Clark Booth on Sports

Much as beauty is in the eye of the beholder so apparently is the value of finishing baseball’s interminably arduous regular season with the most wins, thereby ending atop your division in what was -- once upon a time -- loftily proclaimed the... Read more

Several things to thrash over while waiting for Boss Belichick to admit he may have over-reached when he opted for a radical, instant, make-over of his veteran Patriot team when a more subtle transition might have been both more efficient and politic... Read more

Forever and a day, which seems to have been as long as baseball has handed out its annual merit badges, the voting has been done at the end of the regular season with all votes being cast before the post-season begins. The suspicion holds that... Read more

And so we reach Labor Day, comrades, whereupon the rallying cry of the stretch run on to the post- season is sounded. You may dimly recall when this season was being heralded as wildly promising and shaping up, as late as the All-Star break, as a... Read more

Maybe in the end, when everything about this blistering baseball season has been said and done, the most noteworthy utterance – be it with a bat, ball, or pen – will have come from a committee of legal graybeards in a California courtroom. The 11... Read more

The sporting mob is mercurial. Its many moods range from the stark to the inalienable. There is little room for appeasement. “What have you done for us lately,” is the governing mindset. Given half of a flimsy excuse they’ll turn on anyone.... Read more

Here are some stray bits and idle musings to consider while we slog our way through the Dog Days of August en route to a much ballyhooed titanic finish to the baseball season.

• You can bet the ranch that if the Red Sox finish first... Read more

On the one hand, we have fresh evidence that there is no restraining the sleazy lawyers out there who roam the dark edges of the Republic and have the ethics of a goat and the conscience of a lamp post.

On the other, the fundamental axiom that... Read more

Arguably the sweetest day of the baseball season if not the most mellow on the entire sporting calendar is the lyric moment every last weekend in July up in bucolic Cooperstown when glasses are raised on high in tribute to the game’s latest class of... Read more

In the dawning of the Age of Obama the sports pages brimmed proudly with mossy tales of the role sport played in paving the way. Ancient Don Newcombe, who arrived with the Dodgers in 1949, tearfully recalled a conversation with Dr. Martin Luther King... Read more

And so now it is clear that baseball’s worst fears are slowly but quite certainly being realized with a steady and relentless drip. Nor is there much doubt that the dreaded worst- case scenario will soon follow, probably in the form of a deluge.... Read more

The rip-roaring theatre of it all rather resembles something borrowed from a grand finale of one of Gilbert & Sullivan’s lustier and more outlandish light operatic productions.

Two beefy characters impeccably attired in tight-fitting... Read more

Here’s some driftwood to pick through while waiting for the basketball and hockey seasons to end, hopefully before the fourth of July:

When the Celtics won their first championship in 1957 they beat the Hawks on the 13th of April, the Saturday... Read more

It’s been said lately that the strings are being pulled tightly in the publishing industry. Several factors are purportedly involved including the general decline of the printed word in our brave new internet driven world as well as the general... Read more

At the far turn of another baseball season – the giddy first quarter mark – at least 24 teams remain in contention. You can already say ‘Goodbye’ to Baltimore and probably Oakland in the American League, Washington, Colorado, Pittsburgh and... Read more

Pages