He threw the first pitch

I’ve written about the first baseball game I ever attended here. It was the summer of 1975, I was seven years old, and my dad drove me down to St. Louis to see a doubleheader between the Cardinals and the New York Mets. I remember a few things from that day, but the baseball end

From small things

Hall of Famer Gary Carter died today, shortly after being found to have inoperable, Stage IV brain cancer. He was 57 years old. I hinted at this in an earlier post, but the most remarkable thing about Gary Carter’s career is that he started off maybe the best rally some people have ever seen. The

Mets from A to Z

One of the things that keeps me connected to baseball is collecting baseball cards. It started for me in the mid 1970s, went into hiatus in the early to mid 1980s, and laid dormant until the summer of 2001. A distribution of Topps cards reprints at a couple of games I went to at Wrigley

Maybe I’m in there somewhere

One day last summer, I was changing channels on the television when my kids were in the room. I’m not sure why the television was on, but I’m guessing that what I wanted to watch and what they wanted to watch had no relationship to each other. But I had the remote in hand, and

LaTroy Hawkins and my basement elliptical

Yesterday morning, I had the house to myself and some time before I needed to work, so I heeded the typically-ignored elliptical machine in the basement. I put on some Pearl Jam (Vs., if it matters) and began to work out. It actually felt good to be working up a sweat. And as it sometimes

The Buckner Surprise

At the end of tonight’s ESPN documentary Catching Hell, I found myself saying one simple word: No. To expand upon that, I offer the following instant analysis: No, I don’t see the connection between the Red Sox collapse in 1986 and the Cubs of 2003. For one thing, the Red Sox were at least in

One great day in the sun, and then life goes on

It was Opening Day, 1994. April 4, to be exact. I couldn’t know it at the time, but it was 5 years to the day before my first child would be born. My wife and I were in full-on DINKS mode, which explains why we were at Wrigley Field that day. I found the picture