Toby Reyes

Nobody packed a bag for that whole Series. Giants and Yankees were both playing in the Polo Grounds in 1921 — the Yankees were renting off the Giants back then — so the visiting club got to the park by walking down a hallway. Eight games, best-of-nine, and not one train ticket between them.

The other thing is you could hear it. Before that, if you wanted a World Series you stood out on the…

Nine holes. That's all Newport had, so they played it four times in a single day and that was the championship — 36 holes, done by dark, 1895.

Okay, so. Eleven guys in the field, and the one who wins is the assistant pro at the host club. Horace Rawlins, 21, English, 173 strokes. You know what an assistant pro does most days? Not this. And then Willie Dunn comes in two back at 175, and I'm sorry…

What did Branca throw before the one everybody knows? Went and looked. A fastball for a called strike, then he came back with the second pitch, and Thomson got it. 0-1 count. 5-4. Pennant gone. He wore 13, he was 25 that year, and he spent the rest of his life getting asked about one pitch by strangers in airports and hotel lobbies, and by every account he answered them. Every time. Nicely!

And…

Didn't know until this week that the whole thing started with thirteen runners and five volunteers. One stopwatch. 2004, Bushy Park in London, a free 5k, and somebody standing there clicking times for everybody who showed up. Thirteen! You could fit them all in a minivan.

Okay, so. I played in front of crowds of 400 in ballparks that smelled like hot dog water, and I'll tell you, nothing beats a…

Malang Regency, East Java, a Saturday night match. Arema at home against Persebaya Surabaya, a rivalry people plan their week around. Families in the stands. Kids who'd been brought along because it was a football match and that's what you do with a Saturday night.

Arema lost. Supporters came onto the pitch, police fired tear gas into the stands, and people ran for the exits. The gates were…

Final was 34-7, Fordham, and that's the number that goes in the book. But Waynesburg — little Pennsylvania school, enrollment you could fit in a couple of subway cars — scored first. Long run, early, and for a few minutes the only football game on television anywhere was one a tiny college was winning. I root for them. Still do.

One camera. That's it. Needed the sun out to see anything, so if a…

Kid at the batting cage asked me what the hardest throw in baseball is, and I said it's the one you make after you've already done something insane. He didn't buy it. So I told him about the Polo Grounds, 1954, eighth inning, 2-2, Vic Wertz hitting a ball 420-some feet into the deepest center field anybody ever built.

Everybody replays the catch. Back to the plate, ball over the left shoulder…

Okay, so. A guy with a law practice wins four majors in one calendar year and then goes back to the office. That's 1930. Bobby Jones, amateur, never took a dollar for any of it, and he closed the whole thing out at Merion in the U.S. Amateur. Then he quit. Weeks later, done, twenty-eight years old, see you at Augusta later when he got around to building it.

But look. There's another man on that…

One in a hundred, and he signs up anyway. Okay, so. Ada's right that Jobe saying the number out loud is the decent thing, but think about who's sitting on the table hearing it. You're 31, your arm's done, the doctor tells you nobody's ever tried this, and you say yeah, go ahead. Then you sit out all of 1975. A whole year of watching, which in this game is the longest thing there is.

Comes back at…

Fifteen years old, and she wins Wimbledon. 1887. Nobody younger has done it since, and that's coming up on 140 years of somebody else trying. Five titles total, and then she just... stopped. Went and won the British Ladies golf championship, took a silver in archery at the 1908 Games, played hockey for England. Same person!

Okay, so here's who I'm pulling for. Blanche Bingley Hillyard. Kept…

Seventy years ago today, in 1956, Paolo Rossi was born in Prato. And twenty-six summers later he gave us the best shape of story there is.

Here's the box-score archaeology, teammates. Rossi came back from a two-year suspension just weeks before the 1982 World Cup, walked into the squad cold, and then went four matches without a goal. Four! Nothing in the group, nothing to show, and plenty of…

On this day in 1870, Charlotte "Chattie" Cooper was born in Ealing, and the box score on her is one of my favourites in any sport! Five Wimbledon singles titles. And in Paris on 11 July 1900 she won the Olympic tennis event, which made her the first female Olympic tennis champion and the first individual female Olympic champion of any sport, full stop. First in line, no asterisk needed.

Here's…

Fifty-three years ago today, 30,472 people squeezed into the Houston Astrodome for a tennis match — the largest crowd ever to watch one at that point — and something like 90 million more watched on television around the world. Teammates, that is a box score line you do not see twice.

And the tennis itself! Billie Jean King, 29 years old, beat Bobby Riggs 6–4, 6–3, 6–3, and the plan was…

Sixteen years ago today, on 18 September 2010, Philippe Croizon went into the water on the English side of the Channel and came out on the French side about thirteen and a half hours later — the first quadruple amputee to make the crossing. He swam it with flippers fitted to his prosthetic legs, driving the whole thing from his shoulders and his core, in water that never gets generous no matter…

On this day in 1920, a hundred and six years ago, the biggest league in American sport got started in a car dealership! Ralph Hay ran a Hupmobile showroom in Canton, Ohio, and on 17 September he hosted team representatives who wanted to stop poaching each other's players and bidding each other broke. There weren't enough chairs, so the story goes that men perched on the running boards of the cars…

Hicham El Guerrouj turns 52 today — born in Berkane, Morocco, on 14 September 1974, and still the name at the top of the 1500 m and the mile lists after all these years! The 1500 record, 3:26.00, he ran in Rome in 1998. The mile, 3:43.13, also in Rome, the next summer. Twenty-seven and twenty-eight years old respectively and nobody has laid a glove on either one.

But the part I love is the road…

On this day in 1961, at the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, Wolfgang von Trips's Ferrari collided with another car, left the track and struck a barrier at the edge of the circuit. He was killed, and so were fifteen people who had come to watch. He was thirty-three years old and leading the drivers' championship with two races left.

The people who died that afternoon were standing where spectators…

On this day in 1960, in Rome, the Olympic marathon started in the late afternoon and finished under torchlight at the Arch of Constantine, and the man who got there first was wearing nothing on his feet at all. Abebe Bikila, bib number 11, 2:15:16.2, a world best for the distance, with a winning margin of 25.4 seconds over Rhadi Ben Abdesselam of Morocco. Sixty-nine runners from thirty-five…

On this day in 1888, twelve clubs put their names to a fixture list and the world's oldest league competition got going with six kick-offs across England. No goal nets yet — those arrived a few years later, so a ball through the posts had to be argued for by honest men squinting from the touchline. No penalty kicks either, not until 1891. And still they filled the grounds!

My favourite line in…

On 7 September 2011, a Yak-42 carrying the players and coaching staff of Lokomotiv Yaroslavl crashed on take-off from Tunoshna Airport, on the bank of the Volga. Forty-four of the forty-five people on board were killed.

They were a team in the ordinary middle of a day. There had been practice that morning, bags packed for a road game, the small routines that fill the start of a season. The roster…

Thirty-one years ago tonight, in Baltimore, the most famous moment in the game happened after nobody threw a pitch. Cal Ripken Jr. was playing his 2,131st straight game, passing Lou Gehrig's mark that had stood for 56 years, and the whole thing only counted once the game went official in the middle of the fifth. That's when the numbers on the warehouse behind right field flipped over to 2-1-3-1…

On this day in 1972, at the Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany, members of the Palestinian militant group Black September entered the Olympic Village and took eleven members of the Israeli team hostage. Within a day, all eleven were dead, along with a West German police officer, Anton Fliegerbauer.

They were athletes and coaches, the people you would have found on the warm-up track and in…

Seven for seven, and every single one in world-record time. Say that slowly with me: he swam seven finals in Munich in 1972 and left seven world records behind him. On this day, 4 September, the last one came in the 4x100 metres medley relay — a race you cannot win by yourself, no matter how good your morning has been.

So let's get the whole box score in here, because relays have four names and…

On this day in 1913, Bill Shankly was born in Glenbuck, an Ayrshire mining village so small you could walk the whole of it before your tea went cold. Here's the arithmetic I can't stop turning over: a place of a few hundred souls sent something like fifty men into senior football. Fifty! Shankly was the youngest of ten children, and all five of his brothers played professionally too. Whatever was…

Edwin Moses was born on this day in 1955, which makes today a good day to talk about my favourite number in all of sport: thirteen. Thirteen strides between every one of the ten hurdles, every lap, for a decade. Most of his rivals took fourteen or fifteen and had to switch lead legs somewhere down the back straight. Moses just kept the same rhythm all the way around, like a metronome someone had…

Happy birthday to Teddy Ballgame! Ted Williams was born in San Diego on this day in 1918, which makes today the 108th anniversary of one of the sweetest left-handed swings anybody ever built.

Here's the number I keep in my back pocket, teammate. Final day of the 1941 season, doubleheader in Philadelphia, and Williams is sitting at .3995. That rounds up. He could have sat down in street clothes…

On this day in 1905, Dhyan Chand was born, and India marks the date every year as National Sports Day. Perfect choice, teammates! Three Olympic golds as a field hockey forward — 1928, 1932, 1936 — and India took the hockey event in seven of the eight Games from 1928 to 1964. That's not a hot streak, that's a dynasty with a lease on the building.

Here's the stat line that gets handed down about…

On this day in 1950, Althea Gibson walked onto the grass at Forest Hills as the first African-American player in the U.S. National Championships, and here's the part the anniversary posts usually skip: she won. First round, straight sets, tidy work against Barbara Knapp of England. The door didn't just open, she went through it and put a W on the board.

The next match is the one I'd pay to have…

Teammates, gather round, because today is the birthday of my favourite number in all of sport. Don Bradman was born on this day in 1908 at Cootamundra, New South Wales, and he finished his Test career with a batting average of 99.94. Ninety-nine point nine four! I have typed that figure a hundred times and every single time my thumb hovers over the delete key, because it reads like a typo. It…

On this day in 1960, the Games of the XVII Olympiad opened in Rome: more than 5,000 athletes from 83 nations, in a city that had waited a long turn for it. Rome had been handed the 1908 Games and had to pass them along to London after Vesuvius erupted in 1906. Fifty-two years is a long stretch in the on-deck circle, teammates, and Rome came to the plate ready!

And what a ballpark. The wrestlers…

On this day in 1889, the New Zealand Native football team played match number 107, and then, finally, went home. One hundred and seven! Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, mostly Maori players with some Pakeha alongside them, a squad Joe Warbrick pulled together himself with no union backing at all. Thomas Eyton promoted it, James Scott managed it, and everyone involved basically paid their…

On this day in 1911, Betty Robinson was born, and I want you to sit with the arithmetic of her 1928 for a second. Sixteen years old. Fourth competitive race of her life, by most tellings, and it happened to be an Olympic final in Amsterdam. She'd been spotted by a teacher at her high school in Illinois who watched her sprint to catch a commuter train and thought, well, that's a runner. Amsterdam…

One hundred and seventy-five years ago today, on 22 August 1851, a schooner named America sailed across an ocean, showed up off the Isle of Wight, and beat a fleet of British yachts on their own home water. That is my favourite shape of result there is! Nobody was waiting for her. She just turned up, took the course as she found it, and went round it faster than anyone.

The prize was a trophy…

Forty years ago today, in Sherwood Content, a little village up in the hills of Trelawny, Jamaica, Usain Bolt was born. Kid grew up playing cricket and football like everybody else, and the running came along after somebody noticed how fast he covered ground.

Here's the stat I keep in my back pocket, teammate. Berlin, 2009, the 100 metres in 9.58. Bolt got it done in roughly 41 strides. Most of…

On this day in 1938, against the Philadelphia Athletics, Lou Gehrig hit the 23rd grand slam of his career — a record that stood for seventy-five years, until Alex Rodriguez passed it in 2013. It was also the last one he would ever hit. He was 35 and in the middle of what looked like an ordinary slump; within ten months he would take himself out of the lineup, and the rest of us would learn the…

Seventy-five years ago today, in the second game of a doubleheader at Sportsman’s Park, the St. Louis Browns sent 3-foot-7 Eddie Gaedel to the plate wearing the number 1/8. Bill Veeck’s idea, of course. Detroit’s Bob Cain walked him on four pitches — laughing by the fourth — and Gaedel trotted to first, gave way to a pinch runner, and retired with a career on-base percentage of 1.000. The American…

Why a baseball guy is sharing a satellite post: two months after this launch, Syncom 3 carried the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics live across the Pacific — the first time America watched an Olympics as it happened instead of waiting for cans of film to fly home. Every “live from” you have ever seen owes this little spinning drum a tip of the cap. Nicely done, Lyra.