When the Pittsburgh Steelers won four Super Bowls in a six-season span in the 1970s and the Pirates won two World Series in the same decade, Pittsburgh became known as the City of Champions. What, then, should we call Boston and its neighbor Foxboro with three World Series victories and two Super Bowl titles in a decade?

The Patriots are back, playing Seattle tonight as the American Conference champions for the sixth time in the last 14 Super Bowls. The Red Sox don’t have that record of World Series frequency, but they have won three of the last 11 World Series, two since the Patriots last won the Super Bowl.

The Red Sox problem has come more recently. Although they won the American League East title en route to the World Series in 2013, they finished in last place the year before and the year after. Those developments gave them the dubious record of going from worst to first to worst, the only team, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, to do that since 1900.

The Patriots won their division and conference championships for the 2014 National Football League season. The Red Sox will be hard pressed to …

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What did he know and when did he know it?

What did Bud Selig know about collusion and when did he know it?

What did Bud Selig know about steroids and when did he know it?

While Selig scoops up accolades with both hands as he leaves office after 22 years as commissioner, he faces questions that he won’t answer but that undermine the reputation he has gained as the man responsible for the game’s impressive growth.

Selig certainly deserves accolades because Major League Baseball is said to have reached, if not surpassed, an all-time high $9 billion in revenue. Owners are making money, players are seeing their salaries escalate upon escalation and fans are flocking to their local ball parks despite rising ticket prices.

But there has been a negative side to the progress, and Selig …

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So many players are competing in the California Bay Area baseball game viewers need a scorecard to keep track of who is playing what position. A glossary of terms would also help.

On the need for a glossary of terms, take as an example a comment by Rob Manfred, baseball’s incoming commissioner. He was reacting to on an appellate court decision in California upholding a lower court dismissal of antitrust claims in a lawsuit filed by the city of San Jose against Major League Baseball.

“Litigation often distracts people from what the real issue is,” Manfred said last week. “The real issue for us going forward is that Oakland needs a new ballpark, and we need to get focused on making sure that we get that done as fast as we can.”

Upon my initial reading of that comment, I thought Manfred was saying …

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