Baseball great Tom Seaver spent his career shutting down would-be sluggers.

Now he’s found a new passion in the wine industry. Check this out.

Good to see the former superstar enjoying his time off the field.

Here’s a nice reminiscence on the heavy wood bats of a bygone era.

While this predates our own baseball-obsessed childhood, we feel a certain kinship with the author.

Well worth a read!

If you need evidence of baseball’s global appeal, look no further than the Wikipedia entries discussed in this enjoyable read.

But somehow Major League Wezen-Ball just doesn’t sound right…

But the years have passed in an instant, and now we’re coming up on the first years of Hall of Fame eligibility for the greats of that era like Clemens, Sosa and Biggio.

The question is, how do we deal with the elite players of the tainted years of MLB?

While the highlights of the 2011 MLB season are unforgettable, the lowlights have a persistence of memory all their own. Fatalities, fiascos and epic fails make the list of MLB lows in 2011.

The message, we guess, is that bat safety is of paramount importance - for rookies.

We tweeted about this last week - marking the passing of Irving Franklin, co-founder of Franklin Sports and co-inventor of the batting glove.

Franklin teamed up with Mike Schmidt in the 1980s to design and make the batting glove that remains today the flagship product of the Franklin Sports brand - and a favorite of batters stepping up to the plate.

Little League International has announced bat specs and standards for the 2012 season - check it out here.

Although the ban on composite-barreled bats remains in effect, some composite-barreled bats have received waivers based on the Bat Performance Factor and the Accelerated Break-In process.

For your ease of use, here’s the list of approved composite-barreled bats for the Little League Majors Division in 2012.