A game from my youth: NFL Strategy

It’s Championship Sunday in the National Football League, and it’s snowing heavily at home in New Jersey. Small wonder that I got the urge to pull out one of the tabletop games I played in my high school days during winters in snowy Cleveland — NFL Strategy. Introduced in 1970 by Tudor, the company that […]

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 […]

The Eagles prevail in the snow

Today’s Rams-Eagles game at snowy Lincoln Financial Field was a classic, and I took it in from the warmth of my living room 35 miles away. The game brought back sort-of fond memories of the one game I saw in person at the Linc: the Army-Navy game a few years ago. We were in the […]

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 Baseball Books: ‘How to Star in Baseball’ by Herman L. Masin

An avid reader and aspiring ballplayer as a kid, I had one book in my hands more than any other: “How to Star in Baseball” by Herman L. Masin. That book was the Bible of Baseball to me. I studied its pages for hours and hours, reading up and memorizing the fine points of how […]

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 […]