Sometimes I wish I lived in the alternate universe where he didn’t have a stroke.

Having grown up a fan of the Washington Football Team and then living the majority of my life in Chicago, a Dallas - Green Bay game in which neither team wins is absolute perfection!

Oh, man! My dad (Lutheran pastor) got that in the mail. I took it to college with me and we all enjoyed the hell out of it. My favorite was one friend who stuck a Bible in his backpack the day it was supposed to happen “in case there’s a test and it’s open book”.

My first neighborhood Jewel. Reminds me of a story. Wendy and I got back from our honeymoon Saturday night. So, Sunday morning (June 28, 1992), I head down to Broadway to walk to Jewel and am unable to do so, because the Gay Pride parade was in full swing coming down the street!

Sometimes you just have to tip your cap to an elite pitcher pitching elitely. My goodness, Hunter Greene! Throwing 101.5 in the 9th inning! And helluva pitching performance on the other side by Colin Rea - that’s a tough loss! I don’t feel terrible about the Cubs starters heading into the playoffs.

Retrosheet is seeking volunteers to help with game entry of box-score data for the 19th Century and Negro Leagues. If this sounds like something you would be interested in, please email me at [email protected].

This is bizarre. The old Baltimore Orioles of the National League were contracted away after the 1899 season. The first American League Orioles started in 1901 (and folded in 1903). 125 years ago was 1900, the one year back then in which there were no Baltimore Orioles!

Had some free time yesterday after getting home from Louisville so I organized my baseball shelves in the attic.

Made it home safely from another outstanding #SABR Negro Leagues conference. Great people, great presentations. Louisville is a beautiful city (although a little too hot). Can’t wait until next year!

Attended the dedication of a grave marker for longtime Baltimore Elite Giants second baseman Sammy T. Hughes in Louisville. #SABR went over and above! Beautiful marker!

Retrosheet’s latest (Summer 2025) release contains complete play-by-play for the 1911 and 1913 AL/NL seasons, box scores for the 1899 and 1900 NL, the 1936 Negro National League season, and updates to more than 1,000 other game accounts. See here for details: www.retrosheet.org/summer2025re...

Retrosheet is pleased to announce its semi-annual summer 2025 release. Too much great stuff to fit in a skeet. See here for details: www.retrosheet.org/summer2025re... Enjoy!

Portland Maine really punches above its weight. At Back Cove Music Festival a mile down the street from our house.

Very cool! As a Negro Leagues historian, I’ve started judging cities by how well their newspapers covered Negro League games played there. Paterson, New Jersey gets high marks. www.retrosheet.org/NegroLeagues...

So, my two favorite teams are playing the team that set a major-league record for losses last season and the team threatening to break that record this season. And it is not going the way I had hoped and one might have expected. Ah, well, the beauty of baseball!

This game 101 years pre-COVID also comes to mind sabr.org/gamesproj/ga...

Neil Robinson is probably my favorite Negro Leaguer. The Memphis Red Sox of the 1940s had terrible newspaper coverage so we’re missing huge chunks of his statistical career. In a better world, Neil Robinson was a slam-dunk Hall-of-Famer. www.retrosheet.org/NegroLeagues...

I shouldn’t. But the mathematician in me can’t help it. He is literally claiming that drug companies are going to pay us to take their drugs!

First is Eddie Murray, who was Rookie-of-the-Year the first year I really followed an MLB team. Other favorites from that team were Ken Singleton, Al Bumbry, and, as a soft-tossing left-handed, I always liked Scott McGregor and Mike Flanagan.

When you omit "A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol," you completely alter what Scully was describing as "marvelous." Scully was NOT just broadly marveling. He was marveling at a very specific, very important thing.

In Chicago for work. The company got tickets in the same section as Pope Leo had for the 2005 World Series.

I love weird stuff like this. (I also, of course, love the Cubs hitting home runs against the Cardinals.)

Our boy is 10 years old. But he’ll always be “puppy” to us.

Retrosheet meeting starts in five minutes in the Irving Lecture Hall. Come say hi! #SABR53

Mind-blowing research and presentation from @markarmour04.bsky.social tracking the life (but first, the pitching career) of Satchel Paige. The visuals are so impressive because nobody has ever compiled this before. Awesome work.

Have of the basis for my old Twitter handle with his double-play partner that season: Kiko Garcia.

Golden batter in Texas - he can end the game with a win for either team.

Globe Life Field is the 15th MLB park I’ve been to. The man in front of me said it’s his 58th. I asked the guy next to me how many MLB parks he’d been to: “All of them”. Both of these guys have even been to Sacramento earlier this season! I have some catching up to do! #SABR

Great idea. Man did the Fergie one (that starts this thread) make me cringe!

Dammit! I moved to Maine for a reason! Although I suppose it’s preparing me for Texas the rest of this week for SABR.

Good night for the 2025 Cubs too. Good to see those guys doing well!

Good night for 2016 Cubs: 2 HR for Baez, 6 shutout innings for Hendricks, Contreras stole home. Good to see those guys doing well!

Today I learned about the Shannon twins, whose major-league careers overlapped by one game. www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/191... They entered in the 5th inning as Boston’s DP combo (contemporary newspapers disagree on which played where) in what was Maurice’s (“Red”) debut and Joe’s final game.

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.” Alice Walker

Random old-timey baseball fact I stumbled upon today. I’m working on the 1910 season for Retrosheet, and on June 15, 1910 both Chicago teams played 14 inning games and both Philadelphia teams played at least 14 innings. A lot of baseball played that day! www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/191...

I thought the sky looked cool on my walk with Stanley today.

Surely the Rockies can win 21 games, right? But I didn’t think I’d ever see a team behind the pace of the 1899 Spiders this many games into the season. The 1988 Orioles started 0-21 and had passed the Spiders by this point. Damn!

“A few years later, he would become Father Aloysius S. Travers, S. J., and to this day he is the only Catholic priest ever to play in a major league game.” sabr.org/bioproj/pers...

And here was the result of the player strike: just a ho-hum 24-2 A’s win over a poor pitcher by the name of Allan Travers in his only major-league appearance www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/191...

Perfect day for a roll in the grass

This! I’m not giving an original take here. But the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown is awesome and tells the full scope of baseball history. The Plaque Room in said museum is cool but is a mere drop in the bucket of what’s at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

My two sons were born in Chicago and attended a World Series game (Cubs, game 4). One of the groomsmen in my wedding is a Catholic named Rob who lives on the South Side. It’s very weird that I know people who are even kind of like the Pope!

The “sermon on the mound” absolutely has to happen at Comiskey at some point! (Pope Bob seems like a guy who still calls it Comiskey.)

The next Chicago team to win a championship (okay, stop laughing) should blow off visiting the Trump White House and instead go to the Vatican.

The last two governors I have voted for were J.B. Pritzker (2018) and Janet Mills (2022). (I moved from Chicago to Portland Maine in 2019.) I feel really good about my voting record there.

This survey is shocking to me! One of the highlights of my fatherhood was when my youngest was 5 or so and we transitioned from me reading to him to him reading to me.

Trump has this exactly backwards here. What a trade deficit means is that the U.S. is buying more stuff from other countries than they’re buying from us. Which is fine: we get stuff, which is good. But in the “world is a mall” analogy, that makes the U.S. the shoppers, not the store owners.

A bakery once spelled my last name “Phreff”. I had spelled it for them over the phone: T-H-R-E-S-S. Say that out loud: it really does sound like P-H-R-E-F-F - except that I had first said my name, which is pronounced Tress (silent H).

The baseball team of my youth! Good times!! (And I still have a little grudge against Willie Stargell and that damn Sister Sledge song.)

Sam Jethroe is a guy who could have been a Hall-of-Famer if his timing had been different. Fun fact about Jethroe: he played a fair bit of catcher in 1944-45. If he’d stuck there he’d probably have been the fastest catcher in major-league history. www.retrosheet.org/NegroLeagues...