Category Archives: Personal
Field of Dreams
The Field of Dreams game and this Calvin and Hobbs timely comic strip made me write what I’ve dreaded writing about for almost a year. Many people like to rank this movie compared to other baseball movies but I think those folk have always missed the boat. For me, this movie was always about a …
Dreaming of some empathy
She clutched the bat as though it was her childhood baba, but the look in her eyes was of determination mixed with fear. We were all there in spring training for the Dodgers and while I didn’t know why I was there, I knew why she was there. She had come to make the team …
At Common Space Brewery, dreams do come true
All of us have dreams, but how many of us take a risky plunge to make that dream come true? Brent Knapp had a good job but he had been dreaming of his own micro-brewery, so several years ago he put in place the mechanisms to make his dream come true. This involved quitting his …
Kevin Smith almost died today
and I was already writing this column when I read about it on twitter. On Sunday I met a parent of one of my wives students and he was why I was writing an article about heart attacks and luck. We were at a youth Hockey game Sunday to watch one of my wives students …
Win Shares be gone
When Bill James came out with Win Shares in 2002 it was a stat I had been waiting for. Baseball Reference didn’t exist yet for me so until then I had no way to normalize the year to year variations of major league baseball statistics. With this book, you could look at trades and see …
Invigorated with Wonder
There is no way to sugar coat how the last twelve months have made me feel about being part of these United States. I understand two party realities but I don’t understand the hatred I’ve seen being delivered by a percentage of our population. We can disagree on abortion, economic issues, tax cuts, spending cuts, health …
Ira Glass and the deal with mothers
I recently saw Ira Glass the media heavyweight who does This American Life among many other things at the Ace Theatre in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday Night. I’m not sure what kind of show I was expecting but it turned out to be interesting. There were some nuggets in there and some big surprises. …
Neuromancer strikes my fancy
A few weeks ago Keith Law tweeted this lifehacker list of seminal Science Fiction books. From the age of 10 – 30 the only books I read were nature/baseball/science fiction/westerns so I thought I’d take a look at the list and see how many of them I read. Turns out I had read most of …
I can’t pull the trigger
Anyone who knows me knows this story. At the age of fifteen, my mom let me cut school and stand in line for world series tickets for 1974. Back then the tickets were sold through outlets called ticketron and the local Sears in Glendale was our ticketron outlet. My mom dropped me off early in …
Congratulations to fellow TBLA/DT alumni
For years I’ve been able to mock the younger generation of Dodger fans on Dodger blogs by telling them how great 1981 and 1988 were. I don’t know if over the next two weeks if they will get the joy of 81 and 88 or the despair of 74,77, and 78. I’m expecting joy for …
Dodgers, Yesterday and Today 