It’s gotta be the bird

The Baltimore Orioles were one of the best teams in baseball when I was a young kid. They had Earl Weaver and Jim Palmer and Brooks Robinson and Eddie Murray and lots of pitching. And they had a funny cartoon bird on their cap. But they won, and that’s what mattered. In 1989, the year

A left-handed story

This is a story that’s been bouncing around inside my head for at least 10 years now, and it’s only today that I’m going to try to get it out. I hope I can do it justice. Back in the summer of 2001, the Cubs still had a fighting chance around this time of the

It was a lucky number

In the spring of 1975, I was signed up to play baseball for the first time.  I found out, as I had never really thought about it before, that being left-handed narrowed down my choices for baseball gloves considerably. In fact, there was exactly one glove for left-handers in the entire store: a black glove

Going the distance and shutting ’em out

Rick Reuschel was one of the prototypical Cubs of the 1970s. He was from downstate Illinois (Quincy, to be exact), which is an area that, as George Will put it, is “infested with Cardinals fans.” You might think that Illinois folk would have a predisposition to root for the Illinois teams in Chicago. But you