When you root for any baseball team for 65 years, a few odd ducks are going to stick with you.

Since that usually means a player who has some harmlessly wacky streak, like the Red Sox’s Bill Lee, it doesn’t feel like exactly the right term for Mike Marshall, a first-rate relief pitcher who was 78 when he died Monday at his home in Zephyrhills, Fla.

But he did stick with you.

I remember Marshall best from his two and a half seasons with the Dodgers, though he also had terrific seasons with the Expos and Twins.

The season no…

Lo these many decades after the folk music wave of the 1950s and 1960s — the one the late Dave Van Ronk jokingly called “the great folk scare” — history tends to telescope the era into its most famous alumni and alumnae, like Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell.

They reserve that recognition. But the movement, ragged, free-spirited and often contentious by nature, incorporated a much larger and more diverse group, many of whom sadly have reached or are now reaching the age where they’ve strummed the last chord.

In that spirit, it’s worth pausing to say goodbye to Patrick Sky…

My wife and I were married on May 24, 1986, the day Bob Dylan turned 45. That may explain why he missed the wedding and we missed the birthday party.

More significantly, it means that this May 24 Bob Dylan turns 80, which is marvelous because, among many other things, he gets to keep enjoying how pervasive his art has become and what it has meant to the culture of his time.

Now sure, you could assemble a crowd of young folks who had barely heard of Bob Dylan and would do one of those “Okay, Boomer” wave-offs if you…

Lloyd Price is the only artist I remember who hired a major New York public relations firm to lobby for his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

It worked. He was inducted in 1998.

Oh, okay, he very likely would have been inducted anyhow, because Price, who died Thursday at the age of 88, was more important than most rock ’n’ roll history tells us.

Hiring a lobbyist wasn’t self-delusion. It was more like moving perception into line with achievement.

If he had done nothing else, Lloyd Price’s 1958 version of the folk ballad “Stagger Lee” would…

The possibly apocryphal story goes that when Sam Phillips of Sun Records asked a young walk-in named Elvis Presley who he sounded like, the kid answered, “I don’t sound like nobody.”

For most singers, that would have been a lie. For Elvis, it wasn’t. In the radio biz, it wouldn’t have been a lie for Bob Fass.

Fass, who died Saturday of Covid-19 complications at the age of 87, was for decades the host of an overnight show called Radio Unnameable on WBAI (99.5 FM) in New York. …

The strangest thing happened this week. For one brief shining moment, the rich didn’t get richer.

It’s a complicated story and it happened in the European soccer world, so it didn’t get a lot of attention on the American side of the pond.

Nonetheless, it’s worth noting, because in this golden age of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and extreme capitalism, it’s what we newspaper old-timers used to call a man-bites-dog story.

To oversimplify, the best and richest soccer teams in Europe and Britain got together to form what they modestly called a Super League.

The idea…

I enjoy enough Jim Steinman songs that I’m probably on the borderline between harmless guilty pleasure and the need for an intervention.

Steinman, who died Monday at the age of 73, wrote songs with really long titles like “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)” and “Loving You is a Dirty Job But Someone’s Gotta Do It.” He wrote lots of them and they were pretty much all frenzied, with bombastic production that showcased swelling choruses and over-the-top vocals.

If Phil Spector created the Wall of Sound, Steinman jacked it up into the Great Wall of China.

…

I never met Mark Mitchell, so it’s fair to say I didn’t know him. But in a way, I kinda did. Welcome to the radio game.

Mark Mitchell, one of two on-air names used by Mark Wurzburger during a long career in radio, was for the last four years the morning host on my local radio station, WMTR-AM (1250 AM). He had been off the air since February, and last week he passed away from cancer.

His friends at the station, and others who did know him, say he was one of the good guys. They will be offering more…