I can’t write. I know I can’t write. But my wife and son keep telling me that I should, and we all know how objective a spouse and the children can be. So, I am writing just to prove a point: I can’t write. Although deep inside, I think I can, but...
On the ninth day of the fifth month of the year, we still wait. Call it the longest rain delay ever. That’s a great inside joke I have with BaltimoreBaseball.com’s Rich Dubroff. Rich keeps score of everything, including rain delays, and this has trended toward a delightful Twitter joke for two. There...
There was something about the last game of a baseball season that troubled me. One-hundred-and-sixty-one games had been played, but number 162 had a finality to it that triggered a certain sadness. I sometimes would watch the replay later that night to hold on to it for just a little longer. The...
I was born in 1983 at Union Memorial Hospital, just down 33rd Street from Memorial Stadium. Bittersweet, born an Oriole fan and unable to rejoice in what remains to this day our organization’s last World Series championship. On the bright side, the city had Cal Ripken Jr., real-life Iron Man. I can...
I moved to Chicago in July 2010, a New York kid who grew up with the dynasty Yankees and loved every minute. Though few would label the Bronx Bombers anywhere near the word underdog, I remember when the team won its first title in 18 years. The Yankees did so in 1996,...
The team we would be competing against played only home games. It seemed to give the players an advantage, but it was not a topic for debate. The softball team for the Baltimore City Detention Center didn’t travel. An inmate had written to the manager of our team, Dick Irwin, asking if...
When my sister Colleen turned 5, my mom wasn’t home for her birthday. She was in the hospital having our baby sister Val, who had the temerity to be born on Colleen’s birthday, April 4th. It was bad enough that Mom wasn’t there for Colleen’s birthday, but from now on she’d have...
When I first started working part time at the Baltimore News American, I got a ride home one evening from a summer intern whose car was about as old as I was, 18. The brakes might have been just as old. As we crested the Jones Falls Expressway from downtown, traffic was...
I loved playing home run derby as a kid. You needed only two players — the pitcher and the hitter. Anything not hit over the fence was an out, and we struck out a lot because every swing was for the fence. You needed only a Wiffle Ball with the cut-out holes...
Once upon a time, I shared the same feeling many of you who come to this website have about baseball. Playing it, talking about it or watching it were all important parts of life in the summer for me while growing up. Back then, breakfast was cold cereal and intense examinations of...