I felt the need today to take a break from my Hot Stove baseball posts.
Fifty years ago today, Martin Luther King delivered his last speech: “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.” The following day, he was assassinated.
OPENING DAY!
“There is no sports event like Opening Day of baseball, the sense of beating back the forces of darkness and the National Football League.” George Vecsey, New York Times.
Themes for Hot Stove posts often come quite by accident. This one was sparked by the Winter Olympics, a Ted Williams story and the death last week of David Ogden Stiers. The common denominator: Korea.
In 1995, Jerry Seinfeld did a bit that went like this:
“Loyalty to any one sports team is pretty hard to justify. Because the players are always changing, the team can move to another city, you’re actually rooting for the clothes when you get right down to it. You know what I mean, you are standing and cheering and yelling for your clothes to beat the clothes from another city. Fans will be so in love with a player but if he goes to another team, they boo him. This is the same human being in another shirt, they ‘hate’ him now. Boo! Different shirt!! Boo.” [click here to see the video]
Royals pitchers and catchers reported to spring training today. Game on.
And as we wait to see how that works out…
Rita and I head to Phoenix later this week to visit friends of long standing, Diana and Larry Brewer. Sixty years ago this month (that would be January of 1958), the #1 record that Diana and I and our classmates were dancing to at Van Horn Teen Town was “At the Hop” by Danny and the Juniors. Three years later, I fixed Diana up on a blind date with my college fraternity brother Larry Brewer. They are still dating (and long married). Continue reading
This message is a combination of my annual MLK message (since 2002) and the newest Hot Stove post.
The theme for this message started percolating in 2015 when I saw an exhibit at the Kansas City Public Library. The exhibit honored Lucile Bluford as a civil rights activist and for her influential career as a journalist with Kansas City’s premier African American newspaper, the Call. The exhibit chronicled her “separate but equal” litigation with Missouri University when she was denied admission in 1939. Her case and others seeking fairness in education helped lay the foundation for Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Continue reading
Rita and I over the years with Al Franken.
2003: Al Franken appeared at the Uptown Theater on a book tour in 2003. The book: Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them): A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Continue reading
As the year ends, I am sending out some odds and ends that have been accumulating in my Hot Stove folder. My editor Rita says it reads like I’m cleaning out my closet. She is very perceptive.
Nerd Alert: For those of you in the “general” audience, feel free to skip the nerd-heavy stats and scroll down to the Statistics-Free Zone – Judging the Royals and Lonnie’s Jukebox.
When I decided to feature the World Series from 50, 75 and 100 years ago, I thought it was going to be one general post. It turned into five. Just too many good things that a retired lawyer can find with Google. So now for the finale. The 1967 World Series between the Cardinals and the Red Sox.