The Major League Baseball playoffs lead off this weekend’s list of stellar sports reads from around the Web, starting with Nathan Fenno’s marvelous piece in The Washington Times about the last time Washington played host to a post-season game.

The year was 1933, still early in the Depression and late in the era of Prohibition. Fenno goes retro about a city with six daily newspapers, scalpers and pickpockets galore around the stadium grounds, and the Senators falling to the New York Giants in the World Series:

“Three hundred and fifty policemen eyed the crowd. Prohibition would end in December. Concern about the nation’s whiskey supply — 18 million gallons — loomed. Would there be enough? Three-point-two-percent beer, the only alcohol 26-year-old Senators manager and shortstop Joe Cronin drank, already was legal. Pabst Blue Ribbon insisted its brew ’soothes jaded nerves, develops fresh energy and helps build a sound, healthy body.’ But Griffith Stadium remained as dry as the afternoon. That was a good thing for home plate umpire Charley Moran.”

Next week, 79 years later, the Nationals will end that long home drought against the Cardinals. To quote a clergyman cited by Fenno all those years ago:

“A new hope is evident in the hearts of the people.”

More Baseball Goodness

• Author and former pitching prospect Pat Jordan writes in SB Nation about his last game of his career being the biggest game of his life.
• Bruce Arthur of The National Post on Miguel Cabrera, Mike Trout and the new math of the Triple Crown.
• Charlie Pierce of Grantland on the miserable throwback season of the Boston Red Sox.
• Diana Moskovitz of The Classical on how to survive on hope as a Pittsburgh Pirates fan.
• Dave Kaufman, writing in the Montréal Gazette about the ultimate loss — of a team, to become the Washington Nationals.

Weekly Rewind

On the blog this week, I wrote about the continuing existential probing of the NFL; a new rash of books about the Dallas Cowboys to relieve fans of the awful present; the mockery of sports justice by some ultra-powerful governing bodies; and resisting the temptation to place politics above sports.

The one post I’d like to have back, or many need to expound on in a future post, is the emergence of fan sports mega blog sites and the rap they get for low quality. Geting the worst rap of all is the commercially lucrative Bleacher Report, the subject of a scathing story in a San Francisco alt-weekly. In response have come some thoughtful defenses of BR, including King Kaufman, the site’s writer program manager, who wrote a solid sports column at Salon for many years.

After I wrote that post, I took a deeper look around BR and noticed a vast improvement, much different than the impression I’ve had. There was some bad old-school bias that came out in my post, but more than anything I was beleaguered by the rote demands for high churn and a formula dictated by reverse-engineering. It’s hard to develop a distinctive voice under the duress of running with the SEO-driven herd. My first instinct is to run from it. Like hell.

But BR and SB Nation are evolving into even more powerful entities as the legacy media’s struggles continue, and it’s far too tempting for someone from my background to be dismissive of that reality.

Other “printies” like to lambaste the blogging masses for not being exactly like them. At the Awful Announcing blog previewing the ongoing Blogs With Balls Conference, Andrew Bucholz takes exception to the “replacement journalists” sneer in declaring that the bloggers have won. But this shouldn’t be about picking sides:

“People on both sides are becoming more cognizant of the other side’s value, and it’s those people in turn that are doing well. Lots of mainstream reporters on the rise are the ones who get the web, get blogging, understand Twitter, etc. Many of the bloggers who have gone on to greater prominence are those who can use mainstream content effectively to build something new, and those who can use mainstream techniques when it adds value. The lines have become so blurred that it’s very hard to find many people who can be described strictly as ‘bloggers’ or ‘journalists.’ Most are doing both.”

When Pittsburgh Pirates minority owner Bing Crosby — yes, that Bing Crosby — was out of the country during the 1960 World Series, he had the full NBC broadcast of Game 7 recorded on several reel-to-reel tapes.

Those films were among the various non-alcoholic artifacts recenly found in the wine cellar of the late entertainer’s northern California home. Richard Sandomir tells the fabulous story of a most unlikely discovery, and how Crosby tuned in excruciatingly (crooning?) in Paris for what’s been long dubbed “The Best Game Ever:”

“We were in this beautiful apartment, listening on shortwave, and when it got close Bing opened a bottle of Scotch and was tapping it against the mantel. When Mazeroski hit the home run, he tapped it hard; the Scotch flew into the fireplace and started a conflagration. I was screaming and Nonie said, ‘It’s very nice to celebrate things, but couldn’t we be more restrained?’ ”

• At Extracurriculars I spent far too much time and too many words on the sorry sagas of Jason Whitlock, Jay Mariotti and sportswriters who insist on becoming the story. I’ll leave it to Deadspin to put the proper shine on the self-parodic figure that Whitlock has become:

“Jason Whitlock is Richard Hofstadter, if Ponderosa were Columbia University.”

• While far too many sports media “stars” are becoming disturbingly like the athletes they cover, the latter are in increasingly ample supply. Latest non-LeBron, non-Favre poster boy: Albert Haynesworth, who gets roundly spanked today by Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post. And deservedly so.

• The possibility of Ohio State and Michigan being placed in opposite divisions so they might potentially meet in the new Big Ten championship game has plenty of traditionalists up in arms. But the Wall Street Journal’s Darren Everson says there’s plenty more change afoot, far beyond the forthcoming college football conference realignment. So get used to it.

• If you’re a realignment geek, then Dennis Dodd of CBSSports.com is your scribe. He masterfully simplifies the mind-numbingly complex machinations of the BCS solons and those wishing to join them. His latest piece examines the risks schools take by jumping into the Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly NCAA Division I-A). Think real hard before you leap.

• The Associated Press has obtained financial data showing how the Pittsburgh Pirates continue to make money by losing, and in grand fashion. They haven’t had a winning season since 1992, the longest such skid for a team in North American pro sports history. Naturally, team officials are incensed that the information was leaked, but they’ve got some serious ’splaining to do.

How sad to a once-proud franchise run into the ground by pure, unadulterated greed, without a care about its paying customers. It won’t be the last.