baseball
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Birdland
Near the entrance of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, you can grab a little cheat sheet (see picture above) telling you where to find all the exhibits and artifacts relevant to your favorite team. The folks in Cooperstown know that while many of their visitors come out of a broad love of Continue reading
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National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum
This past weekend, I travelled to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown. I could go on and on about my history of visiting the Hall of Fame going back to childhood or wax poetic about the place of baseball in the fabric of America. Or I could just share some photos Continue reading
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Immaculate Grid
I’m not much of a video/computer/mobile gamer. Hand-eye coordination was never my strong suit, which put a hard ceiling on how good I could ever get at a lot of arcade and console games. When I was younger, I enjoyed PC-based strategy/worldbuilding games like the Civilization series, but those games are major time-sucks. I simply Continue reading
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Cascading Effects
Like Al Capone in the 1987 film version of The Untouchables, I believe that baseball is often a good metaphor for life. Take, for instance, a team’s starting-pitching rotation. We tend to think of the quality of each starting pitcher as being independent from each other. You have five starters, and the assumption is that Continue reading
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Dueling Fandoms
A week or so ago, I was following a baseball game that my favorite team, the Baltimore Orioles, were playing in and a thought struck me: This year’s Orioles squad is simply a lot of fun. They are a young team, loaded with talent, and they have a knack for come-from-behind victories. This team, I Continue reading
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October
I’ve heard it said that tourism is all about collecting clichés. When it comes to the enduring clichés associated with the fall season, I don’t need to engage in tourism to collect them. They are right outside my front door. Central New York has all of the stereotypical/archetypical ingredients of American autumns in spades: pumpkin Continue reading
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Oriole Park at Camden Yards
On September 16, Griffin and I visited Baltimore’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards to watch the home team soundly defeat the Tampa Bay Rays 8-0. I will have more to say about the trip, the game, the Orioles, and Baltimore in general in the future, but this post is devoted to some pics that we Continue reading
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Birdwatching
In case you were wondering, I can confirm that, as of September 5, 2023, the Baltimore Orioles still own the best record in the American League. In related news, Griffin and I will be traveling to Baltimore next weekend to catch a crucial late-season game against the hated Tampa Bay Rays. I haven’t been to Continue reading
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Numbers Game
The past couple weeks, I’ve been gradually dipping my toe back into baseball, after largely ignoring the sport for the better part of two decades. It’s been fairly easy to pick up where I left off. There have been some rules-changes and I don’t know the majority of this generation of players, but for the Continue reading
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Like It’s 1999
Ever since I found that 1990s Orioles jacket a few days back, I started wondering where some of my old Baltimore caps were stashed away. I looked in the most obvious places and came up empty-handed. Tonight, on a whim, I decided to check the basement. Bingo! I found the cap I wore a lot Continue reading
About Me
Researcher. Marketer. Teacher. Father of adult children and dogs. 20th Century holdover. Central New York native. Long-suffering Buffalo Bills fan. History nerd. Traveler. Vintage advertising enthusiast. Hat wearer.
a.k.a. V.J. 