The World According to Gillespie

BASEBALL'S HALL REQUIRES FAME    This column originally appeared on Wicked Local The names of the 2018 Baseball Hall of Fame inductees will be released this week and the selection process remains one of the most hotly debated issues in contemporary sports. Much has been made about the well publicized letter of complaint submitted by former Cincinnati Reds second basemen and current Baseball Hall of Famer Joe Morgan regarding the apparent sentiments of former major leaguers currently in the Hall of Fame and the ever-growing potential that they might be forced to share the stage with suspected PED users. Statistical milestones in baseball were once well earned. I remember Carl Yastrzemski taking what seemed like months attempting to reach hit number 3,000, and when he finally grounded that ball into right field off of Jim Beattie and the dreaded Yankees, it meant something. And 400 home runs? Who among us hasn’t hit 400 home runs? OK, I haven’t, but Mark Teixeira...

BOSTON NEEDS THE HERALD       This column originally appeared on Wicked Local I t was recently announced that ownership of the Boston Herald will soon fall into the hands of GateHouse Media, which hopefully does not mean the end for a paper that has served Boston well for over 100 years.   I do not remember a version of the Herald as early as the 1800s, but I do remember the Boston Herald American, which was one of two primary newspapers distributed in the Boston area during the 1970s along with the Boston Globe.   The Herald was the newspaper that showcased the colorful Peanuts comic as part of its Sunday edition.   In 1984, all of that changed when the Herald was purchased by Rupert Murdoch and became more of a tabloid publication in the style of the New York Post – also owned by Murdoch at the time.   Although the paper always seemed to be the junior publication to the more traditionally assembled Boston Globe, the Herald...

CANCER COMES UNEXPECTEDLY This column originally appeared on Wicked Local. My wife asked me if I would like to go to her doctor’s appointment with her.  Although I would be forced to take the morning off from work, it was something that was clearly important to her, so in a show of support I agreed to join her.   (My wife sometimes measures loyalty and commitment through a willingness to accompany her to medical appointments.) She was scheduled to get a routine mammogram, a relatively simple procedure that would hopefully leave us the rest of the day to have lunch and possibly do some light-hearted shopping.   I had already poured through roughly ten pages of my book, Bill Pennington’s expose on late Yankee icon Billy Martin, by the time she reached out to me via text message.  “So they just did another mammogram x-ray and now I wait to talk to the radiologist.  They said I could have them bring you in for the results but it’s a little weird ...