Hullabaloo

It was a Monday night in the summer of 1976. You remember because it was on NBC’s “Monday Night Baseball” that you and the rest of the world discovered the phenomenon that was Detroit Tigers’ rookie pitcher Mark “The Bird” Fidrych. He borrowed his nickname from Big Bird of “Sesame Street,” but otherwise he was an American original, right down to manicuring the mound on his hands and knees.

Thanks to a beautiful iPad app called Pennant, you can recapture some of the magic of that electric night of June 28, 1976, when Fidrych beat the New York Yankees, 5-1.

Billed as an interactive history of baseball, Pennant offers details of more than 115,000 games played from 1952 to 2010. It’s possible to scroll through each game – play by play – by running one’s fingertip around a circle not much larger than a baseball.

Steve Varga developed Pennant as his senior thesis project toward earning an MFA in the design and technology program at Parsons School of Design.

We discovered Pennant in a video that also features the song “1976” by The Baseball Project, a rock band comprising Steve Wynn, Scott McCaughey, Peter Buck and Linda Pitmon. The group’s second volume of baseball tales is called “High and Inside.”

Batting leadoff is “1976,” an homage to Fidrych, from his injury-shortened career to his tragic death at age 48.

Thirty years of working in Manhattan as a Newsweek executive was enough for Maine native Tom Manning. In 2008, he turned the page on one career and embarked on a wholly new one as owner of the reopened Miss Portland Diner in Portland, Maine. Built in 1949 by the Worcester Lunch Car Co., the Miss Portland, according to the diner’s Web site, made a cameo appearance in the 1993 movie “Man Without a Face,” which marked Mel Gibson’s directorial debut and was filmed in Maine.

Reading was first. Before the likes of Jonathan Quick, George Parros and Scott Parse made it to the National Hockey League, they were members of the Reading Royals hockey club. The Royals play in the ECHL, just two rungs from the NHL, so the brand of hockey is quite good. The Royals also represent fun, affordable family entertainment, including many opportunities to interact with players.

Someone thought so much of Ralph Slate that they started a petition to get him into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Slate never played the game, at least not on a level that would earn him a mention in his creation, the Internet Hockey Database. But his contributions to the sport are legion – and ever-expanding. The database includes statistics for thousands of players, from Antii Aalto to Andrei Zyuzin, as well as teams and leagues from the past to the present. It also boasts an inventory of team logos, including the greatest one of all time.

What Slate is to hockey fans, Mike Andrews is to members of Red Sox Nation. He created SoxProspects.com in 2003, giving diehard Red Sox fans access to profiles and statistics about players toiling in Lowell and Greenville, Portland and Pawtucket with the hope of following Kevin Youkilis, Jonathan Papelbon and Dustin Pedroia to Fenway Park.

You can take the boy out of Maine, but the boy can't find anything outside of the Pine Tree State quite like a Sam's Italian sandwich. It's not complicated: salami, white American cheese, green pepper, onions, pickles, tomatoes and light oil. A Vacationland institution, right up there with L.L. Bean, the Portland Sea Dogs and Ed Muskie.