Where have you gone, Billy Dick?

On a whim the other day, I asked Google to find pro baseball players from my hometown, Cleveland Heights, Ohio. I grew up knowing that Steve Stone went to Brush High School in neighboring South Euclid, and that Mike Hegan and Gary Roggenburk attended my high school, St. Ignatius in Cleveland. As with many of […]

The ‘Bible of Baseball’ goes to the gamblers

As a teenager, I couldn’t wait for the mailman (in those pre-gender neutral letter carrier days) to stuff my copy of The Sporting News into our mailbox on Erieview Road in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. I read — no, scoured — that newsprint magazine cover to cover, reading the columns by Joe Falls out of Detroit […]

Looking back fondly on my ball-playing life

Playing softball again this year has got me thinking about the arc of my ball-playing life. It began as a toddler trying to hit a plastic ball tossed by my dad and has morphed into the 60-something trudger that I’ve become. As a kid, I learned the rules and how to play the game. “Meet […]

Saying farewell to my left knee

I underwent replacement surgery for my left knee on Thursday, Jan. 23. As with many things in my life, a connection to baseball is involved. In all my years as a kid and teenager playing baseball, only once did play come to a halt because I was injured. It happened when I was 11 years […]

A Salute to Tito Francona, his dad and an old mitt

The Cleveland Guardians gave a wonderful tribute last night to Terry “Tito” Francona on his last home game managing the team before his retirement. It was a well-deserved sendoff, as illustrated by this video the team produced in his honor. That tribute video prominently mentioned that he spent a lot of his early childhood with […]

The antidote for ‘ghost runners’ poisoning baseball

My Twitter feed these days is awash in baseball fans bashing the “ghost runner” placed on second base to start each half of any extra innings in baseball games. If anyone has posted in favor it, I have seen no evidence. This man-in-scoring-position “enhancement” is designed to shorten the games. To me, this strange maneuver […]

My baseball career, corrected

Following a line of reasoning current among some federal officials that coronavirus would go away if we merely stopped testing, I had an emotional breakthrough today in looking back at my youth baseball career. I didn’t realize it until now but, had we not kept statistics, as a teenager I was rocketing on a trajectory […]

You can’t slide home again: A trip to the diamond of my youth

Several weeks ago I was back in the neighborhood where I grew up in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and I took a stroll down Memory Lane. More accurately, I walked up and down Bluestone Road, the major thoroughfare of my youth, connecting our home on Erieview Road to my grade school in neighboring South Euclid. In […]

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 […]

Here’s to the Irish, especially the baseball players, on St. Patrick’s Day

Happy St. Patrick’s day, everyone! I was pleased to find that there is an Irish-American Baseball Hall of Fame, thanks to a Google search and the Eddie Kranepool Society Mets blog. The 2011 inductions are on today at Foley’s Pub in New York City. The Irish and baseball have been joined like a firm grip on […]