John Thorn
John Thorn
John Thornis a sports historian, author, publisher, and cultural commentator. Since March 1, 2011, he has been the Official Baseball Historian for Major League Baseball...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth17 April 1947
CountryUnited States of America
anecdotes form
I am opposed, naturally, to regurgitating anecdote or any other form of received wisdom, unless it is characterized as such.
games ties events
If I haven't made myself clear, this worrisome chain of events describes the game of the nineteenth century.
father son years
Better than anything else in our culture, it enables fathers and sons to speak on a level playing field while building up from within a personal history of shared experience - a group history - that may be tapped into at will in years to come.
team fall heart
As the game enters its glorious final weeks, the chill of fall signals the reality of defeat for all but one team. The fields of play will turn brown and harden, the snow will fall, but in the heart of the fan sprouts a sprig of green.
hands data tables
Except in expert hands, stats can get in the way of story; an array of data that might better be presented in a table instead clogs up sentences.
pain home greek
This was nostalgia in the literal Greek sense: the pain of not being able to return to one's home and family.
team player games
Do we settle on a regional team because we can go to its ballpark and see its games on television? Or do we choose a team as our favorite because it has an especially appealing player, a Barry Bonds or an Ichiro?
dream boys men
But the dream is never forgotten, only put aside and never out of reach: Where once the dream connected boys with the world of men, now it reconnects men with the spirit of boys.
baseball writing crafts
I'd just like to see - in writing about baseball - more energy and better craft, minus statistical bludgeoning and invective.
instant-replay instant replay
Distant replay morphs into instant replay, and future replay cannot be far off.
player awards pay
Award trophies, as opposed to letting the players define and claim their own. Ultimately, pay them to play so that their activity not only resembles work but is work.
children boys past
It says, I think, that at root that we're children, or we'd like to be. And the best of us each keep as much of that childhood with us as we grow into adulthood, as we can muster... And even after we're past the point of being able to play the game with any skill, if we love it, then it's like Peter Pan - we remain boys forever, we don't die.
mean bored people
Just because I am increasingly bored by sabermetric arcana doesn't mean anyone else has to be; it remains good for people who like that sort of thing.
dream home past
More fundamentally, it is a dream that does not die with the onset of manhood: the dream is to play endlessly, past the time when you are called home for dinner, past the time of doing chores, past the time when your body betrays you past time itself.