Welcome Back Buckner

I want to preface this by saying that I don’t think Bill Buckner will ever be a Hall of Famer, even though is career was longer and more productive than many current Hall of Famers. His .289 lifetime batting average, for instance, is higher than that of Eddie Murray, Ryne Sandberg, and Carl Yastrzemski. But

2011 in review

The year is coming to a close, and everyplace you can think of seems to take this opportunity to do a retrospective on the year gone by. I’ll join the crowd for this one time, and look at what happened in 2011 for the subject that I write about the most: Cubs baseball. The biggest

Hanu-Cubs, Night 1

Hanukah begins tonight, and I wanted to put my collection of Cubs baseball cards to work to commemorate the season. In order to do this, I have brought out a ceramic menorah that was purchased at a garage sale many years ago. If I was actually Jewish, I’d probably have a better one to use for

Re-learning the lesson of 1986

As exciting and incredible as this year’s World Series was, there was a lesson to be taken from it by anyone who was paying attention. In a nutshell, it’s that the game isn’t over until the final out is made. In football, you can take a knee to run out the clock. In basketball, you

One million dollars. For a baseball.

I saw this story online today and felt like Mr. Hand when Spicoli had a pizza delivered to his classroom in Fast Times at Ridgemont High: Am I hallucinating? The story of Bill Buckner and the ground ball that went through his legs has been played again and again in the 25 years since it happened,

The difference between Cubs fans and Red Sox fans

In the Spring of 2004, I was in Seattle on business. One bright, beautiful day, I went out to lunch with some of my associates. We went to a seafood place on the waterfront, and as we sat down to lunch, the conversation turned to baseball. Two of the people at the table were Red

Madlock took it away

1976 was the first full year that I considered myself a Cubs fan. Watching the games on WGN every afternoon was something of an elixir for the eight-year old that I was at the time. The games were always in the sunshine at Wrigley Field, and the away games must have happened, but they were

Why does Gonzo get a pass?

If I’m Alex Gonzalez, the one shown on the card above, I would consider myself an extremely lucky man. Without the widely known–and tragically unfortunate–interference event that happened during the top half of the eighth inning of Game six of the 2003 NLCS, Gonzalez would be as renown as Bill Buckner for the error he

I love the irony here

Over the past decade or so, I have slowly waded back into a hobby that I thought had died out when I was 12: collecting baseball cards. I can even pinpoint the way that it started, but that’s a post for another day. I would hope that the 12-year old me would be more impressed