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 […]

Unexpected find: new baseball caps at an antique store

In my first season of organized youth baseball, I played for the Red Sox in the Tris Speaker baseball league in suburban Cleveland. Now, 60 years later, I finally have an actual Red Sox cap. It’s not the same cap the BoSox wear at Fenway Park, but it’s a fine replica, one I found unexpectedly […]

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 […]

Nine positions and universal truth

I got a serious chuckle out of the graphic posted this morning on the Instagram account called The Baseball Authority. The graphic is a distillation of youth baseball, mid-point on the spectrum between cynicism and truth. In grade school gym class ballgames, I started by playing second base. I wasn’t the smallest kid (he was […]