Baseball was made for kids, and grown-ups only screw it up. ~Bob Lemon

Jonesborough, Tennessee

Damn, I hate to get up before the sun; it is blasphemy.

I will miss Mike Wallace, but I suppose there are many people whom he interviewed who will not.

I am finally reading Jim Bouton’s baseball chronicle, Ball Four. I put off reading it for nearly 40 years, but Amazon had a Facebook special of the day and I got it for $.99. The reason I had never read it was some of the reviews from the early nineteen-seventies had me thinking it was a tattle-tale story from a player in his last years as a professional. I was already becoming disillusioned with the big league game and I figured by reading the book it would belittle what few dreams I had left of the old days and heroes like Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Whitey Ford, and Yogi Berra. All these guys were teammates with Bouton for the New York Yankee organization in the late fifties and early sixties. It has turned out to be a very good book, written with humor by a man who knows the insides of baseball and uses his knowledge to tell an entertaining story which is not a tell-all about the game or its players.

Sammy is coming; have a Tuesday.