Category: On Playing the Game
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May 27 2006: Now I Remember
“Just in time for Memorial Day, summer is here with a vengeance. We had huge thunderstorms yesterday, the humidity went through the roof, and today it hit eighty degrees. Just in time for my first baseball practice. I had forgotten what it was like to stand in the outfield, with not a hint of a…
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August 29 2005: Season’s End (Slaterettes Baseball)
My league’s season is over now, as kids go back to school and the evenings get shorter. The final two games of the season bookended my vacation, so corwin and I drove together down to Rhode Island for one game, left right from there for New York, made stops at Yankee Stadium and Citizen’s Bank…
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August 16, 2005: Touching Base (My baseball travels in August)
My baseball travels have been extensive of late — so extensive that I have not had time to pause and write about all the things I’ve seen and done. Here are some snapshots from the past month in my baseball life. August 1 I went to Cooperstown for the Hall of Fame inductions, which was…
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July 13 2005: Hit or Miss (More on playing baseball)
I’m batting .400 on the season. Granted, the season hasn’t been going on very long, but it’s a nice number to have, ain’t it? It probably doesn’t look as good if you see that every out I’ve made, though, has been a strike out. Yes, folks, I feel Mark Bellhorn’s pain. Like Bellhorn, I tend…
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June 18 2005: Brand New Shoes (Buying spikes)
I splurged today on a new pair of spikes. Sorry to break your heart, Jeter dear, but I am leaving your sponsor Nike behind, and jumping ship to Adidas. My actual preferred brand would be Reebok. My every day sneakers are Reeboks, after all, and have been since–gulp–1983 or so. Yes, I’ve been wearing the…
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August 18 2004: Sweet Swings
It has been a hectic summer for this baseball-loving geek, with far too much going on and not enough time to write about it all. There was the SABR convention in Cincinnati. There was Old Timer’s Day at Yankee Stadium. There was running into Byung-Hyun Kim in a restaurant by chance, the same weekend we…
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24 Hour Game Diary Pt 8
Monday, October 20, 2003 12:48 pm Arizona time (Pacific) Well, my flight leaves in about an hour, and here I am sitting in the Tucson airport with sore legs, but happy. The Red-Eyed Nites mounted a comeback in the morning hours, cutting the lead of the African Gray Birds, which had been around 40 runs…
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24 Hour Game Diary Pt 7
Sunday, October 19, 2003 4:20 am Arizona time (Pacific) Since I last wrote I’ve had the best catch of my life. I don’t mean a caught ball in the outfield, I mean best game of catch. Chiba, one of the Japanese players, and I went down to the batting tunnel after we woke up from…
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24 Hour Game Diary Pt 6
Saturday, October 18, 2003 11:08 pm Arizona time (Pacific) I have just had my first major league shower. And damn it felt good. It is patently clear that this is the locker room of the team with the tallest player in the majors, because the showerheads are set so high it’s hard to reach them…
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24 Hour Game Diary Pt 5
Saturday, October 18, 2003 8:30 am Arizona time (Pacific) Ow. Ow. Ow. Well, if I thought I might be less tired and less sore today… I was wrong. If I felt yesterday like I had been hit by a car, today I feel like I was run over by a monster truck. Repeatedly. My feet…