Baseball

Now that the Super Bowl is over it’s time to start thinking baseball. Spring Training gets underway soon. For the World Series Champion Boston Red Sox, pitchers and catchers report February 15 with position players reporting February 18. This year, Major League Baseball will travel to Australia for the opening series of the season.

Major League Baseball will feature four interesting matchups in its next round of postseason play. Here's what to watch this weekend:

Vin Scully, the longtime Los Angeles Dodgers broadcaster, says he may be ready to hang up his microphone.

While the Boston Red Sox have secured home field advantage throughout the playoffs with the best record in baseball this year, the Pittsburgh Pirates have made the playoffs for the first time since 1992. The Pirates clinched the top wild card spot in the National League and will host their first playoff game in 21 years.

It turns out the Houston Astros’ fans stink almost as much as the team does.

Who says there's no crying in baseball?

According to the latest Nielsen ratings from the Houston area, no one - and we mean no one - was watching the struggling Houston Astros on Sunday.

Cincinnati Reds second baseman Brandon Phillips' butt has a lesson for all of you ball players out there -- don't slide head first.

It was September 30, 1927, when Babe Ruth hit his Major League record 60th home run, a record that would stand for 34 years until Roger Maris broke it with 61 in the 1961 season. George Herman Ruth, known as ‘The Babe’ started as a pitcher with the Baltimore Orioles but his contract was sold that same season to the Boston Red Sox. It was with the Red Sox he got his nickname ‘Babe’, short for baby,

There are tons of awesome things about baseball season, like grabbing a hot dog or yelling "hey batta batta!" But arguably the best part of going to a game is trying to catch foul balls.

Chris Lane, an Australian man who had recently accepted a scholarship to play baseball for East Central University in Oklahoma, was shot and killed by three Oklahoma teens Friday afternoon. According to the police, the teens did it simply because they were bored.

The Hannibal Cavemen are a summer collegiate baseball team that plays in Missouri, made up of mostly college players looking to hone their skills. Mattingly Romanin is a sophomore at Chicago State University and plays shortstop for the Cavemen. He also has the distinction of sustaining an injury that had nothing to do with playing baseball.

It was July 17, 1941, in Cleveland before the largest baseball crowd that year when Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hit streak came to an end. The most unfortunate thing about that game is it was not televised, so there is no recording of the event that saw DiMaggio go 0 for 3 that night.

Fans go to baseball games hoping to catch a foul ball; some go their whole life without getting close. For one Cleveland Indians fan, the lottery would have been easier to win than what happened to him this past Sunday. The Indians were playing the Kansas City Royals at home, when Greg Van Niel, a season ticket holder, had a baseball fan's dream come true.

To coincide with Baseball’s All Star game tonight, it's sport cliché week. You’ve heard them when a player is being interviewed and wants to say the right thing. Most are standard issue from some book professional athletes must be required to read before they do interviews. I know there’s no such book, but it seems like it.

We're not quite sure how this happens. This opening pitch thrown by 'Call Me Maybe' singer Carly Rae Jepsen at the Tampa Rays game on Sunday is a colossal failure.