These six months

In honor of Opening Day this Friday, I've rounded up some baseball and baseball-related posts: on being a White Sox fan; a quote for the ages; wrestling with the great Roger Angell and losing; and a prismatic memory of me and The Bird.

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Play ball, and all of that.  I'll likely be posting on the game as the season progresses, as I watch games from the Collegiate Summer League to the Majors, and burrow deeper into my shelf of baseball books and storehouse of vivid and vague memories.  Baseball's a beautiful game, and a beautiful game to write about, but I find myself courting a deadly sentimentality and nostalgia.  I'll try to leaven my immoderate love of the game, its history, and my lifelong fandom with skepticism and anti-melodrama—if possible.  As a writer, it's tough to guard against when your subject is maddeningly perfect, perennially heartbreaking, fascinatingly logical yet oftentimes beyond description, urgently tied to your adolescence, occurs every Spring, and renews a kid-like spirit burdened with grown-up perspective.  But I'll try.