I don’t feel I have to introduce myself, as I’ve been writing a baseball related column each month or so for over 18 years.
I’m changing the title of my column from “Baseball Insider” to “Wise & Otherwise.” Sometimes you’ll find parts wise and sometimes you’ll find me otherwise. Don’t worry baseball fans, we’ll talk some baseball in almost each and every column.
We’ll talk about different subjects besides baseball also. Politics, religion, antisemitism, shidduchim (I have grandchildren in the “parsha” and I’m newly married after being a widower).
How often will the column run? I hope to appear more often than monthly and we’ll judge by the feedback. Sometimes you’ll think the column is about “nothing.” But that was the success of the television show Seinfeld. The cast of characters on the program, George, Elaine, Kramer and Jerry Seinfeld himself always said “the show was about nothing.”
I know the readers are more intelligent than I am, but I may have experienced more than most in my 80-plus years.
I experienced the highest of highs and the lowest of lows.
Baruch Hashem, I had a great childhood with great parents, sharing a lower three-bedroom flat with grandparents and a younger brother and sister. I saw my first ballgame in 1950 with the Yeshivah Beth Yehuda Day Camp (YBY). The Detroit day school was in its fifth year at the time and the small school accommodated Young Israel also. Today YBY has four state-of-the-art buildings on its campus.
The high came in 1984 in my first year of working for the Detroit Tigers. The team won the World Series and I was awarded a small World Series share and a World Series ring.
The lowest of lows happened 12 years ago. My daughter, our only child, passed away after battling cancer for three years. She was only 41 and left seven children, the oldest of whom was 19 and the youngest only three. Unfortunately, the youngest has no memory of her mother.
At the funeral, one of the Detroit area rabbis said, “She was one of the greatest women this community has ever produced.”
She was.
I had an interesting week this week. A producer from the Fox network in New York flew in to interview me for an upcoming program in my West Palm Beach dugout. We’ll talk about it in the next column.
