The joy of throwing a ball at a wall

Just as I did 1,000 times as a kid, today I threw a rubber baseball against a wall. Growing up, I spent countless hours practicing my pitching and fielding by throwing a rubber baseball or tennis ball at the stone and brick steps leading to the front door of our suburban Cleveland home. Over those […]

Old-school baseball: How I learned to catch with a flat mitt

My education in baseball was old-school, beginning with my father tossing the ball back and forth to me in our back yard. I had one tool for the job, and that was my mitt. And it was flat. Odd as it may seem, in late 1950s and early 1960s America, I was a kid using […]

Great moments in childhood: My 1966 Rocky Colavito baseball card

On this, the 78th birthday of Rocky Colavito, permit me to reminisce on one of the great events of my childhood. Like most kids in Cleveland in the late 50s and 1960s, I idolized Rocky Colavito, my favorite Indians player. I was only 3 when Frank Lane traded him to the Tigers for Harvey Kuenn at […]

The Cleveland Browns and a brand new NFL season

The Thursday night game between the Redskins and Giants notwithstanding, today marks the real kickoff to the 2008 National Football League season. In celebration, I took my natty corduroy Cleveland Browns cap out into the warm California sun for a morning portrait. I call this a classic Browns cap because it dates not from the […]

The Tris Speaker Baseball League cap

For those of us who grew up in Cleveland Heights and University Heights, Ohio, the intertwined “T” and “S” logo of the Tris Speaker Baseball League is a powerful icon. Everyone who played wore the same red and black wool cap. Here, my Adam’s apple jutting prominently and skinny belt sagging, I’m wearing my first […]

My first cap

MLB replica caps were scarce when I was a kid in the 60’s. They weren’t mass-produced as they are today. I’ll have to comb through the hundreds of slides my father took to find the earliest evidence I can of my wearing a ballcap. I’m guessing I probably had a small-billed cap with a “little […]