Page 22 - Dick Flavin News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

It would be a gross exaggeration for me to suggest that I have been a Boston Red Sox fanatic all my life. It's only been since I was seven years old. But in that time span of 75 years (gulp) that I have been carrying the team's banner, there has never been a time that the Sox have not had a Hall of Fame player on the roster. Oh sure, you might quibble over that season and a half (1952-53) when Ted Williams was flying air raids over North Korea instead of hitting home runs over the bullpen in Fenway Park, but he was still a Red Sox and we were all sure that he'd be back. (It was only after the...

Are you the gambling type? You know, the kind of person who gets a kick out of wagering a few shekels now and then? You are? Well, I have a great tip for you. Ya wanna hear it? Okay, lean in a little closer, I'll whisper because we don't want to let the word get out; it might drive down the odds. Alright, put all your money -- yes, all of it -- on the following trifecta: 1) By 2023, give or take a season, the Philadelphia Phillies will have an absolutely terrific team, they'll be favored to win the World Series;

They are dying off and there is nothing that you, I, or anyone else can do about it. The numbers of 11 Boston Celtics who played for the team during the greatest of all sports dynasties, 1957-1969, hang from the rafters of TD Garden. With the passing of K. C. Jones on Christmas Day, more than half of them, six in all, have now died. None of them died young and only one, John Havlicek, did not live to see the age of 80 -- and he came close. But time was up for the six who have died and the clock is ticking for the five who are still with us.

Where do you stand on the question of whether the National League should permanently install the designated-hitter rule? Put me down as all in favor of it. And that's from someone who, when the rule was first adopted by the American League back in 1973, ranted and raved that it was the worst idea since General Custer challenged the Sioux Indians to a fight at Little Bighorn. The outright heresy, I thought, of installing a permanent pinch-hitter into a starting lineup is a desecration of The Grand Old Game. Surely, I was convinced, it foreshadowed the beginning of the end. I was not even molli...

Can you believe that the Boston Red Sox once traded away a player who was considered to be one of the best in all of baseball? He had just turned 28 years old and was right in the prime of his career; he was a defensive whiz, the best outfielder of his day and one of the greatest of all-time; he terrorized the opposition with his base-running skills; added to that, he was a terrific hitter. And his name wasn't Mookie Betts. Nor was it Babe Ruth, who, by the way, wasn't traded to the New York Yankees. He was sold for cold, hard cash, something to which then-Sox owner Harry Frazee was addicted.