I’ve become friends with one of the reference librarians in the Great Library where I work, partly because she’s interested in music of all kinds. She’s played the piano most of her life and sung in choirs; she also does some Latin dancing, so music is about as important to her as it is to me. We’ve taken to trading CDs back and forth and recently I left four jazz ones on her desk with an email explaining them. …
At the end of my last post I wrote, with tongue mainly in cheek, that I wish I could have played major-league ball, but that the chances of this happening were a big fat zero. My friend Ted O’Reilly commented that this was just as well, that my career in music has been much longer than any ballplayer’s, with the possible exception of Minnie Minoso, who managed to play in parts of seven decades. This is true and a …
With over 350 sets of brothers and more than 100 father-son combinations, major-league baseball has had far more family acts in its history than any other sport. This doesn’t include the rarer examples of nine sets of twins who played the game or the four instances of players over three generations – grandfather, father and son. There’s even a very rare case of baseball spanning four generations (while skipping two) as in the case of Jim Bluejacket, who pitched …