

There is nothing inexplicable about why some histories are not widely known.

Not an amazing photo, but a great experience: When SABR's Boston chapter arranged an outing to a Boston College "fall ball" game, four BC players kindly took the time to meet us for an extended chat. They were awesome, especially to the kid ballplayer in our group.

Here’s my list of books read this year. The sheep detectives were so much fun. jacobpomrenke.com/reading-list...

Alright, it’s 6:30 PM on a Tuesday, and we’re on the back end of a holiday break during an Olympic bobsled season. So what better time than to throw on Cool Runnings and live skeet about it! I’ll mix in some bobsled insight along the way as to how real some of those parts are.

The first time this happened was legitimately terrifying. We caught Nixey in the act later and she was as ruthless as a velociraptor. @pulhitzherprize.bsky.social

a great actor who took a cuss word and turned it into music sad day www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UXJ...

COURT QUEENS is out March 17, women's hoops in pictures and words, 1890s to 2020s. It was a blast to pull together such a love letter of a coffee table book—pre-orders open everywhere you buy your books 🧡 (But 25% off for Barnes and Noble members right now! www.barnesandnoble.com/w/court-quee...)

The sale goes through Dec. 31 and includes preorders, too! Like, just for instance, if you wanted to preorder my book on the Czech Republic national baseball team’s World Baseball Classic run. www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/978...

Happy 90th birthday to Dodgers great Sandy Koufax! Check out stories, essays, and memorable game recaps on Koufax's life and career from SABR: sabr.org/e-books/sand...

Oh, this is a fun map. Haven't lived here long enough to make a dent in most of the city outside the Red Line. But that just means more to explore. (Also, bus > train is super-convenient for more places than I would have expected.)

This is Ruben Amaro Sr. You likely know his son, Ruben Amaro Jr., played Major League Baseball. You might even know his dad, Santos, was a star and HOFer in Cuba and Mexico. I bet you didn’t know (I didn’t) that his MOM (Josefina Mora) played professional baseball for the Veracruz Women’s Team!

ATG Post-War: Golden Age 1949 Historical Project Now available in the #mlbtheshow25 roster vault 30 teams (AL, NL, NeL) 30 stadiums rebrands/logos 2000+ players

So fair and foul a day I have not seen! Beautiful fog at Graceland Cemetery today.

The pope attended a World Series game in 2005 was a real thing we learned this year.

So great to have our amazing Projectionists profiled on @wttw.bsky.social's CHICAGO WORKS! Visit the link to go inside our Projection Booth: www.wttw.com/chicago-work... .

Baseball 2025: During June I attended SABR 53 in Dallas. I finally crossed the Texas Rangers’ new ballpark off of my list (we had tickets for April 2020). I also caught a minor league game in Frisco, enjoyed another pack night, and snagged a SABR cookie. ⚾️

Looking forward to this one!

Chicago resisted. Protests came with a price. Bruises from pepper balls and fits of sickness from the tear gas. But also the shattering of illusions and loss of faith that what they witnessed could not happen in America. It did and is happening in America www.chicagotribune.com/2025/12/28/c...

He’s right: “Journalists maybe stopped appreciating how cool their job is. It’s like, wait a minute; you guys are basically detectives if you’re actually reporting shit. Bringing people into the process is like bringing them into a movie.” www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2025/...

The Jesse Orosco Massive gets a Boxing Day gift: My new SABR Games Project jawn 🚨 details the first pro appearance of MLB's busiest pitcher. sabr.org/gamesproj/ga...

A nice profile today at Ball Nine on Leslie Heaphy, one of the foremost scholars of Negro Leagues baseball (and one of my favorite people on the planet): ballnine.com/2025/12/26/d...

The Christmas Day baseball tour tradition continues with @shoelesspodcast.bsky.social and @pulhitzherprize.bsky.social! Today we paid our respects to my Internet namesake for the past quarter-century with a visit to Buck Weaver’s grave.

Shout out to everyone working today - reporters, editors, techies, broadcasters, musicians, first responders, hospital and airline and hotel staff, baristas, sports folks, all the gas station people. Been there! I hope you get time to celebrate.

one thing i post every christmas is my piece about charles dickens’s washout brother www.chicagomag.com/city-life/de...

the other thing i post every xmas is this about charlemae hill rollins, an influential chicago librarian and her anthology “christmas gif’,” a collection of stories, poems and recipes from black authors (i think the langston hughes poems were new) www.chicagomag.com/city-life/de...

Most gratifying (non-family) happening for my 2025 was the launch of the Satchel Paige Project. A work in progress, I have logged 1,909 games thus far. (I have another 145 as "plausible".) If you have questions, ideas, or wish to help, let me know! marklaurencearmour.wordpress.com/2084-2/

Eddie Vedder, 1991 Topps style, in honor of his birthday today

George Will, Studs Terkel and Bill "Spaceman" Lee on this topic is maybe the best 90 seconds of Ken Burns Baseball.

last effort: I run a baseball site with some of my best, smartest, and most talented friends. we do fun and engaging work all year long, and it's about to get more expensive to read that work as of 1/1. I'd much rather you get in the door as cheap as possible. It also makes for a great gift:

" The total number of student news programs in the country that distribute work to local outlets is now roughly two hundred and fifty. "... the addition of a student-run paper is a lifeline for community news." via @columjournreview.bsky.social

Rogers Park, a magical place where you can look East and still get a spectacular Sunset. @buckweaver.bsky.social @pulhitzherprize.bsky.social @u2girl1966.bsky.social @rebeccakell.bsky.social

MLB's tech regulation plans give itself full control over who can do business with baseball. And I learned an AI scouting firm — founded by the uncle of an exec in Rob Manfred’s inner circle — may win a bid. Team sources and antitrust experts told me it creates a conflict of interest. NEW from me:

YES! Illinois wins a Supreme Court ruling keeping Trump's troops out. This is an important victory as the regime perverts the military's mission and seeks to punish states that won't bow to the dictator.

Just wrapped a great two-hour conversation with @benlindbergh.bsky.social and @cdgoldstein.baseballprospectus.com for @ewpod.bsky.social. Forgo the Yule Log this year and listen to us debate the ABS challenge system.

50 years ago today, baseball entered its free agency era when arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled on a landmark MLB Players Association case challenging the reserve clause on Dec. 23, 1975. From the SABR archives: sabr.org/journal/arti...

About 25 of these memorials went up in Rogers Park over the past few days, marking the spots where our neighbors were abducted by armed, masked government agents. This sign is at the end of our street. You don’t have to go far to find another one.

Fun fact: Newsrooms used to have sharp metal spindles near copy desks where stories deemed unworthy of publication would be literally “spiked.” It was not uncommon for angry/drunk editors to smash stories on the spindles, puncturing their hands and causing the pages to be smeared in blood Cc: CBS

Strippers! Blackmail! Who says umpires are boring? Check out my new SABR Biography Project bio of former AL arbiter Bill McKinley. It's not *quite* as spicy as I've just made it sound, but it's interesting: sabr.org/bioproj/pers...

Baseball 2025: During March, SABR published its book highlighting the 2005 Chicago White Sox. It included my game summary of the team’s 50th win of the season. A link to the article is in the comments. ⚾️

Please consider the gift of SABR membership (perhaps to yourself) this holiday season. You would have access to several digital newspaper archives, the Sporting News, thousands of pages of research resources, chapters, committees. Its great for introverts or extroverts! sabr.org/community/

Holiday wishes from Lt. Joe Jenkins “over there” (see alt text). Jenks is a major figure in my book Battlefields: The Chicago White Sox and the Great War, coming in February from Bloomsbury Academic.

Last curling for the year, and we got skunked. But the biscochitos that @pulhitzherprize.bsky.social and I made were a big hit during broomstacking, so we won the afterparty. 🥌

Ask any historian, and this is a standard experience. The project you envision you will write turns out to be something different in the end. Why? Because you go where the sources lead you, and you can never get there if you rely on technology that only builds off of established knowledge.

Until two summers ago, I had not played any sort of real organized sport since college, and this has been such a fun little chapter. I took a chance trying something I’d never done, and I’ve made a bunch of friends, stayed active doing something enjoyable for exercise, and have had so much fun.