Playing with the pencil in my hand Thursday night, my mind wandered. I was sitting in the midst of a meeting where the discussion floated between topics like clouds on a breezy day, and I realized I had no idea what was being discussed.

The cellphone buzzed in my pocket. It was a text message from my son asking me if I was watching the White Sox game. "No," I wrote back, "I'm at a meeting. What's going on?"

He wrote back to tell me that Mark Buehrle...

We had tickets to Opening Day. The key word there is "had," because the game was snowed out and postponed until the next day. Disappointing, but it happens. This is April in Chicago after all.

We couldn't make it to the next day's game so I exchanged the tickets for April 28th. A bummer, because I love Opening Day: the crowd, the pageantry, the spring-is-here feeling that accompanies the event. But I already had tickets to the April 25th game and I resigned myself to making...

When I decided to make use of the blog feature on WSI I tried to think of a clever title. Something catchy, maybe a little snarky, and somehow relevant to baseball. Hoping to post some original thoughts, the notion of "hit 'em where they ain't" seemed to fit.

With lantern in hand, I regularly prowl the web looking for nuggets of insight, prospecting for information gold. To my surprise I found that a message board for Baltimore Orioles fans already calls itself "Hit...

There was news this week of the layoff of 53 more newsroom people at the Tribune, adding to a thread that ruminated on the paper's fate. Another thread discussed Melissa Isaacson's last column in the Tribune. The piece dealt with the firing of Denis Savard, but could easily be read as her own valedictory as her Tribune career ends. I posted in both threads and realized that my musings are better suited to this blog space.

Dying newspapers upset me because I believe in news. "News"...

While prowling the interwebs for something that I've since forgotten about, I came upon an article by Roger Angell, the baseball writer for The New Yorker. In the July 31, 1989 issue, he wrote "No, But I Saw the Game," a long essay about baseball movies.

His premise was that baseball movies by their nature have to show ongoing excitement, while real baseball is a series of long stretches of tepid activity with occasional bursts of emotional release. Actual baseball doesn't...