Baseball is Life (and Happy Birthday Dina)

The Coronavirus has taken the game of baseball from us in 2020, perhaps for as long as the entire season. And, truth be told, the game had been dwindling in interest to me, at least since November 3, 2016. When you spend practically your whole life waiting for something, and then it happens, well, where

Inside the Ricketts Square

My daughter, who’s in 8th grade in a Chicago public school, took biology a year ago. She was exposed to genetics and the Punnett Square, which brought back lots of old memories, and not necessarily fond ones, as I tried once again to understand alleles and dominant and recessive traits. However, I apparently remember enough of genetics

Play ball!

It’s no accident that “Baseball” is the biggest topic in the wordcloud associated with this blog. Nor is it an accident that the first thing I wrote on this site related to baseball in some. Without baseball, I might not even have a blog in the first place. Today it’s Opening Day, and what I’ve

Something Old, Something New

It’s been a quiet February on the blog front. The enthusiasm I once had for doing this has ebbed, and I like sleeping at night, too. But I recently had my annual Cubs preview posted on Cardsconclave.com (has it really been five years of doing that? Time flies!) and I had a piece that I reconstructed from

Hang in there, Cubs fans

So the Mets won a game. No big deal.

Goodbye Goose

I still remember so many things that happened twelve years ago tonight. I’ve relived some of them here so many times. But try as I might, I haven’t just let them go. I’ve been like Maverick in the movie Top Gun, wishing things had turned out differently than they did. And the only way to

Win Win

It’s a beautiful fall day as I sit down to type out a few words on my smartphone. Blogging gives me a chance to spend a few minutes getting thoughts down, before the moment changes and the feelings are lost. and this is a moment that I want to preserve in some manner. The arrival

Introducing…The Schweep

The Cubs get back to their winning ways, and the English language gets a tiny bit larger.

Time for some baseball memes

This Cubs fan is just feelin’ his oats and makin’ some memes

Chicago’s Moonlight Graham

From the majors to the Great War, here’s a story for Memorial Day weekend

Almost there

It’s been a long offseason, and we’re down to 72 hours until the season begins.

There’s baseball in the air

Baseball’s almost here! What more is there to say?

Nobody on the road, Nobody on the beach

It’s been more than two weeks since I wrote anything to put in this space. That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped writing, though. In fact, I wrote a trio of pieces relating to the recent death of Ernie Banks, and sent them off to websites that are willing to share my thoughts with their readers. I

A bleachers retrospective

Hearing that the Cubs started tearing down the Wrigley Field bleachers today felt like the end of something for me. From the first time I sat in the bleachers back in 1987, to the last time I did so back in 2005, they were always a place where I felt good. Granted, a fair amount of

Here’s to Baseball and Sand Castles

Peanuts was a big part of my life growing up.

For the love of the game

There was no better place to be on Father’s day than at a baseball field, watching my little one play. She doesn’t love the game as I do, and that’s OK. Seeing her bat and play the field is enough for me. It feels as if the intergenerational transfer of the game–which is the only

The everyday game

Today I got to meet some fans of the game I love. In everyday life, I’m not always very talkative. In truth, I’ll take writing over speaking every time. But when the subject is baseball, that’s a different story. I could talk about baseball all day long. In the process of talking about the game

Winter dies on Opening Day

This has been the worst winter I can remember. We’ve had snow, cold, ice, more snow,  more cold, and still even more snow. Some days it felt like it was never going to go away. Spring officially started a few days ago, but today was the first day that it really felt like spring. And

A baseball haiku

Sometimes I get some morning inspiration to go along with my tea, and here’s what came to me this morning. I’m looking forward to Opening day next week, and I don’t think I’m the only one, either.

On Springtime, old guys and losing

Today is the first day of Spring, and of all the years I’ve been on this earth, I’ve never paid attention to the change of seasons as I did today. Winter 2013-2014 has been a terrible burden to bear, and now it’s over. It can, and probably still will, get cold and bring some more

Baseball on my mind, as usual

I write about a lot of different things, because inspiration can be found just about anywhere. But the topic that always seems to inspire me the most is baseball. It’s been a part of my life ever since I was a young kid, and it’s something of my muse. And so it has been over

Me and the old dog

I posted this photo on facebook today, as a TBT (or ThrowBack Thursday) blast from the past. Zoe was the first dog that I ever had, and we were always looking for things to do with the dog in the pre-children days. Back in the 1990s, the Chicago White Sox had a promotion called “Dog

Still another writing outlet

Over the past few years, I’ve sent some of my writing into other websites. It’s always a hoot to see something that I wrote turn up somewhere, whether it’s in print or online. For reasons that may never make sense to me, I enjoy helping to create content for places that share my interests. So

Light at the end of Winter’s tunnel

This winter has been unlike any that I’ve seen before. The cold seems colder, the snow seems deeper, and the winds seem to whip everything up with more gusto than usual. A conversation with a baseball-loving colleague earlier this week produced what I’m going to call the Wilker Rule. It’s an inverse relationship between the

A teabag wrapper haiku

I’ve been drinking tea lately, as I wean myself off of a long-term coffee habit. And when I drink tea at work, I undo the tea envelope so as to leave the paper intact. And today, I took the white space and the baseball on my coffee-turned-tea mug as a form of inspiration. I really