For Conrado Marrero, beating the Yankees was "the sweetest feeling in the world." Blowing out 101 candles on his birthday Wednesday probably felt almost as good.

Marrero became the oldest living former major league baseball player last year. Born on a farm in El Laberinto, Cuba, on April 25, 1911, he now lives with his family in a modest Havana apartment, enjoying cigars and the sounds of Cuban baseball on the radio. The right-handed pitcher recently talked with the Associated Press about his career with the Washington Senators, and an aftermath that hasn't been as glamorous as some might imagine.

Although he was a star in Cuba from his years in the country's minor and major leagues, Marrero was already 38 when he made his debut with the Senators. Standing at just 5 feet 5 inches tall, Marrero recalls the Yankee batters as tough.

"They were the best," he told the AP's Paul Haven. "Each batter was a struggle."

Though, according to Haven, Marrero's memory isn't always sharp, he remembers meeting Babe Ruth, spending time with Connie Mack and sharing an elevator with Dwight Eisenhower. During his five years with the Senators, he faced batters like Mickey Mantle and Ted Williams.

In 1951, he pitched a one-hitter against the Philadelphia Athletics -- giving up a hit to Barney McCosky. He finished his major league career with a 39-40 record and though he was selected to the 1951 American League All-Star team, he didn't play in the game.full story >>

Long before steroid sluggers, Hank Aaron held the most important record in American sports. Soon, Aaron's breaking of Babe Ruth's career home run record will get the Tinseltown treatment.

Barry Levinson, who helped bring the iconic 1984 baseball move "The Natural" to life, has added his name to the project. Additionally, big name writer Adam Mazer, who also helped develop the Robert Redford film with Levinson, will work to bring Aaron's story to life.

The Hollywood Reporter passes along that producers Mike Tollin and Glenn Rigberg scored the movie rights to Howard Bryant's book "The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron." The biopic will key in on Aaron's life between 1972 and 1974, as he knocked the Bambino's 714 home runs out of the top slot in baseball's record books.full story >>

By Joel Huerto
OneManFastBreak.net

There are certain images that are deeply embedded in the history of the NBA. There's the famous photo of Red Auerbach smoking a cigar on the sidelines in the Boston Garden as the Celtics are about to win the championship. The great decade of the 1980s was defined by the picture of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird fighting for position under the basket. Michael Jordan's game-winning shot in Game 6 of the 1998 NBA Finals not only captured Jordan's greatest moment but it also displayed the priceless reaction of the Utah fans as the Bulls inch closer to their sixth NBA title. And then there's the NBA logo. Although the league won't confirm it, the image clearly mirrors a young Jerry West driving to the hoop.

As good as those images were nothing compares to the iconic photograph of Wilt Chamberlain sitting on a bench and holding up a white piece of paper with the number "100" etched on it the night he set the NBA's unassailable single-game scoring record on March 2, 1962 in Hershey, Pa.full story >>

There was no player more controversial in Major League Baseball during the mid-1990's than a certain slugger from the Cleveland Indians. But Father Time and fatherhood have caught up to Albert Belle.

The former slugger visited the Cleveland Indians spring training camp yesterday in Arizona -- his first visit with the Tribe since he skipped town for a big free agent payday in 1996.

Although Belle spent a good chunk of time talking about those great Indians teams of the early 1990's with Kenny Lofton, Carlos Baerga and Sandy Alomar Jr., he says parenting is his focus these days.full story >>

Before there was Linsanity, there was, for a brief moment, Misakamania.

OK, that might be an exaggeration. But Wataru "Wat" Misaka, the first non-Caucasian and first Asian-American to play in the NBA was perhaps an even more unlikely star than Jeremy Lin. If you happened to be listening to NPR during your morning commute Wednesday, you might have caught his interview with Morning Edition's Steve Inskeep.

The 5-foot-7-inch Japanese-American was born in Ogden, Utah, in 1923. He played basketball for the Utes in the 1940s, a time when being Japanese in the U.S. was anywhere from uncomfortable to terrifying. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor brought the U.S. into World War II, many Americans of Japanese descent were forced to live in remote internment camps, where the conditions could be quite difficult.

It was a complicated time for Misaka personally, who took two years from his college basketball career to serve in the U.S. Army during the occupation of Japan. After witnessing the occupation, playing basketball at home just felt bizarre.full story >>

When he arrives at the spring training camp of the Houston Astros Feb. 29, Milo Hamilton will begin his farewell season as a regular baseball broadcaster.

Hamilton announced Wednesday that the 2012 season will be his last as the radio voice of the Astros, though he has signed a professional services contract that will keep him tied to the club for three more seasons. He told ThePostGame.com that he'll not only emcee events at Minute Maid Park but also fill in when needed in the broadcast booth.

By the time he hangs up his mike for good, the Fairfield, Iowa native will have worked 70 years as a baseball broadcaster and broadcast from 63 different ballparks (more than double the number of clubs in the big leagues today). Thanks to expansion, shifting franchises, interleague play, and stadium construction, his broadcast from the new Miami stadium April 13 will come from Hamilton’s 63rd different broadcast booth.

One of four octogenarians still broadcasting major-league baseball, Hamilton turns 85 just before Labor Day. He has been Voice of the Astros since 1985 and a member of the broadcast wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame since 1992. He is also a member of the Radio Hall of Fame, and Texas Baseball Hall of Fame, among others.full story >>

Last week, Jeremy Lin was a Knicks benchwarmer with a non-guaranteed contract who slept on his brother's couch.

Now Lin is named the NBA's Eastern Conference player of the week (27.3 points and 8.3 assists per game), has the league's No. 1-selling jersey and is the subject of a record-breaking number of headline puns.

But the "Linsanity" doesn't end with jerseys and newspaper headlines.

One savvy Ebay member -- and apparently a schoolmate of Lin's from their days at Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School -- is auctioning his seventh- and eighth-grade yearbooks.

The seventh-grade edition features Lin's yearbook photo and a, shall we say, "Linscription," from Jeremy himself, and is available for the Buy It Now price of $4,800.full story >>

Get your 84 jerseys out? Maybe. Randy Moss announced Monday he'll attempt a comeback next season.

When Moss announced his retirement last August at the age of 34, a lot of football fans thought it was too soon. The prevailing sense: Moss still has something left in the tank. Surely one of the greatest wideouts of all time has something to bring to the right team.

Well, Moss agrees. And he told several hundred fans via live broadcast on UStream. The broadcast conversation kicked off his 35th birthday celebration.full story >>

A beloved 1980s Major League Baseball star says he used cocaine not only a few times, but a majority of the time he was pitching.

The Boston Globe reports Dennis "Oil Can" Boyd, who pitched eight seasons for the Boston Red Sox, admitted he was under the influence of cocaine two-thirds of the time he was on the mound.

Boyd has penned a tell-all book, "They Call Me Oil Can: My Life in Baseball," which will hit bookstore shelves in June.

"Some of the best games I've ever, ever pitched in the major leagues I stayed up all night; I'd say two-thirds of them," Boyd said to WBZ radio. "If I had went to bed, I would have won 150 ballgames in the time span that I played. I feel like my career was cut short for a lot of reasons, but I wasn't doing anything that hundreds of ballplayers weren’t doing at the time; because that's how I learned it.

"It was something that I had to deal with personally and I succumbed. I lived through my life and I feel good about myself. I have no regrets about what I did or said about anything that I said or did. I'm a stand-up person and I came from a quality background of people."full story >>

Every year, the Super Bowl brings together not only the two best football teams, but also the very best commercials Madison Avenue has to offer. (It's still the only TV event that actually makes us want to watch commercials.) And we can trace the current era of the big-event, big-budget Super Bowl ad back to a single commercial: Apple's groundbreaking ad, "1984."

The ad, which introduced the Apple Macintosh personal computer to the buying public, ran only one time nationally, during the 1984 Super Bowl -- but it made such a huge impression, we're still talking about it. Set in a gray, dystopic future with miserable people grimly marching underneath an image of a Big Brother-like overlord, it featured a female athlete in an Apple tank top dramatically hurling a hammer into the evil overlord's image. Translation? Look out, IBM: You've got a little competition on your hands.full story >>

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