Jeffery G. Hanna
Details are hazy this many years later, but vague outlines remain. It was sometime in the mid-1950s when a friend of my parents was driving along West Virginiaâs Route 2 north of Wheeling late one night. The two-lane road runs parallel to the Ohio River and, back then, featured several dark and deserted stretches.
The man was cruising along one such stretch when bright disc-shaped object flew in front of the car, floated along above the highway before darting away toward the river.
I recall many hushed conversations among my parents and their friends about the incident. Since everyone agreed this guy was not some crackpot, no one seemed to know what to think. Then there was this postscript. Several curious people who went to the spot of the encounter the next day insisted they found marks where the asphalt had been singed by something.
In the closing minutes of the NCAA lacrosse championship game between Virginia and Maryland on Memorial Day, emotions were running so high on the sidelines that there was apparently a
Jeffery G. Hanna
Historians of baseball often argue over how Major League Baseball should be divided into different eras based on trends in the sport. Hereâs one common list: the Dead Ball Era (1901-19), the Live Ball Era (1920-41), the Integration Era (1942-60), the Expansion Era (1961-76), the Free Agency Era (1977-93), and the Steroid Era (1994-2005).
Where does that leave us in 2021? Welcome to the Statcast Era.
The Statcast Era began in 2015 when MLB installed state-of-the-art tracking technology in every stadium. Using a dozen cameras plus radar equipment, this technology tracks the location and movements of the ball and every player on the field in real time. For those fans who love collecting and arguing over arcane statistics, Statcast is another level entirely. For example, we now know precisely how fast the ball comes off the bat of San Diego Padresâ Fernando Tatis Jr. (113.4 MPH). We can now measure which outfielder gets the fastest jump when chas
The asterisk is a humble punctuation mark. Unlike the period, it doesn’t stop anything. Unlike the comma, it doesn’t even slow things down. It doesn’t shout like an exclamation point