The rebrand was planned as part of the team's big move to their new stadium, New Marlins Ballpark (which also sports a logo with a rainbow motif), a baseball-only park with a retractable roof to keep the tropical rains away. With a name like New Marlins Ballpark, the powers-that-be decided the team needed a new identity as well. So not only are the uniform colors radically different, but the team will now be called the Miami Marlins.

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Like Mays’ over-the-shoulder catch, Buckner’s booboo is entrenched in American folklore. Jimmy Fallon’s Red Sox fanatic in “Fever Pitch,” distraught over breaking up with his girlfriend, watches Buckner’s play over and over on his VCR. During congressional hearings in 2008, U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Ky., called former Treasury Secretary John Snow, then-SEC chief Christopher Cox and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan “three Bill Buckners.” On “Curb Your Enthusiasm” this season, Larry David loses a softball game when a ball rolls between his legs; his coach screams, “You Buckner-ed me!”

Everyone knows that Buckner lost the 1986 World Series for the Red Sox. But what everyone knows is wrong.

At the time, the Red Sox were burdened with 68 years of frustration; their last championship was in 1918. Leading three games to two against the New York Mets, Boston was ahead by a score of 5-3 in the bottom of the 10th inning. Red Sox pitcher Calvin Schiraldi got two quick outs. In the Sox locker room the champagne was iced, and the scoreboard flashed “Congratulations Red Sox.”

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Thankfully, though, we now have baseball to help shine a light on the problem so that everyone can see it for what it really is.

Today, Major League Baseball games using QuesTec's computerized pitch-monitoring system are the most statistically quantifiable workplaces in America. Match up QuesTec's accumulated data with demographic information about who is pitching and who is calling balls and strikes, and you get the indisputable proof of how ethnicity does indeed play a part in discretionary decisions of those in power positions.

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That's the question we posed to several experts -- novelists, sports journalists, even a former baseball commissioner -- as  "Moneyball" hits theaters. We also asked each to name a favorite baseball movie ("Bull Durham" turns out to be, as one writer put it, "the gold standard"), and discuss whether baseball is better suited to prose -- fiction or journalism -- than it is to the big screen. Below are the responses we received.

John Thorn

[My favorite baseball movie is] "Bull Durham," because it is gritty, real, and smart about the subculture that only baseball professionals know. Not to mention that it is funny, as is "Major League," which stands up to repeated watching. Not funny but also with much to recommend them are "The Natural" (better than Malamud's dreary novel) and "Field of Dreams," a three-hankie weeperoo for guys.

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Oh, and it's about baseball. Not that its publisher is keen to advertise this. Indeed, Vanity Fair's 19,000-word e-book on the novel's "birth" describes how its designer was forbidden from referring to the sport on the book's cover. "The Art of Fielding's" official description tells us it's "about" such things as ambition, family, friendship, love and commitment -- themes common to just about any novel. Though the baseball novel may be in rude health -- according to bibliographer Noel Schraufnagel, some 200 of them were published between 1990 and 2007 alone -- in literary circles, it's still deemed minor-league. Sure, the likes of Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway made reference to baseball in some of their best-known works, but most novels about the sport are dismissed as Cracker Jack for the sort of enthusiast that agonizes over his -- and it's always his -- fantasy team, rather than manna for the enlightened, worldly reader.

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In this theatrical production, the Red Sox provide the stage, and the Pentagon the props. In military parlance, it is a joint operation. In front of a gigantic American flag draped over the left-field wall, an Air Force contingent, clad in blue, stands at attention. To carry a smaller version of the Stars and Stripes onto the playing field, the Navy provides a color guard in crisp summer whites. The United States Marine Corps kicks in with a choral ensemble that leads the singing of the national anthem. As the anthem's final notes sound, four U. S. Air Force F-15C Eagles scream overhead. The sellout crowd roars its approval.

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This is not a joke, people. Did you see this guy Alan "Nasty" Nash, one of the world's premier toe wrestlers? Because that dude looks like a blacksmith from a medieval war movie and I bet his toes are not playing around.

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This fetishization of the individual has intensified since the 1980s. We see it in political activists' focus on presidential elections to the exclusion of almost all other political arenas. We see it in young people who have traded in idealistic "save the world" goals for dreams of celebrity. We see it in the revival of Ayn Rand's Objectivism as a powerful political ideology in Congress. We see it in both the left and the right mindlessly and unquestioningly parroting whichever cable-news deity they revere. Now, we see it even in America's ultimate team sport.

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"30 Rock's" Alec Baldwin and "The Office's" John Krasinski have figured out what they're doing with their off-season, and that's punching each other in the face about baseball. No, seriously. In this series for New Era Caps, Baldwin goes head to head with Jim Halpert over their Red Sox/Yankees rivalry. So far there have been three spots, and if you play them in succession it's kind of like watching a crossover episode between the two shows.

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Quinn, who was down in front of the field, then shouted, "Hey there are kids out here," he said during a news conference at the Los Angeles office of noted attorney Gloria Allred.

Quinn alleged that the coach replied that kids don’t belong at a baseball park, picked up a bat, walked up to Quinn and asked him, "How much are your teeth worth?"

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Well, in an effort to get more of Middle America (read: non-hipsters) aware of their existence, two members of the group showed up to sing at the seventh inning of a Chicago Cubs game Saturday.

Though lead singer Win Butler wasn't in attendance, the audience gamely put on their happy faces and sang along to the tune.

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I have been without a relationship for over three years. I do not count the illegal alien from Kazakhstan, who I met on Ludlow Street in lower Manhattan. He never held my hand but wanted to marry me. Or the old friend who dutch treated me to a meal in Hell’s Kitchen. Forget the Lower East Side cub who wanted a cougar until the sun rose. I have given up on real men. But before I go to bed alone, I make sure the AM/FM alarm clock is set to Sports Radio 66 WFAN NY at 5:55 a.m. As I slumber, I dream of my cowboy. It has become my obsession to quiet my dogs each morning, so that Craig Carton's voice will be the first I hear when I wake.

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Following a 12-day trial and almost four full days of deliberation, a jury could not reach a unanimous vote on three of four counts, a messy end to a case that put the slugger in the spotlight for more than three years.

Bonds sat stone-faced through the verdict, displaying no emotion.

The case also represented the culmination of the federal investigation into the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative steroids ring. Federal prosecutors and the Justice Department will have to decide whether to retry Bonds on the unresolved counts.

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The meteoric rise and decline in African-American baseball has been staggering. Dark-skinned players, of course, were everywhere in the Series. They made up 40 percent of the players, but most came from the Caribbean or were Hispanic Americans. Few were U.S.-born blacks.

That's a stunning reversal. African-Americans changed baseball after Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, Henry Aaron and other men schooled in the Negro Leagues brought a revelatory combination of speed and power to the majors. Eight Negro Leaguers who entered the major leagues became Hall-of-Famers. So did another nine African-Americans born before Robinson integrated the Dodgers but who were too young to play black baseball. By 1975, African-Americans constituted over a quarter of all players and were over-represented among the game's elite. More important, they made baseball, once an obstacle to social change, a catalyst for it.

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In his tiny hometown of Van Meter, Iowa, he was the farm boy who never forgot his roots.

Flags flew at half-staff Thursday at the Bob Feller Museum in Van Meter, a short drive west of Des Moines, a day after Feller succumbed to acute leukemia at the age of 92.

Museum general manager Scott Havick says Feller was a patriotic, loyal and warmhearted man who wasn't afraid to speak his mind, and museum staffer Delores Jones says Feller always seemed like family, warmly greeting visitors and sharing stories of his time in the big leagues.

Feller won 266 games with the Indians and was enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962.

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The 92-year-old Feller, who was recently admitted to the Cleveland Clinic with pneumonia, has been transferred to a hospice in the Cleveland area, Bob DiBiasio, the team's vice president of public relations confirmed to The Associated Press on Wednesday night.

Feller's health has been in decline in recent months. He was diagnosed with leukemia in August, and after fainting while undergoing chemotherapy, Feller had a pacemaker implanted.

Feller won 266 games in 18 seasons -- all with the Indians. An eight-time All-Star, Feller interrupted his baseball career to enlist in the Navy during World War II. Feller served three years in the military before returning to the major leagues.

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I knew what she was going to say.

There've been two Chicagoans whom I've pre-mourned in my life. That is, the two of them were getting on in years and it was only a matter of time before some news announcer would say, Sad news from Chicago. They both meant so much to me; in fact either could have been the father I wished I had. Both of them would have been heaven. One was Studs Terkel. The other died Thursday.

Before the two died, I'd think ahead to how I'd feel when I'd hear the news. Once or twice I'd even find myself with wet eyes. I knew them both -- not well, but strangely enough, intimately. In the case of Studs, his whole life had been laid bare in the books he'd written, my favorite of which was "Talking To Myself." In the case of Ronald Edward Santo, I'd spent a month with him in the summer of 2000, eating with him, watching him rage, witnessing him charm men and women alike, recoiling in horror as he'd bark at innocent passersby merely because he was teed off about something stupid his beloved Cubs had done. And in the 40 years he'd been associated with that silly baseball team, he'd been made mad by their stupidity more times than the world's combined computer capacity can calculate.

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Revelers were seen jumping on cars, rocking buses and tossing toilet paper Monday night after the Giants captured their first World Series title since they moved from New York more than a half century ago.

Video from KTVU-TV showed crowds swarming and attacking the occupants of a car in the city's Mission District before police intervened. A window at the Dugout Store at AT&T Park was also broken, and several fires were started nearby.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom says the vast majority of people celebrated peacefully and police did a good job of keeping order.

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