|
|
|
 You're probably wondering why this site exists more than anything else. There's no E! True Hollywood Story here: my dad didn't flee the draft to Canada, we didn't grow up in a single parent household with a mom that worked two shifts at a diner followed by one as an undertaker. I went to public schools from kindergarten through 12th grade... that's boring. I even attended a prissy little liberal arts college.
I'm perhaps the prototypical armchair quarterback. I played Little League and was stuck in right field for most of my first season, because that's where you put the kid who can't field. Really. See, there are only a few kids who bat lefty, and those kids usually have odd swings and can't pull the ball with any sort of authority anyway. Those righties who have power will pull that twenty mile per hour heater. In other words, the ball isn't hit to Mr. Right Fielder that often. I hit about as well as I fielded.
I hit off the tee about as well as I pitched. Fast forward to college. I didn't play for any sports teams, intramural, intercollegiate, or otherwise. I did have a brief but rather catastrophic careers as an engineering student. Ended up with a degree in Economics, which explains why I like to talk about salary caps and the like. One quickly learns that the worst part about about being an engineering student -- well, a bad one -- is that you never learn to write. But once you leave the world of F=MA, you have to pick up the pen and go scribe. Case in point: My first real college paper as a non-engineer was about NAFTA. The first paragraph had one run on sentence, two fragments and nothing else. I started learning by doing. I joined one of the nation's best college papers, The Primary Source. It really is one of the best -- it was given such an award by National Review. Why they took me? Dunno. But you learn to write by reading and editing, less so by writing. At least I did. And no, I didn't join the regular newspaper. I don't like to report -- I like to opine. My first article was published on National Review Online in January 2001. It's the first break that one needs to start the ball rolling and to mix metaphors. I joined BootlegSports.com because the guys who run it used to work for SportsTalk.com, who ran my second article. (It took over twenty years to get byline #1. Number 2? Two days more. Funny how that works.) Since then, I've been writing pretty much constantly for a number of different outlets. I write mainly about sports policy and economics, but occassionally dabble in statistics or other diversions. I'm responsible for popularizing the Chunky Soup Curse and run a mock BCS using NFL teams. If you'd like me to write for you, contact me via the link below.
|
At the end of my first year, I got a chance at second base. Suddenly, coaches and parents and teammates and heck, I learned something about me (myself). I'm not afraid of line drives. In fact, I could field -- just not throw. For the last few games, the coach put me at second base, and I stayed there for the rest of my little league career. Yeah, I had a few innings at catcher (which sucks), shortstop (which also sucks), third and first (they rock), and in the outfield too. Oh, I also pitched one inning: three "walks," one strikeout, one hit, one hit batsman two runs. Walks is in quotes because they didn't just give you first base -- you had to hit off a tee.
