A columnist for the Post since November 2002, Mike Vaccaro has reported from four Olympics, 12 World Series, 10 Super Bowls, eight Final Fours and five U.S. Opens, among the hundreds of events he has covered in his 20-year newspaper career. His "Open Mike" and "Vac’s Whacks" are regular Sunday features, and he has written three books, the latest -- "The First Fall Classic," about the 1912 World Series between the Giants and Red Sox -- is out Oct. 6.
Here's the thing: It isn’t all that hard to be a fan favorite, even in New York City, the place that’s supposed to take such great delight in bleeding a fellow dry and stomping on his carcass. Determining whether or not...
September 09, 2010 4:01 AMThis is my wish for you, you who root for the New York Jets: I wish you six days of serenity. Six days of peace. Six days when you aren’t constantly craning your neck, waiting for the other steel-toed boot to drop. Six...
September 07, 2010 3:44 AMThe road to this weekend, to this honest-to-God opening of the New Meadowlands Stadium was paved with a billion words. Small words. Big words. Angry words. Boastful words. Hopeful words. Rhetoric and rumbling. Debate...
September 07, 2010 1:55 AM
A few years back, I was at a ballgame with a couple of friends, and one of us happened to mention that none of us had ever caught a foul ball. I doubt that’s unusual; I would guess most people spend their entire...
September 05, 2010 1:55 AM
Sometimes you have to wander off the script, ad-lib a little. By this point in the game, 13 years in the major leagues, Kerry Wood was going to have a couple thousand strikeouts, a couple hundred wins, and he would have...
September 04, 2010 3:37 AM
Managers tend to fret over their batting orders, obsess about their bullpens, stay up nights thinking about how to properly align their starting rotations. It's what they do. If they didn't, if their eyes were missing...
September 03, 2010 12:00 AM
This was the very definition of a "quality start": six innings pitched, three earned runs allowed (we can discuss how great the "quality" of such an outing really is at a later date). So this probably wasn't what you...
September 02, 2010 12:00 AM
WASHINGTON — There was nothing wrong with Roger Clemens’ appetite as he made his way through the cafeteria on the first floor of the E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse at the lunch hour yesterday. Onto his tray went a big...
August 31, 2010 4:26 AMWASHINGTON -- There are those who would argue, and with fair reason, that what Roger Clemens does today rises only a few inches above the worst elements of reality entertainment, that we will be nothing more than...
August 30, 2010 12:00 AMIf you spend enough time at ballparks, you can start to identify what’s happening on the field with your eyes closed. A home run, for instance: The ball makes a different sound off the bat than even a well-struck double...
August 29, 2010 3:46 AMThis was the reminder, the stick in the eye, the serf following the king and whispering in his ear, "Remember thou art mortal, remember thou art mortal." The Jets have a very good football team and should be on the...
August 28, 2010 12:00 AM
Ok, baseball buffs and history mavens. A question for you: Tell me what you should know about the 1974 Chicago White Sox. And tell me why any of that is at all relevant to the 2010 New York Mets. (We will now cue...
August 26, 2010 12:00 AMThe Yankees are 29 games over .500. They have owned at least a tie of first place for 62 of the past 63 days. Their magic number to clinch a postseason berth sat at 34 heading into last night’s batch of games. There are...
August 22, 2010 4:06 AMHere's today’s sports quiz for you: How do you know when you’ve reached rock bottom? In real life, it’s a little easier: Your bank account tells you. Your soon-to-be-ex-wife tells you. Maybe, if you’re lucky, your...
August 22, 2010 3:53 AM
Roger Clemens is the one who wanted this fight, don’t forget that. Most people, the government comes after them, there’s a sad story behind the headlines, big guy slapping around little guy, bureaucrats bullying and...
August 20, 2010 1:59 AMFame was never a burden for Bobby Thomson. Are you kidding? However you suspect that you would have reacted to hitting the most famous home run in baseball history, that’s precisely how Thomson reacted. He never grew...
August 18, 2010 2:01 AMThere are good fights to pick, and there are bad fights that are best avoided. The Mets have a fight worth contesting now, they have an opportunity to send a loud message to their fans that they are done being — pardon...
August 17, 2010 2:02 AMFor Giants fans of a certain vintage, and for football fans of a certain age, this had to be a chilling snapshot of dreadful déjà-vu: star quarterback, sans helmet, blood running in rivers and rivulets up and down his...
August 17, 2010 12:00 AMThe manager tries to keep saying the right things, even as he sees so much wrong, so much bad, all around him. There have been nights this year when Jerry Manuel has left the people at Citi Field scratching their heads....
August 16, 2010 2:15 AMDarrelle Revis is only the latest athlete to play this game, a game as old as . . . well, games, or at least games in which the players are compensated. The men who play for teams and the men who own them almost never...
August 15, 2010 3:38 AM
The people in the ballpark, all 35,440 of them, knew what they were seeing. Mets fans, more than any other set of fans in baseball, have razor-sharp antennae for this sort of thing. Last weekend, when it was brought up...
August 14, 2010 3:56 AM
The Mets never just have lousy seasons, the way normal teams do. Armageddon and apocalypse must always accompany the uninspiring baseball. The clubhouse always has to be more interesting -- if not as mordantly...
August 13, 2010 12:00 AM
It should surprise nobody that James Dolan still wants to sneak Isiah Thomas into the side door at Two Penn Plaza, nudge him back onto his abdicated throne. Dolan is such a dim bulb it’s surprising there’s enough...
August 12, 2010 5:05 AM
This was the difference be tween the Yankees and the Red Sox in this second week of August, the difference between the best record in baseball and the outside of the playoffs looking in, the difference between a game...
August 10, 2010 12:00 AM
PHILADELPHIA -- He has never been a darling of Mets fans, not in his first year (when he struggled to acclimate himself to New York) and not in his finest year (which ended, famously, with him staring at an Adam...
August 09, 2010 12:00 AM
I am not an accountant. I do not have access to financial records of the Wilpon family and even if I did, I wouldn’t have the slightest idea what I was looking at. I don’t have to know how badly the Bernie Madoff...
August 08, 2010 3:16 AM
PHILADELPHIA -- This was like seeing one of those original "Honeymooners" episodes for the 6,000th time, right? The same 39 episodes played over and over and over, always ending the same way, always ending with the...
August 08, 2010 12:00 AM
If someone walked up to you in a bar and treated you with the kind of disdain, the kind of naked contempt, that James Dolan showed you yesterday, there are just two ways you would possibly have reacted. If you are a...
August 07, 2010 3:15 AMATLANTA -- The arithmetic doesn't lie, because it never does. After 54 games this season, the Mets were 27-27. Across the next 54 games -- which ended with last night's mind-numbing 8-3 loss to the Braves at Turner...
August 05, 2010 12:00 AM
ATLANTA -- This was a few weeks after the Giants had beaten the Patriots in Super Bowl XLII, a few weeks after Tom Coughlin had coached the hoodie off Bill Belichick, a few years after I'd written a column for this...
August 04, 2010 12:00 AM
NEW YORK POST is a registered trademark of NYP Holdings, Inc.
nypost.com, nypostonline.com, and newyorkpost.com are trademarks of NYP Holdings, Inc.
Copyright 2010 NYP Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved. Privacy | Terms of Use
