“Well, I’d better start packing,” I announced as I rose from my chair by the door. I had been sitting in the common room of the London flat I shared with 11 other American students. Grant, one of my flatmates, sat on the couch to my right and Jake, another resident of Flat 17, was […]

For the past three years, I have been leading the campaign to get Larry Walker into the Hall of Fame. The campaign has mostly involved talking him up to people who don’t actually have Hall of Fame votes, so you’d think it would be largely ineffective, but his voting totals have gone up every year […]

When the White Sox and WGN announced that they had reached an agreement to broadcast all 162 games for the upcoming baseball season and beyond, I heard a lot of celebration that baseball is back on WGN after a three-year drought. But I also heard people express the oddness that it’s the White Sox they’ll […]

[Originally published in the Windy City ThunderBolts game program in May, 2017] On June 30, 1993, eight teams began play in the Frontier professional baseball League and a new era of baseball was born. Well, maybe not exactly a new era. In fact, independent baseball is just about as old as baseball itself with leagues […]

[Originally published on wcthunderbolts.com in September, 2015] I confess I’ve seen a lot of baseball in my life. But I don’t remember ever seeing a stretch of games like the first 64 that the ThunderBolts played this year. Exactly two thirds of the way through the season, after watching this team play day after day […]

[Originally published on wcthunderbolts.com in September, 2013] On August 26 of last year, the ThunderBolts suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the eventual champion Southern Illinois Miners. They lost leads in the seventh and eighth and then dropped the game in the tenth. The loss effectively ended the ThunderBolts’ playoff hopes but it […]