Sometimes memories just come from out of nowhere

If you ask people where they're from, a lot of them will have a very easy time answering. Either they've spent most of their lives in one place or they grew up somewhere and moved somewhere else as an adult.

My friend Mickey, for example. He spent almost his entire childhood and college years in Northern Virginia and then moved to Los Angeles and has been there ever since. My younger brother was born in Ohio, but we moved to Virginia when he was 3 and he has lived there ever since.

1963

It isn't as easy for me to answer. I have lived in 10 different states and one foreign country, three of the states for at least 10 years. But I suppose if I'm from anywhere, if I had to say just one place, I suppose I would have to say Virginia. So many of my best -- and worst -- memories are from there. With the exception of 20 months overseas in my mid 20s, I lived there from age 13 to 32.

It's where my first marriage began and ended, and I think where my first wife still lives. It's where I made almost all the friendships in my life that lasted, and it's where my 29-year career in newspapers got its start.

It's where we buried my dad five years ago, and it's where my brother, my youngest sister and many of my friends still live.

When we moved from Ohio to Virginia in January 1963, there was one big disappointment. I had sort of discovered rock 'n' roll the previous summer, and I spent hours in the afternoons and evenings listening to "high-flying WING," Dayton's No. 1 station. But I was disappointed to see that the Washington, D.C., area in early 1963 had only two decent rock stations -- WEAM and WPGC -- and one of them was directional in the opposite direction at night and the other one broadcast only on FM after sundown.

I don't think I had an FM radio until 1971.

By ninth or 10th grade I discovered wonderful stations in faraway places, but that winter there was just nothing I liked on the radio at night. So I found myself listening to one of the two local stations I could get. WMAL had soft jazz and WTOP had news. I didn't much like jazz, but I loved the two-minute signoff at midnight that carried WMAL into the all-night show.



It was wonderful. I was just at the age where I could appreciate living near one of the world's great cities, and there was so much pride at realizing what was happening downtown. We had an extremely conservative Republican congressman living next door, but when I checked his voting record from 1964, I saw that he had voted for the Civil Rights Act that year and then voted yes again in 1965 for the Voting Rights Act.

They were different times.

When I listened to the jingle on YouTube, it gave me an amazing feeling. There are plenty of other pieces of music from 50 years ago that bring back memories, but there is nothing else I can remember from that time that I was hearing for the first time since 1963.

Goose bumps?

You bet.

"That's why we like to be in Washington, D.C. ..."

Boomer culture was the first to refuse ever to go away

I suppose that when younger people who weren't around when the music of the '60s and '70s was actually popular listen to it and it sounds dated to them. Ditto with the movies and television shows; movies without CGI and TV shows that were a lot less risque.

Cybill

I suppose they look at Cybill Shepherd and Katharine Ross and see women on the far side of 60, and not the stunning beauties they were when they first showed up in the movies.

Maybe we were the first generation that refused to let go of our culture. When I was in high school from 1963 to '67, there were no oldies stations to play the songs we loved when we were younger, and there were no television stations devoted to shows that were no longer in production. Stunningly, there was no way to own a copy of a movie, unless you were very rich. The only way we could see "Casablanca" was by watching for it in TV Guide or going to a Bogart Festival.

Katharine

Believe me on this. If you've seen "American Graffiti" and think there were radio stations like that, there weren't. Everything that got played was what was popular at the time, except for maybe one oldie per hour.

I'm not going to tell you that's a bad thing, even though I've got an iPod Classic (160 GB) almost full of old music I love, as well as probably 50 different TV series I enjoy on DVD and well over a thousand of my favorite movies on Blu-Ray and regular DVD. I'm perfectly capable of wallowing in the pop culture of the 63-plus years I've been on earth anytime I want.

Ironically, I have only two television series from my youth, and neither is one I watched much in first run. If I ever get around to seeing all the episodes of "Twilight Zone" or "Outer Limits," I'll be seeing most of them for the first time. I think nearly all the rest of what I have is from the mid '80s on, except for another one I've never watched -- "Monty Python's Flying Circus."

Old TV shows seem dated to me in a way old movies don't. Many of the movies I make an effort to see now were released before I was born. I'd much rather watch a great drama or an old western than see an extravaganza that looked like it was shot almost entirely in front of a green screen.

As for the music, I spend a lot of time now listening to stuff I never listened to as a kid -- Glenn Miller, the Andrews Sisters, even Spike Jones. There's a life to it that so many things lack these days.

I think I was in my late 30s before I ever heard "Der Fuehrer's Face," and it was years after that when I finally saw the Donald Duck cartoon for which Spike Jones provided the soundtrack.

That's not just dated, it's history, but there is something about it that is so much more interesting -- and yes, fun -- than anything I'm seeing these days.

I think there is a very good chance that if I ever find myself old and alone, I will sit on the couch all day and immerse myself in a world that existed before I was born. I can fall in love with Rita Hayworth or Teresa Wright, I can admire Jimmy Stewart and Spencer Tracy or wish I could be Clark Gable or John Wayne.

Times Square 1948

I'd be happy hearing President Roosevelt on the radio, keeping me posted on what was happening at home and abroad, and I'd probably find myself rooting for the Indians or the Reds (since I did spend 10 of my first 13 years in Ohio).

I'd like to think I would root for the Dodgers, but in their pre-Jackie Robinson days, they were just a little too down and out. I would have loved to see New York in the '40s. My first view of the city was in 1957, and Times Square was closer to the '40s than it is to now.

I used to go to New York quite often, but since I was there in 1981 for my little cousin's funeral, the only times I have been there since were in the mid '90s for my sister's wedding and a same-day excursion from Atlanta to Queens and back for a fantasy baseball draft.

But I'm digressing very badly. That seems to happen to me a lot lately; I start thinking of something and the memories just flood over me.

Some are dated, some aren't. It's true even with the music. A Beatles song from 1966 can sound fresh and new, but a song by the Rolling Stones seems stuck in that time.

Maybe someday I'll figure it out.

Remake a movie and it's probably going to be junk

I never understood the logic behind remaking movies.

Oh, I understand it from a financial standpoint. If a movie is popular, then a remake of it has a built-in audience. And there is certainly a history of some great stories being told again and again in Old Hollywood -- "Quo Vadis," "The Four Feathers," even "Ben-Hur" was made twice.

And these days, movies cost so much to make that it's difficult to get the money people to take chances. "Cloud Atlas," maybe the best movie I've seen in 10 years, cost a reported $102 million to make in 2012. As of two weeks ago, Internet Movie Database gave its worldwide gross at about $130 million, but only $27 million or so in the U.S.

That's considered a financial failure, although not a bad one. But it wasn't a U.S. company that made "Cloud Atlas." The Wachowskis had to get their backing from Germany.

Apparently U.S. studios were too busy remaking movies about comic book heroes. How many times do we have to see the origin of Superman before we say "Enough!" Of course the newest one killed the franchise for a lot of us by having the "Man of Steel" break Superman's No. 1 rule.

How many great movies from the Golden Age of Hollywood were redone in seriously inferior versions. "It's a Wonderful Life" was great with Jimmy Stewart in the lead, not so great with Marlo Thomas.

It isn't a feminist thing. Jimmy Stewart was one of the great leading men and could carry a story like this. Thomas was, well, That Girl.

The original "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956) is one of the greatest science-fiction films ever; three or four remakes just haven't measured up.

"Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" (1968) was a classic of its time with Spencer Tracy, Kate Hepburn and Sidney Poitier (all Oscar winners). The remake of sorts, "Guess Who" (2005), could give us only Bernie Mac and Ashton Kutchner.

Maybe the most ridiculous was when "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" (1936), with Gary Cooper was reamde in 2002 as "Mr. Deeds", starring ... sigh ... Adam Sandler.

I really like Ben Stiller, but his 2007 remake of "The Heartbreak Kid" suffered from a lack of Charles Grodin, Cybill Shepherd and Eddie Albert in the 1972 original.

The saddest one of all to me comes from one of my very favorite films. Stanley Donen's cult classic "Bedazzled" (1967) starred Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in a retelling of the Faust legend, but also with an amazingly funny satiric take on religion, one in which the Devil is basically just misunderstood and God is an egomaniac.

It's one where Cook is harassing pedestrians from the top of a building, making grocery bags break and pigeons release their load of people's hats. Moore notices something and asks Cook why he didn't abuse a vicar walking along.

"Oh," Cook says. "He's one of ours."

I'm not sure I've ever seen a funnier movie, so of course I was apprehensive when I saw that Twentieth Century Fox was remaking "Bedazzled" in 2000 with Liz Hurley in the Cook role and ... yikes! ... Brendan Fraser in the Moore role.

I'm not sure the original would have been any good if it were made in 2000. Satirically it was very much a creature of its time. Maybe the best movie ever about religion, and yes, I have seen "Dogma." But a major American studio wasn't about to make serious fun of God in the Pat Robertson Era.

Using Hurley as the Devil caused a serious plot error that the late great Roger Ebert caught. Since the goal of the Faust character is to have a particular woman love him, Peter Cook as the Devil makes sense. Liz Hurley, not so much. Ebert asked why on earth Fraser's character wouldn't just say forget her, I want you.

Remakes really just don't work.

If you don't give your dreams a chance, what's the point of them?

If there's one thing that can be truly heartbreaking, it's when people don't even pursue their dreams.

It's one thing to go after something and not get it. It's far different to decide you probably wouldn't get it if you tried and then not try at all.

I'm not really talking about myself. I got so far off track during adolescence that for some years I don't think I had any real dreams. When I finally decided on something at age 27 -- going back to school and becoming a sportswriter -- a combination of circumstances allowed me to succeed but only at a mediocre level.

My brief moment

But I had a friend who dreamed bigger. He loved baseball almost as much as I do, and he dreamed of playing professionally. We played ball together in the summer, and I never saw the sort of talent that would have made it, but to be fair, he was several years younger than I was.

He didn't play high school ball, but he played Babe Ruth and Senior Babe Ruth ball, and he told me years later that in the summer after high school, he was offered a contract to play Rookie League ball for, I think it was, the Orioles. Now my friend may have played well and even understood the game well, but what he didn't know about the business of baseball would fill a bookshelf.

He told them his plan was to go to college, and he wouldn't give that up for rookie ball. Now if they would send him to Double A ball ...

Of course what he didn't know, and I didn't know either until years later when I covered minor league baseball, is that once you reach Double A, you are considered a prospect to make it to The Show.

Some people may think anyone who is playing in the minors is a prospect, but I learned that the truth is very different. In 1983 I was covering an Expos farm team that won the South Atlantic League championship. The SAL is considered Low A, one step above rookie ball and two steps below Double A. Junior Minor, the Expos' manager, explained to me that below Double A, there are rarely more than two or three players per team considered prospects.

The others are there primarily to fill out lineups so the prospects can play.

But who cares? I would have given my left testicle to have had the talent and the opportunity even to play in the minor leagues for a month. I could have lived off that month for the rest of my life.

What I got was one night, the last night of the 1982 season, and not as a player, but as manager of the second-worst team in organized baseball that summer. The Gastonia Cardinals were 35-36 in the first half of the season, but were so bad in the second half they were 53-89 overall. They won just nine of their last 50 games, and never won a game all year in which they fell behind by as many as three runs.

We lost my game too, but I got a picture that has been a part of my memories for more than 30 years now.

If I could have told my friend -- with the benefit of hindsight -- that he might always wish he had taken his chance, it might not have made any difference. He might have lived his life exactly the way he has. He's not known for listening to my advice.

But I do think it's important -- if you have dreams -- to at least take a chance on living them.

Otherwise, what's the point in sleeping.

Fallen heroes don't diminish from a love for the game

There isn't anything that could make me stop loving baseball.

That doesn't mean I have to care at all about the current players. Now that the game is apparently suffering through another doping scandal with some of its very best players, I find myself thinking more and more about players from better times.



There may never be a baseball player who combined an ability for the game and perfect gentlemanliness than the great Christy Mathewson, who played only 16 years and still won 373 games as a great righthanded pitcher.

Nobody ever said a bad word about Matty, who died at age 45 after being tragically gassed after hostilities had ended in World War I. His best-known nickname, a pure compliment, was "The Christian Gentleman."

You'll never hear Milwaukee outfielder Ryan Braun, one of the best players in the modern-day American League called by that sobriquet, although his own nickname explains that. Braun is known as the "Hebrew Hammer," and he has already hit 211 home runs and been named both Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player as well as being a five-time All-Star by age 29.

Braun, however, has already been tainted twice by steroids. He was suspended for the first 50 games of the 2012 season, although it was overturned on a technicality, and he was just this week suspended for the final 65 games or the current season.

Who knows where his career will go from here, although national sports columnist Gregg Doyel points out that Braun's statistics have been so consistent that he probably has been juicing all along and calls him "a cheater and a liar."

But just when you think it can't get worse ...

Alex Rodriguez has five more years remaining on his contract with the New York Yankees, a contract the Yankees are desperately trying to void. They are paying him $28 million dollars this year and he has yet to appear in a single major league game. In fact, he apparently is so deeply entangled in the same scandal as Braun that there is speculation he will be given a lifetime ban from the game.

At one point, Rodriguez appeared to be a lock to break the all-time career home run record. When he hit 54 home runs and drove in 156 runs in his age 31 season, he had 518 home runs. At the end of that season, he renegotiated and signed a contract with the Yankees to play 10 more years.

The next five seasons brought 35, 30, 30, 16 and 18 home runs.

And of course, zero so far this year.

Heroes? Not anymore.

But there are still plenty of greats, and there's always Matty, the greatest of them all.

His memorabilia is far too expensive for me, but I was certainly happy to see that my Herb Score baseball came the other day.

What is the single greatest song ever -- from the dawn of time till now?

Talk about your tough questions to answer.

Here's one:

What's the greatest song of all time?

I'm not talking about the rock 'n' roll era, or pop music or even American music. In fact, I will accept any song from any genre, with the possible limitation that if it really is the greatest song of all time, I feel like I probably should have heard of it.

I'm not looking for anything performed by a specific artist. In fact, a song this great would probably have been performed or recorded by many artists. It can be a hymn or carol, or even a patriotic song or some sort of folk music. As someone pretty knowledgeable about pop music in my lifetime, I would certainly think nothing like that is going to top the list, although I've got to think "In a Gadda da Vida" deserves some consideration.

Just kidding, but I'll throw out one that might earn a spot in the discussion -- John Lennon's "Imagine." It isn't a song I love. Some folks might pick national anthems. I sure wouldn't pick ours, although I love "America the Beautiful" and "This Land is Your Land." My very favorite patriotic song is actually "Waltzing Matilda."

 I suppose my favorite religious song would either be "O Holy Night" or "Ave Maria," although you may have to be Christian and possibly even Catholic to appreciate both of those."

There are songs known as evergreens, ones that seem fresh no matter who is singing them -- classics like "Where or When," "Danny Boy," "When You Wish Upon a Star," "Somewhere," "Someone to Watch Over Me" and "What a Wonderful World."

One that I hadn't heard until a few years ago that I love is the operatic "O Mio Babbino Caro," and I would actually toss in three of the loveliest songs of the '60s -- "God Only Knows," "Blowin' in the Wind" and "Here There and Everywhere."

And let's not leave out "Take Me Out to the Ball Game."



So it's a tough call, a nearly impossible one to even come up with a top 10. But everybody has a song -- one special song -- that just lights up their heart when they hear it, whether it's Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley or Kermit the Frog singing it.

Give it some thought and give me some answers.

Kind of strange how it's turning out for the eternally youthful generation

“Up until the 1950s, American children yearned for adulthood. When their time came to be adults, they stepped into the role proudly, leaving childhood behind and taking up the mantles of responsibility, honor and dignity. They embraced and championed the ideals of those who came before them while valiantly tackling new ideas and problems that their families, communities and nation faced. Those days were long gone.

“Americans now shunned adulthood, preferring to remain in a state of perpetual adolescence. By failing to move forward with grace and dignity, they left a gaping hole in American society. They treated relationships like disposable lighters, tossing marriages away when they ran out of gas. Children were left without families, and even worse, they were left without adults who could be role models of responsible behavior.”

-- BRAD THOR, "The Last Patriot"

Let me start this with two words:

Mea culpa.

Nearly everything I will criticize in this piece will be something of which I am also guilty. I certainly was not influential enough to be responsible for causing any of it, but if, as the saying goes, you are either part of the solution or part of the problem, I was part of the problem.

I never saw my Dad read comic books, or watch cartoonish movies about superheroes. Until he was in his 60s, I never saw him wear blue jeans, and I never saw him wear T-shirts advertising commercial products. We never discussed whether Superman could beat Batman, or what the coming year's Strat-O-Matic baseball cards would look like.

My Dad was a serious guy, and unless you're under 40 as you read this (or unless your dad was Soupy Sales), I'll bet your dad was too. I don't know anyone of my close friends who had a joking relationship with his father when he was in his teens or twenties. In fact, one of my closest friends lost his dad as a young adult, but for years his youngest brother often piped up with "Dad wouldn't want you to do that."

When I was 40 and my brother was 30, I was home for Christmas and Stephen and I were spending some time on the computer playing the second "Leisure Suit Larry" video game.

Our dad was OK with it -- we both had good jobs and it was a vacation -- but he was sort of shocked to learn that we had spent $20-30 dollars calling the Sierra hint line for clues to keep us going in the game.

I'm pretty sure he never -- that's right, never -- played computer games, and he was around for nearly 20 years after that Christmas.

I had an odd moment at my daughter's wedding in 2006 (I think) when I saw my new son-in-law doing some sort of goofy traditional family dance with his brother and their dad to "Woolly Bully."  My first reaction was that I could never imagine my brother and I doing that with our Dad.

Then it hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks.

In that particular grouping, I wouldn't have been one of the sons. I would have been the dad.

Ryan's dad was my contemporary, not my father's. His grandfather was at the wedding, as was my dad, and neither one of them was dancing.

But to return to the thesis from the beginning of the piece, my generation not only didn't yearn to be grown up, we shunned it. When someone at a store or a doctor's office called me "Mister Rappaport," I can't count the times I said, "Call me Mike. Mr. Rappaport is my dad."

As often as not during my years as a sportswriter, I wore golf shirts and jeans to work. For at least 15 years, I didn't own a business suit. When jeans were inappropriate, I wore khaki slacks. When a tie was required. I wore one with a dress shirt and possibly a sport coat.

If you look at the walls of my home office, it's certainly not what you would expect from a guy collecting Social Security.

The only times I really feel like a traditional-type adult are on the occasions when my children ask me for advice about something. So I suppose you could say they keep me honest.

Thank God for that.

They are 32 and 28, and both of them are definitely adults. They have pursued their careers like hounds pursuing a fox, and both of them have accomplishments at least a few years beyond their ages. They are making their mark in the world, and seeing how things turn out for them and their children is one of the main things keeping me interested in life.

So maybe my generation has wasted way too much time on having fun and spent way too little time as responsible adults. In the end, though, I guess we've muddled through and at least left the world a generation -- our kids -- that is going to fix what our generations and the ones before us got wrong.

Remember, hope is the thing with feathers.

Truth is tough to find these days, but there's a place called 'Heaven'

One thing that's truly disturbing  these days is that the two sides of our American spectrum are so far apart philosophically that they can't even agree on the facts.

The best (worst?) example of that is the recent case in Sanford, Fla., in which George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing Trayvon Martin. Depending on who you believe, Zimmerman took an aggressive position, stalked the 17-year-old Zimmerman and was glad to take the opportunity to kill him. Or the other view, that Martin was a bulked-up kid who knew mixed martial arts and attacked Zimmerman, forcing the older man to kill him in self-defense.

I saw one person saying Martin shouldn't have been walking around at 2 a.m., and another saying no, it was actually only 7 p.m.

I'm reminded of what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said to President Reagan's economic team in the 1980s. "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but they are not entitled to their own facts."

That's a pretty great statement, only these days both sides use it on each other because there is no consensus on what the facts are.

For that, I blame the media. These days they may know what's right, but they will not call a liar a liar. All it would have taken is a phone call or two in Sanford to find out how much Martin's body weighed at death. Some things really aren't a matter of opinion.

There are still facts in the world, whether we want to admit it or not.

***

It's funny how things come back into your life. I love '60s music, and one band that was really wonderful was the (Young) Rascals, who churned out one hit after another for four years. Only a few of those songs get much airplay on Oldies stations, and mostly you'll hear early hits like "Good Lovin'" and "Groovin'," two of the band's three hits to reach the top of the charts in the U.S. and Canada.

Three No. 1 hits is a major accomplishment -- that's as many as the Beach Boys had in the '60s -- but some of the Rascals' most memorable songs didn't make it to No. 1. "Lonely Too Long," "How Can I Be Sure," "A Beautiful Morning" and others still resonate down the decades.

But it was the last song of theirs I ever heard, in early 1969, that I absolutely loved -- and totally forgot. I saw a Very Best of Rascals CD in a remainder bin for $5, looked at the back of it and saw "Heaven." I swear I haven't heard it in more than 40 years, but I've been listening to it over and over as I write this.

God, but it takes me back.



Yeah, there's a place called heaven ...

When picking the best ever, perspective is difficult to maintain

Back when I was growing up, there was an old guy who was a sports columnist for one of the New York papers. His name was Dick Young, and he called his column "Young Ideas."

When I met the legendary Roger Kahn in 1983 in Gastonia, N.C., and let him drink a fifth of my vodka to keep warm (it was better than snuggling), we talked about Young. I told him I thought "Young Ideas" might have been the biggest misnomer ever, and he laughed.

Young used to be young, he told me. He actually was the first of the baseball writers to go to the locker room after games for quotes, something any sportswriter worth his salt was doing by 1983. But what I remembered most about Young -- other than running Tom Seaver out of New York and being a staunch supporter of the Vietnam War -- was that he referred to the generation of sportswriters who were baby boomers as "gee whiz" types who acted as if the world began the day they were born.

I was never like that. I'd still say a player who died before I was born was the best ever. It's tough to ignore Babe Ruth when you realize -- to use current examples -- that by being a great pitcher and a great hitter, he was Justin Verlander and Miguel Cabrera. I'm not sure there are any current players, except maybe for Cabrera, who would make my all-time greats.

But every time I search the Internet for lists of greats, I come across a ton of "gee whiz" types. Internet Movie Database rates "The Shawshank Redemption" (in a fan vote) as the greatest movie of all time.

Huh?

That would be bad enough, but only two of the movies in the top 10 were made before 1972. And you could waterboard me for a week and I'd never put "The Dark Knight" (6), the third "Lord of the Rings" movie (9) or "Fight Club" (10) in the top 10. Most real film people consider Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" the best movie ever made.

The "gee whiz" kids rank it 45th, just below "Back to the Future" and just above "The Shining."

Where I really wanted to weep, though, was in the rankings of Broadway musicals. Some idiot writing on a site called "Top 10 Reviews" picked a top 10 that included only one show from before the '80s, and that was an "old classic" known as "A Chorus Line" -- from the late '70s.

No Rogers and Hammerstein? No Lerner and Loewe?

I can almost understand people who prefer modern movies because of the advances in technology, but  live theatre has far more in common with the '40s and '50s than almost any other medium of entertainment. Chris Caggiano, whose website is called "Everything I Know I learned from Musicals," restored my faith a little with his top 100. (You can check the link for the 100; I'll just give you his top 10.

The only overlap with the other list is "Chorus Line," 10th on his list. All the others are classics.

Counting them down from 9th -- "The Music Man," "West Side Story," "Cabaret," "Oklahoma," "Fiddler on the Roof," "Guys and Dolls," "Sweeney Todd," "My Fair Lady" and "Gypsy."

I'd be happy to argue any of those with you, and there certainly are some others I would think worthy of inclusion -- "Carousel," "The King and I," "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying," "Camelot" and South Pacific," to name a few. But there aren't any of Caggiano's top 10 that aren't fabulous shows.

He at least has a historical perspective, which I appreciate.

***

Since we did start this thing with baseball, I'll give you my all-timers, both pre- and post-1947, just to be fair:

C -- Josh Gibson (pre), Johnny Bench (post). Bench wins overall, with Bill Dickey, Yogi Berra and Roy Campanella honorable mention..

1B -- Lou Gehrig (pre), Stan Musial (post). Gehrig wins overall.

2B -- Rogers Hornsby (pre), Joe Morgan (post). Morgan overall.

SS -- Honus Wagner (pre), Cal Ripken Jr. (post). Wagner overall.

3B -- Pie Traynor (pre), Brooks Robinson (post). A very tough call over Mike Schmidt and George Brett, but Robinson may have been the best defensive player at any position ever. Robinson wins overall.

OF (three for each) -- Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb and Joe DiMaggio (pre), Willie Mays, Ted Williams and Hank Aaron (post). Toughest calls of all, so we'll add a DH. All six tie for overall. I'm not leaving any of these guys out.

DH -- Jimmie Foxx (pre), Mickey Mantle (post). Foxx overall.

P (four for each) -- Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, Lefty Grove and Satchel Paige (pre), Sandy Koufax, Tom Seaver, Steve Carlton and Mariano Rivera (post). Mathewson, Johnson, Koufax and Paige overall.

With sincere apologies to Jackie Robinson and Ernie Banks.

This white man can't jump and he cannot sing either

Most people have some things they're good at and some things they're not. And unless they're particularly peaceful, satisfied people, they have one or two things they can't do that they wish they could.

When I used to think about it, there were two talents I wished I had -- one a lot, the other not so much.

I was a decent neighborhood athlete, not good enough to dream of competing at higher levels. Of all the athletic skills I wished I had, the one I would have loved to have would have been the ability to be a white man who could jump (on the basketball court).

I peaked just under 5-foot-11, and we had 6-5 white guys on our high school team who couldn't dunk, so that wasn't a real high priority for me.

The skill I really wished I had was being able to sing. I wrote the other day about how much I enjoyed acting, and I would have loved to be able to try out for musicals.

According to Scientific American, in an article which needs to be purchased to read in full, the problem most people have is not one of a bad ear but of untrained throat muscles.

My two closest friends both sing very well, to the point where they learned to play guitar, wrote songs and then sang their own songs.

I could never have done anything like that, but I surely would have loved a small part with maybe one song in a show like "The Music Man."

In 1972, my big year for acting, I did two roles for Vienna Community Theatre -- a small role in the noir play "Laura" and my aforementioned turn in "Glass Menagerie." They were pleased with the job I did in the two roles, and they hoped I would try out for the musical they were doing next.

"It was "Music Man," and I figured I would try. I had no intention of trying for the lead, but one song I could sing without butchering it too badly was "76 Trombones."



I tried. They told me they would let me know the next time they were doing drama or comedy, and I realized I wasn't going to have a career doing musicals.

But oh, it would have been so much fun to be able to sing.

We say we value diversity, but we're really just kidding

We have always done a wonderful job of playing lip service to diversity in this country.

We say we admire people who dare to be different, but not really. We generally expect people to fit in, to "know their place" and not try to step out of it.

When we see people dressed in a certain style, we look disapprovingly at them. Whether their pants are hanging too low on their hips or their baseball cap is turned backward, we look knowingly and make certain assumptions. Human scum Geraldo Rivera actually blamed Trayvon Martin for his own shooting, saying that he shouldn't have been wearing a hooded sweatshirt if he didn't want trouble.

I have nearly two dozen hoodies in my closet, advertising everything from Huntington Beach surf shops to my college fraternity to colleges as diverse as Texas, George Mason and Ole Miss.

Geraldo better not say anything bad about me.

I've got pictures of my favorite little guy in the world wearing a hoodie, and I'll extend the same warning to Mr. G when it comes to him.

Of course, my buddy Lexington isn't about to walk down to the convenience store for Skittles and Iced Tea. He won't be 2 years old till this fall and he isn't allowed to leave the house alone, let alone cross the street.

And if some wannabe tried to start an argument, well, Lexington isn't allowed to talk to strangers.

OK, for all the joking, Trayvon Martin's situation was very different. No one seems to be saying he initiated his deadly confrontation with George Zimmerman. There is some debate over whether he lost his temper and went after Zimmerman, but if he had been left alone from the outset, nothing would have happened.

Quite bluntly, Zimmerman didn't like the way he looked.

He was a little too diverse, such as it was. In general, Americans are cool with black people as long as they don't sound too black -- think Bill Cosby or Sammy Davis Jr. -- or play the fool, like Jimmie Walker or the kid who played Urkel on "Family Matters."

They can maybe be a little bit edgy, a Chris Rock type, or older types like Morgan Freeman, Danny Glover or Samuel L. Jackson. But they must pay lip service of a sort to the way things are.

Very few of the names above really celebrate any sort of separate black culture. That's one reason Spike Lee makes so many white people nervous. His own movies like "Bamboozled" and ones he produced, like "CSA: Confederate States of America," don't shy away from pointing out how America has traditionally regarded African Americans.

It doesn't surprise me that race seems to matter less these days to younger people. I have mentioned this before, but I live in a Southern city where interrracial couples and mixed-race children are a very common site.

I do think diversity comes more naturally to teenagers and young adults these days. I strongly believe there are fewer George Zimmermans in those generations than there were in mine and my parents' generations.

That, at least, gives me hope.

Even if it is too late for Trayvon Martin.

Do we really have any idea of which freedoms matter the most?

Is it possible to have too much freedom?

I'm not sure, but I certainly think we have gotten to a place in this country where we mistake license for freedom, and value the wrong sort of liberty over real freedom.

Ask yourself this:

What sort of freedom would matter the most to you personally?

For most people it wouldn't be freedom of speech or even religion. One of the most important freedoms Americans have ever had is the ability to change their lives by moving from one place to another and getting a fresh start.

Starting in the last half century, though, so many things have been done to chip away at that freedom that our country has changed to where America in 2013 would be almost unrecognizable to someone from 100 years earlier.

First and foremost, what has changed is the idea of buying things before you have the money to pay for them.

Until the New Deal, a home mortgage basically meant making a 50 percent down payment and paying the

balance within five years. So you saved to buy a home.

Most young people didn't go to college, but when they did, if their families didn't have the money, they worked their way through school. They didn't amass huge loan balances that had to be paid back after college.

Then of course there was the sea change in postwar America that occurred with the beginning of widespread consumer credit. In the great equality of the '50s and '60s, we made the decision that everybody was as good as everybody else and we were all middle class.

Think about this:

Joe Blow in Goat Cheese, Arkansas, is never going to live like Bill Gates, but with easy credit terms, he can probably have a big screen TV nearly as good as Gates had to watch the Razorbacks play on Saturdays in the fall. Of course, the more debts Joe amasses, the less freedom he has.

Now Joe has lots and lots of freedom. He can say whatever he wants about the president, he can buy a pretty good gun (on easy credit terms) and he can go to church wherever he wants -- or not go at all.

In the fullness of time, Joe can evolve to where he decides to smoke marijuana, and depending on where he lives, he can even admit that he'd rather be married to his buddy Jim than to Mary.

But is Joe more free? Probably not, because at the same time all this other stuff is happening, his company started making him pay a greater share of his health insurance and also told him he was going to have his own 401(k) account instead of the pension he had been counting on.

Then when Joe turns 54, his company closes the Goat Cheese plant and relocates to Taco Bell, Mexico.

Pardon my vulgarity, but all of a sudden, Joe is royally fucked.

But he's got plenty of freedom. He can watch pornographic movies, smoke dope and worship at the Church of Snake Handling. Yup, he's free, except when the bills come in and he can't pay them.

Those who prey on people like Joe will tell you he can make his own choices and if he makes bad choices, it's his own fault. These are the same people who want to privatize Social Security, because you see, as long as Joe still has that, he hasn't been picked clean.

Freedom isn't only for the lucky and the strong.

At least it shouldn't be.

I can remember when the cities in this country were still very different

You're going to have to bear with me a little on this one. This is one of those "old guy writing about the good old days" pieces, so cut me a little slack.

The United States used to be a much bigger country, a more interesting country.

It used to be that when you went from one state to another, one city to another, places were actually different. Not anymore. Along about the mid 1980s, I started using a term that I had never seen anyone else use before -- "mallification," as in "the mallification of America." My premise was that if you were blindfolded and dropped into the middle of a shopping mall, and you couldn't ask anyone where you were or look for newspaper vendors, it might take you quite a while to realize if you were in Missoula, Mont., Indianapolis, Ind., or Baltimore, Md.

Most of the malls would have the same stores, from anchor stores like Macy's or Sears to restaurants like Hot Dog on a Stick or Ruby Tuesdays.

But things weren't always like that. When I was in elementary school in the late 1950s, we lived in the suburbs outside Dayton, Ohio. When we went to a department store downtown, it was a store that was unique to Dayton and it was wonderful..

Rike's at Second and Main in Dayton was one of the biggest stores I had ever seen, eight stories of shopping and 920,000 square feet of space. Click on the link to see the directory. There was almost nothing they didn't sell; it was a true department store, not a glorified clothing shop like so many stores are today.

As big and wonderful as Rike's was, it was tiny compared to the real king of Ohio department stores. Lazarus in Columbus was 1.3 million square feet. Rike's and Lazarus are both gone, now. Economies of scale make it almost impossible for single stores to compete with chains like Macy's. In fact, for its final years of business, Lazarus in Columbus was actually owned and run as a Macy's.

I actually remember Lazarus better. We seemed to shop in Columbus more often than we went to downtown Dayton, and what I remembered about Lazarus was how every Thanksgiving, the sixth floor toy department was expanded for Christmas shopping.

I do remember going downtown to see the window decorations at Rike's most Decembers. There was just something so much nicer about walking along the sidewalk and seeing different displays than there was later going to the mall.

I just finished reading Bill Bryson's wonderful memoir, "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid," about growing up in Des Moines, Iowa. Bryson was born in December 1951, almost exactly two years after I was born, so we had many of the same cultural reference points.

He made a lot of the same points I've made here about the uniqueness of his hometown. I think it's a shame that kids don't get that anymore. They don't go to a hamburger stand for a burger and fries; they go to an outlet of a national fast-food chain.

If I remember correctly, I was 11 when Dayton got its first McDonald's. It was fun at first, but I don't think it changed our country for the better.

When we moved to Virginia in 1963, there were unique things there -- Tops Drive-Ins, Three Chefs restaurants -- but they have all given way to uniformity over the last 50 years or so.

Everyplace is the same now.

I even saw a George Will column in 2007 or so that referred to the "mallification of America."

Progress is great, but if there's one thing we ought to have learned by now, just changing things doesn't necessarily mean we're making progress.

Theatre can be fun from either side of the footlights

When I was young, my parents were real theater buffs. They were forever going to plays in New York and in Washington, and because they were intelligent, frugal people, they usually sat in the cheap seats. When they sat at all, it was in the second balcony. Other times they would buy standing room tickets, which at least benefitted from being at the back of the Orchestra seats.

When I started buying tickets to shows as an adult, it was usually for the purpose of a date. Since I didn't think the cheap seats would particularly impress the young women involved, I generally bought more expensive tickets.

Rhoda Penmark from the movie.

In most cases, I was more a movie person than a theatre person. My greatest thrills in the theatre were the few times I had the opportunity to act. As I said, I grew up in a real theatre family. My mother directed plays and my younger sister acted in them. In case you're thinking it was just a nepotism thing, forget it.

When my sister went to the University of Virginia to major in drama, she won the role of Juliet in her very first year. She played Helen Keller in "The Miracle Worker" in summer stock there, but the role in which she really shone was that of the truly evil Rhoda Penmark in "The Bad Seed."

She had the talent. When it came to my acting, the baseball comparison I would make is to say that with a lot of hard work, I might have been able to make it to Double A ball.

I did my share of community and college productions. In 1972 I had a wonderful time in the role of the Gentleman Caller in a community theatre production of "The Glass Menagerie," and in 1973 I had the lead role in the Northern Virginia Community College production of "Black Comedy."

What made that play so much fun was that the entire play, except for a minute or so at the beginning and the end, was performed as if the actors were in complete darkness.

I took several drama classes that spring. I directed an act of Woody Allen's "Play it Again Sam" in one class and began a friendship with Bill Madden that has lasted to this day. In another class, I performed a scene with lovely redhead Marti Lehder in which I got to kiss her.

When our classmates were critiquing the scene, one was praising me when the teacher interrupted, telling the class they should be careful what they said about my performance because I took praise a little too much to heart.

I think the last acting I ever did was a small role in a production of the period comedy "Once in a Lifetime" that my mother directed in 1976.

It's funny. I wasn't a good actor, but I was adequate and I enjoyed it. My sister was a real talent and spent a lot of years in New York trying to break through. Her experiences there showed me that it isn't only what you know that matters; sometimes it's who you know as well.

I still enjoy going to the theatre, although I don't do it much anymore. In the '90s when we lived in Los Angeles, I saw major productions of "Sunset Boulevard" (with Glenn Close) and "Miss Saigon."

I still enjoyed "Bad Seed" more, though.

Forget the myth and let's work for real freedom in America

What does it mean anymore to be free, particularly in terms of Americans and their rights?

If we start with the Declaration of Independence, we believe that some rights are given to us by God and cannot be taken away by government -- life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That sounds wonderful, but we really only pay lip service to those rights being inalienable. There are all sorts of reasons government can restrict our liberties and even take our lives.

If we get down to specifics, our most treasured freedoms are in the Bill of Rights, particularly in the First Amendment -- speech, religion, the press and assembly. But when it comes even to these, we seem to have lost our common sense.

When did out-and-out lying become protected speech under the First Amendment? When did freedom of religion become freedom from ever having to hear about someone else's religion?

When did freedom of the press become the right to inundate the airwaves with trash about celebrities and pointless attacks on opponents?

But let's move on from enumerated rights and look at rights or freedoms we lack compared to much of the rest of the world. In his 1944 State of the Union address, President Roosevelt said that "true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence."

He proposed a second Bill of Rights for after the war, and sadly his death meant none of it was ever enacted. Some of these rights were the right to a useful job at a fair salary, the right to a decent home, a good education, health care and care for the elderly.

If there is one great irony in all this, it's that the U.S. is just about the only "free" nation in the world that doesn't provide these guarantees to its citizens. We seem to be just about the only country in the world still living under 17th century Protestantism, convincing ourselves that the hard-working and pious succeed and the lazy and weak fail.

For one thing, that's incredibly judgmental. But far worse is that it dooms children to second- and third-rate lives because they had bad parents.

Sam Walton made billions because he had a good business plan and worked hard. His four children split those billions for no other reason than being members of the Lucky Sperm Club.

There isn't anything we can do about that, but it seems like we could at least do something about the other side of the coin and stop telling kids they've got no real chance to succeed because they had the wrong parents.

For all the talk about America being a land of opportunity, a country where anyone can get rich, the fact is that we have less upward mobility from the middle class to the upper class than most of the nations of Western Europe.

Maybe we ought to stop buying the myth and start working to improve the reality.

Are Americans exceptional? Maybe only exceptionally uninformed

Conservatives love to go on and on about American exceptionalism.

I think it's fair to say that used to be somewhat true, but so much of what used to be special about our country only has lip service paid to it now.

Land of opportunity? Not so much, with more and more of our national wealth winding up in the pockets of the top 1 percent.

Free press? Six companies own more than 90 percent of the media outlets in the country, which is why the only outlets that seem to attack corporate malfeasance are small, fringe publications.

Consider this:

Within the last 10 days, the Supreme Court made rulings on three important issues. The one that got the most publicity involved gay marriage. The court overturned Congress's efforts to make gay marriage illegal and also refused to reinstate California's anti-gay marriage referendum. This made folks on the left pretty happy and provided cover for the other two rulings.

By a 5-4 vote, the Court threw out an important part of the Voting Rights Law, making it far easier for conservatives to make it more difficult for minorities to cast votes for Democrats. Since voting is pretty much the key to everything, this one really hurts.

But there was a third ruling, one that didn't get nearly as much play. In another 5-4 vote, the court overturned a lower court's ruling in a lawsuit involving a pharmaceutical company that hid some potentially terrible side effects of one of its drugs. The woman who took the drug suffered a flesh-eating side effect that disfigured most of her body. The Court overturned a lower court's rating and said the woman had no right to sue the corporation because its drugs are exempt from lawsuits.

This is becoming more and more common as business tried to quash class action suits that have yielded big awards for those harmed by malfeasance. Massive corporations already have a huge advantage against folks trying to sue, but we have seen in numerous cases -- the exploding Ford Pinto, for one -- that companies sometimes know there's a problem but find it cheaper not to fix it.

I do think we're fortunate in one respect. We have the greediest, most short-sighted rich people in the world, and in the end they always go too far.

Just as progressivism under Teddy Roosevelt ended the Gilded Age, eventually there will be a charismatic progressive leader who will lead a movement that will end the current era. The problem is, we haven't had a real Democrat in the White House since 1969 when Lyndon Johnson left office.

It has been said that the reason Communism never took hold in the 1930s here is that everyone thought of themselves as middle class, not as working class. But our corporate media could be pushing back against this. During the 2012 campaign, when Republican Mitt Romney said he thought a yearly income of $250,000 or so was middle class, no one in the media really called him on it.

No one really wants a revolution, at least not as long as beer and television are still available at inexpensive prices.

American exceptionalism? Sadly, the way in which we seem to be the most exceptional these days is that we are so easily bewitched, bothered and bewildered to the point where we have no idea how much is being stolen from us.

I hope we learn the lesson before this modern system of feudalism gets locked into place.

Rain, rain, rain making it a very strange summer in Georgia

Summer seems to have become very strange.

When I call up the local weather forecast on my iPhone, it shows rain for every day in the five-day forecast. It doesn't usually rain in the mornings, but the afternoons and evenings have been wet for most of the last two weeks. When we moved here, they were talking about a drought.

For a while we were invaded by millipedes, which are so small -- and reportedly so flexible -- that they can come into the house through the walls. At least that's what the exterminator told us when he came out for a command performance.

Not rainy, but pretty light for 9:15 p.m.

All the bugs and all the precipitation definitely made me nostalgically recall my two summers in Colorado in 1987 and '88.

I think weather-wise, the Front Range was the best place I ever lived. Four real seasons, and none of them really unpleasant. I remember in 1987 we got our last snowfall in early April, and then there was no rain or snow at all for six months.

The summers were great in two respects. Temperatures reached the 90s in the daytime, but the humidity was so low it seemed 10 degrees cooler. Then once the sun went down, the nighttime low was around 50. My apartment had air conditioning, but I never once turned it on in two years.

One thing has seemed very strange to me lately. The sun sets, but then it doesn't really get dark until 9:30 or so. That surprised me at first, because we are farther south than Los Angeles. We don't get the "midnight sun" effect of cities far to the north. When Nicole and I were in Amsterdam two summers ago, it was still light out at 10:30.

What's happening here is that Georgia is affected by the way the east coast bends inward as you head south from Virginia. We live in a state that borders on the Atlantic Ocean, but we are almost due south of Cincinnati, Ohio. If I were to get into my car and drive west, it would take me less than an hour to reach Alabama and the beginning of the Central Time Zone.

We're in the same time zone as Portland, Me., but we are 14 degrees longitude farther west. So the sun rises later and sets later than in most of the other cities on Eastern Daylight Time.

Theoretically, if it weren't raining so much, I could go out to play golf after dinner and still get in 18 holes before dark. Now that's weird.

Someday the rain will stop.

I really don't want to build an ark.

Some memories wind up being weirdly incomplete

Every once in a while, something wonderful happens and we don't even know it.

In the spring of 1984, when I was working at the Anderson Independent-Mail in Anderson, S.C., I was covering minor league baseball. The local team was a farm club of the Atlanta Braves, and they had a double-header scheduled with a team I can no longer remember.

It wasn't the games I remember about this particular day, though. I was only peripherally covering the games that day. An executive from the front office in Atlanta -- the minor-league coordinator -- was spending the day in Anderson top check out some of the players.

It was a really nice spring day, so rather than sitting in the press box, we sat in lawn chairs out on the deck and essentially just talked for four hours or so.

The funny part of it is, I spent four hours alone with him, and I cannot remember one bit of the conversation I had with Hank Aaron.

I didn't ask him about his playing career. He wasn't there to talk about himself, so I'm sure most of our talk was about the Braves and their prospects. I had only been a sportswriter for four years or so, and I was still somewhat in awe of the really famous people I met.

It's funny. I have a display case with a dozen autographed baseballs, some from very famous players, but none from people I interviewed. Between my days in St. Louis, Colorado, Reno and Los Angeles, I met at least six or eight players I'd have loved to have autographs from.

I interviewed Jim Palmer and Catfish Hunter in St. Louis, Harmon Killebrew and Boog Powell in Denver, Vida Blue in Reno and Don Drysdale at Dodger Stadium. I also met several baseball-related movie stars at Dodger Stadium, Robert Wuhl from "Bull Durham" and David Lander from "A League of Their Own."

But Hammering Hank would be at the top of any list.

I just wish I could remember what we talked about.

Rainy days seem to make my mind wander back to the past

I wish I knew why rainy weather makes me feel nostalgic.

It has been raining almost every day lately, ever since the not-quite-a-hurricane came through last month, and that's dangerous for me. I tend to look with a little too loving eye at the past, even though at least two-thirds of my memories prior to a certain age tend to be about things that didn't work out.

One thing I find strange is how few people there are in my life who knew me before I was 40 years old. If it weren't for Facebook, there would be even fewer. Facebook put me back in touch with many of the people who were on the staff of my college newspaper when I was editor-in-chief. These are people I doubt I ever would have seen again if not for Facebook, and some of them are people I am very happy to be back in contact with.

Photos, too. I would never have seen this one without Facebook. I'm the guy in the back, just 31 years old and without a gray hair on my head. The picture is courtesy of my good friend Tara Hagenbrock Johnson, the young lady in the front. I could always make her laugh.

The hidden face right in front of me is someone I have known ever since we started dating in February 1980. There were times it almost worked out for us, but both of us are happily married now (to other people, of course) and I'll just remember Lisa fondly. If I ever get hit with Alzheimer's, she'll be one of the last people I forget.

But other than family members, there are very few people in my life who knew me as far back as high school. Mick Curran and Bill Madden, my two closest lifelong friends, go back a long way. I met Mick when I was 15 and Bill when I was 23, and I still know both of them 40-plus years later.

That matters to me. I have other friends who go back to high school, but they aren't people I have been in regular contact with. Before I remarried in 1992, I used to talk on the phone with Bill once a week or so, but marriage and two kids don't leave much time for that.

As for Mick, the 20 years I lived in Los Angeles were good ones. We talked, got together occasionally and played golf together maybe once a month. Now that I live in Georgia, that sort of ended.

Who do I talk to more than anyone else? Except for my wife, of course? It's my amazing daughter Pauline, through the magic of Skype. Whether she has been in Beijing, Indonesia or Jamaica, Pauline has made the effort to call us every weekend so that we can get to know our grandchildren.

She is an incredibly impressive person, balancing a high-powered career and a family and doing well at both of them. I cannot imagine a better daughter, and along with the Skype calls, she is always posting photos on Facebook so that we can keep track of Madison and Lexington, our two New York avenue grandchildren.

As much as anyone else, Pauline is the one who keeps me anchored in the present. It's tough to be nostalgic when I'm thinking about a grandson who won't be 2 years old till November.

But there are other people who are Facebook friends who were important people in my life more than 40 years ago and who I haven't seen since.

One thing good about it is that you get to see how things turned out.

Who got old, who didn't.

Who did well, who didn't.

Things that are, after all, nice to think about on rainy days.

Sometimes greatness disappears like a puff of smoke

"Bet you never heard about Herbie Score ..."
-- TERRY CASHMAN

Was there ever a pitcher more exciting from the get-go than Herb Score?

Was there ever a career cut more tragically short by a fluke, and one that left so many "what ifs?"

There is a general consensus among baseball fans that Sandy Koufax was the greatest left-handed pitcher of all time, and it's tough to argue against it. In his last five seasons in baseball, Koufax had a combined record of 97-17 and won the Cy Young Award three times.

Koufax's last season was 1966, and Score was 33 that year. He might still have been in his prime that summer, but he hadn't been an effective pitcher since 1956. He really had only two good seasons, his first two.

Herb Score

But oh, what seasons they were.

In 1955, when he was just 22, he had a 16-10 record, a 2.85 earned run average and led the American League with 245 strikeouts in only 227 1/3 innings. He was named Rookie of the Year and was the first starting pitcher to strike out more than one batter per inning.

His second season was even better. He was 20-9 with a 2.53 ERA and again led the league with 263 strikeouts. At age 23 he seemed poised to have an almost limitless career.

But on May 7, 1957, Score threw a low fastball to the Yankees' Gil McDougald. Score's followthrough left him unprotected on balls his back to the box, and McDougald hit a bullet right back at Score. He suffered an  injured eye and broken facial bones.

He returned the next year and spent five more seasons trying to regain his form, but he was never able to be even an average pitcher again. He won only 17 games in those five seasons and never won as many as he lost. He retired with 55 victories and one distinction, allowing fewer hits per nine innings than any starter in baseball history.

He remained beloved by Cleveland fans, working as one of the Indians' broadcasters for 34 seasons, and he never complained or expressed any regrets.



And if you're wondering just how good he was, longtime baseball manager Joe Altobelli was a teammate on the Indians in 1955 and 1957. As a minor-league manager in 2010, Altobelli watched another young phenom pitch and it reminded him of Score.

"Herb Score had some kind of arm," he said. "Like this kid."

"This kid" was Stephen Strasburg.

***

If you watched the earlier video, you heard parts of this lovely song in the background. But here in its entirely is Terry Cashman's Ballad of Herbie Score. Why write about this now? I first became a baseball fan in 1956, when we lived in Ohio, and Score was the first player ever that I considered my favorite.

Facebook brings back connections we had forgotten

There is one thing very strange about Facebook.

It has become so ubiquitous in our lives that we wind up reconnecting with people from our past without even really making the effort.

Just yesterday I was commenting on a Facebook page called "You Know You Grew Up in Fairfax if ..." and a woman whose name I didn't recognize responded to my post by saying she thought she knew me, that I had been a friend of her older brother when we were in high school.

As it turned out, she was right. She was in ninth grade when her brother and I were seniors, and she was a cute kid who eventually became a very beautiful girl. In fact, when I mentioned to my great friend Mick that I had heard from her, his response was "She was hot, hot, hot in high school." He's a year younger than she is, so he spent three years in high school with her.

I wouldn't mention it, except that more than 40 years after high school, she'll probably appreciate the memory.

I actually saw her brother, who is my oldest friend, at my 40-year high school reunion in 2007. We met in 1963 and he was one of the groomsmen in my first wedding. I hadn't seen his sister since high school, but I heard from him that she was doing well.

It was nice to hear from her, and to look through her pictures on Facebook and see what has happened in her life for the last 45 years or so.

I'll leave her name out of this, but I will use a picture I grabbed off her Facebook page. She may be 60, but she's still a good-looking woman.

I guess things really do go on forever with Facebook.

It's the good moments that keep bringing us back for more

Sometimes golf literally drives me crazy.

In a good way, of course.

Last week when I was playing at Heron Bay, just about the only thing I could do right was putt. I shot a 93, and without some good putts it would have been worse.

On 9, two putts for par.

Today I went back out in the bright sunshine on my regular course, Sun City Peachtree, and I literally could not make a putt to save my life. I had six or seven putts of less than 10 feet for birdies or pars and I did not make any of them.

I shot an 83.

See what I mean? It makes no sense at all, except to say that I was shooting lights out with my approach shots. On the sixth hole, a par four that has the toughest green on the course, I hit a mediocre tee shot but then hit my second shot from 157 yards away and put it seven feet from the cup. I two-putted, but that still left me with a par on a tough hole.

The ninth hole was disappointing. My tee shot on the par three was four feet from the hole, but I missed the birdie putt and settled for a par.

That was pretty much the way the whole day was going. I was hitting marvelous approach shots but then always taking two putts for pars or bogeys.

Most of my tee shots weren't anything special, which was disappointing after the way I started my round. The first hole is a tough par four that I don't often par, but I hit my very first shot of the day 265 yards right down the middle. I hit an approach shot to 12 feet away, missed the birdie putt but tapped in for par.

I also finished well, thanks to sort of a flukey shot. I had a mediocre tee shot and a crummy second shot on 18, leaving me with an uphill 35-yard shot to a three-tiered green. The flag was near the back, so once my shot reached the green, I had no idea where it went.

It had felt pretty good, though, and when I climbed the hill, I saw my ball literally one inch from the cup. Even I couldn't miss that par putt.

The 83 is the best I've shot in about a year, and if I can start getting onto the course a little more often, maybe I can break 80 again.

It reminds me of the final lines of Jim Bouton's wonderful baseball book, "Ball Four," when he wrote about a former major leaguer who was pitching in local rec leagues. It's funny, Jim O'Toole said, you spend all those years gripping a ball only to find in the end that it was the other way around.

***

Under the heading of These People Eat Their Own, Tea Partiers are urging Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky to stand aside and not run for re-election next year. McConnell has been masterful in obstructing Senate Democrats, but the teabaggers think he may lose next year.

It was 49 years ago today that President Johnson signed the historic Civil Rights Act. He was right when he said it would cost Democrats the South, but it will be the greatest accomplishment for which LBJ is remembered. Martin Luther King was directly behind the president.

For better or for worse, Johnson may have been the last truly memorable president who really enjoyed being president and understood how to use the power of the office.

Yesterday I wrote about concerts I saw at the Capital Centre. I forgot to mention that there would have been a ninth concert. I had tickets in July 1978 to a show, but we moved into our apartment that day after two years in Austria. My wife had a headache, so I missed my chance (for another seven years) to see Bruce Springsteen.

Till tomorrow, dos vedanya.