The Complete Spring Training Report

I'm back after eight wonderful days bopping around Florida. The product as written over in baseball land ended up being about 60% travelogue, 40% baseball, so it may be of interest to the dozen and a half people who read this site.  Here are links to all the posts, in chronological order:

Greetings from Spring Training

Day with the Mets Part 1
Day with the Mets Part 2
Day with the Mets Part 3
Day with the Mets Part 4

Meeting Old Gator

Day with the Twins Part 1
Day with the Twins Part 2
Day with the Twins Part 3
Day with the Twins Part 4

Red Sox Nation South Part 1
Red Sox Nation South Part 2
Red Sox Nation South Part 3

Arrrrgh! The Pirates Part 1
Arrrrgh! The Pirates Part 2
Arrrrgh! The Pirates Part 3

An Aborted Trip to Steinbrenner Field

Phun with the Phillie Phanatics Part 1
Phun with the Phillie Phanatics Part 2
Phun with the Phillie Phanatics Part 3
Phun with the Phillie Phanatics Part 4

Spring Training Trip Wrap Up

If you have the patience to get through all of that you probably enjoyed it.

To beard or not to beard?

Things you can do when you work from home: 1. Grow beard; 2. Pretend to be 19th Century president; 3. Pretend to be Elvis; 4. Go back to normal.

Fear and Loathing in the Sunshine State

I got my itinerary this afternoon. The flights and hotels are booked, the rental car is reserved and the media credentials are (almost) squared away. I'm going to Florida the second week of March to cover spring training. I'm going to once again do battle with a state with which I have never really gotten along.

 There were, I believe, three childhood vacations to the sunshine state. Maybe four -- they kind of blend together so I may be mixing up the continuity a bit -- but none of them were unequivocal successes. The earliest was a classic "let's pile six people in a Buick and drive 1,500 miles -- why? -- because it's the 1970s and that's just what people did back then" trip.  The two extras were a young neighbor couple, friends of my parents. I think I was six years-old. Must have been at least six, actually, because we were driving the light green '79 LeSabre. [UPDATE: My dad notes: "It was not a LeSabre.   It was a full deuce and a quarter. Electra 225 Limited. Strictly class."]  A celadon green, I'd say, which my parents called "the thick and chewy Buick" because of the soft cushy vinyl -- or whatever it was -- on the roof.

I dwell on the car, because I remember almost nothing of our time in Florida itself. Just the interminable drive from Flint, Michigan to Key Largo, two adults and a child in the front seat, two adults and a child in the back. Plus purses. And pillows. And books. And Kleenex boxes. And shoes. And a cooler full of sandwiches and sodas, because it was Jimmy Carter's America and malaise meant only eating at restaurants once a day no matter how far from home you were. And it was always a Howard Johnson's.

The next trip I remember was just the four of us. It started out as another driving trip, but Ronald Reagan was in office by then, and he turned us all into men and women of action. 20 miles from home my dad hit an ice patch on the highway, decided that he didn't need two days of this crap, diverted to a pay phone and booked us on a same-day flight from Windsor, Ontario to Tampa. Well, next day, technically, as the flight left at what I remember as 3AM the following morning. We waited things out in a Travelodge motel sort of sleeping, sort of not.  Once we got on the plane my brother ordered an orange juice and the flight attendant brought him a screwdriver.

The trip itself was generally OK. We went to the pre-Epcot Disney World, which I imagine today would be considered quaint.  We made it down to Key Largo again, staying in a mobile home that belonged to my grandparents. I don't think they had been down there for some time, as the inside was covered with dust and grease and all manner of nastiness. The first morning there my mom turned on the oven and the whole place filled with noxious fumes. The room in which I slept was full of my grandmother's trashy romance and horror novels. One of them had a hyper-realistic cover picture of a man being hanged. It haunted my dreams for the rest of my childhood. I can still picture it, quite vividly, nearly 30 years later.

But the real downer of that trip wasn't the trailer -- you can overlook a lot when you're near a nice beach in January -- it was a short visit with some people we used to know named the Keefes.*  They had been our neighbors in Michigan for a time. The father sold cars (Buicks, natch). The mother, who seemed on the young side and was rather loopy, worked at a record store.  Their daughter, Janie, was a year younger than me, and we were more or less inseparable when we were five and six years old.  My dad built a ladder that straddled the backyard fence so we could visit one another. I swam in Janie's pool, she played with her Barbie dolls in my basement and we decided that when we grew up we'd get married and work together as garbage men, Janie driving the truck, me riding on the back, emptying cans. She was my first best friend.

One day, however, the Keefes just picked up and moved from Michigan down to Florida. I don't think that I ever knew the details, but I recall vague talk of scandal -- maybe drugs -- and other unseemliness.  I can only assume my parents decided to visit them for my and Janie's sake, and I remember being glad to see her. Their home in Florida, however, was a disheveled mess. The morning we went to Disney World -- Janie and her mother came with us -- the power was turned off at their house and some mention was made of "confusion" over the electric bill.  I was too young to know what was going on, but I knew something was amiss.  The day in Disney was fun, but the visit has become overshadowed by a certain sadness in my mind and memory, partially because of Janie's apparently unfortunate circumstances, but also because it was the last day I ever saw her. I've often wondered how her life has gone. I worry that it hasn't gone particularly well.

The next trip to Florida started off with such promise. It was April 1984. My parents were coming off a couple of years of relative prosperity and we were making the trip in a motor home with a boat in tow. In addition to the four of us, two of our best friends -- the Yoder brothers -- were allowed to come along for the trip. The two days on the road were great fun. We brought thousands of baseball cards with us and we sorted and traded them all the way down I-75. Day three was spent out in the great big ocean in our little boat speeding around, jumping waves and having a grand time. It had all the makings of an epic vacation.

That night, however, my father was paged by the campground office. The call was from Michigan. My great Uncle Harry -- who was really more like my grandfather and who may be more responsible than anyone for me being the baseball fan I am today -- had suffered a massive heart attack and died in his back yard.  We started back home that night.  His funeral -- a Jewish affair, held an extra sundown to accommodate our journey -- was the first one I ever attended. By the end of this ordeal I had come to associate Florida with sorrow and disaster.

It would be 21 years before I'd get back there. This time I was there on legal business, dispatched to Sarasota under outrageously stressful circumstances. I wasn't exactly told to obstruct an official investigation while I was down there, but it was pretty clear that everyone on my side of the table would have been happier if the investigation went slowly and was hopeful I could make that happen. I wasn't exactly being followed by government investigators while I was down there, but they certainly knew where I was at all times during the trip.  I wasn't exactly threatened while I sat in a warehouse full of rare coins for three straight days, but the fact that the security detail that guarded them openly and freely brandished Israeli assault weapons didn't make me feel all that comfortable either.  On the bright side I billed a shitload of hours that week and back in those days that was pretty much all that mattered.

My last trip to Florida came on the same case a year later when I visited my indicted client and his wife in their stately Florida Keys home to prepare him for his criminal trial. I'll admit, the place was fabulous. Great views. Expensive wine. Wonderful steaks, seafood, sunsets and  swimming. But for as nice as the accommodations were, an air of dread hung over the entire trip. I won't say my co-counsel and I knew exactly what was coming, but we did know there were rough days ahead. I remember floating in the pool and looking at the stars one evening when Tom walked out on to his bedroom balcony above where I swam. He raised a toast to me and told me that the next time I came I'd have to bring my family. I knew there wouldn't be a next time. I don't know if he did too and was merely playing the role of charming host or if he really felt he'd beat the rap. Whether it was hubris or denial I still don't know, but it cast a pall over the entire trip.

It's been four years since that visit, and again, I prepare for Florida.  Will this be the time nothing goes sideways for me down there? The first time that no bad news, bad cars, bad hotels, bad vibes or bad people come between me and all that the Sunshine State is supposed to offer?

I'm hopeful. After all, I'm going down there for baseball. To grok the spring training zeitgeist in the service of my dream job. I'll be armed with a press pass an expense account and a vague-to-nonexistent mandate to meet people, watch games and write stuff, which is something I'm fairly confident I can handle. No amount of bad Florida juju can mess that up, can it?

Wait. Don't answer that. If you need me, I'll be checking out the cactus league schedules and checking to see if my airfare to Miami is refundable . . .

*As is the case in many of these tales, some names have been changed to protect the innocent, the guilty, the vaguely shifty and the morally dubious.

New Albany

I like to tell people that I live in a fortified compound on the outskirts of Columbus, but I really live in New Albany.

New Albany was a genuine little village dating back to the 1850s or so, though not much of one. As late as the mid 80s it didn't have much more going for it than a feed mill, a general store and a high school for the farm kids. Like so many other Ohio farm towns it was well on its way to oblivion.  Then the New Albany Company came.

The New Albany Company was, for all practical purposes, Les Wexner and Jack Kessler.  Wexner, Columbus' only billionaire, was the founder of The Limited, which spawned and/or bought and subsequently grew and/or spun off Victoria's Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch, Express, Bath and Body Works and all manner of other stores that fill your local mall.  Kessler was a developer. The two of them decided that conquering the retail world was not enough. They wanted to make a more permanent mark.  They wanted to make the prairie bloom.  So they bought up a bunch of land in and around New Albany through shell corporations, made some shady deals with the Columbus city council to get the water and sewers sent out this way and started building faux Georgian mansions everywhere. The first one built was Wexner's house. At about 22,000 square feet, it's a modest little country place for his family of four.

At the time they told the locals that if they put a blindfold on and came back in 20 years they wouldn't know where they were. And they were right.  Most of the farmers were bought-off and left, their land replaced with neighborhoods with names like Alban Mews, Clivdon, Edge of Woods, The Farms, Fenway, Hampstead Heath, Lambton Park, Lansdowne, and Upper Clarenton. Instead of soybeans, this land is now used to grow the over-privileged offspring of bankers, insurance executives and lawyers.  They go to school on a campus of buildings that looks as though it was transported in toto from the University of Virginia. Leisure trails snake through the village -- don't you dare call it anything other than a village, even though legally speaking it became a city once it surpassed 5,000 residents -- and the entire community is lined and surrounded by miles of its signature white fence.

There are still a few pre-New Albany Company old timers living in their non-Georgian, early postwar homes. They were never farmers, really. They were just people who thought they were moving out to the country once upon a time. They live in the kinds of houses that, were they on New Albany Company-controlled property, would be regulated out of existence as eyesores and threats to property values, but they're people's homes. The old timers who live in them probably hate all of the folks who moved out there for the country club and Georgian homes and white fence. I can't say I'd feel differently if I was in their shoes. 

We moved to New Albany in 2005 when our daughter was barely a year old and our son was on the way.  We were convinced that our 75 year-old house in the city was too small and too drafty in which to raise babies, and we knew that the schools in the area were sub par.  We were probably right about most of that, though whether that demanded that we move to New Albany remains an open question.

Still, I can't say I hate it here. There were several times over the past five years when the level sidewalks and nicely landscaped village green right outside our window provided a calming counterbalance to the chaos inside the house.  Anna's school is very nice. The snow is cleared off the streets quite quickly. It's quiet at night.

But though our neighborhood is among the most modest in the village, to the old timers we're probably no different than the folks in the big country club houses  Sure, I drink regular coffee and not lattes and sure I could point out the subtle differences between our Volvo wagon and those Range Rovers, but I'm not sure it would help my case.  We're part of the new New Albany. The people who destroyed the village in order to save it.

Appellant's Convictions are Affirmed

I received a blast from the past last week when the decision came down in a case I left a long time ago. The case? State v. Noe, one of my three forays into criminal defense work in my eleven-year legal career. The decision: Tom Noe's conviction affirmed.  His eighteen year sentence -- which still has around sixteen years left on it -- upheld. I wrote that appellate brief a good eighteen months ago. Maybe longer. Glad to see the wheels of justice spinning so swiftly. 

For reasons that aren't worth going into here I think it's an awful decision.*  Most people familiar with Tom Noe's story don't lose any sleep over him rotting in jail, but the fact is that Tom was unconstitutionally overcharged, shafted on a dozen procedural motions, convicted in the press long before a jury was ever seated and handed a sentence that outstripped his actual transgressions by orders of magnitude (query: how does one engage in a criminal conspiracy with oneself? Only that Lucas County jury can say for sure).  Still, there's a difference between not guilty and innocent, and when you play the kinds of games, make the kinds of decisions and make the kinds of enemies Tom Noe made in his life you're not going to get a lot of calls in your favor. The upshot: I'm not terribly surprised by the outcome even if, legally speaking, it's the wrong outcome.

People who know about that case ask me how I, a liberal guy with a strong aversion to backroom political messiness could defend a hardcore, admittedly corrupt Republican dealmaker like Noe for as long as I did. I have two answers to that. Well, two answers other than "he was my boss's client so I had to do so if I didn't want to get fired."

The first one is the boring one: I truly do believe that quaint stuff about people being innocent until proven guilty, about the government having the burden of proof, about the Fourth Amendment protecting people from illegal searches and seizures and about people being treated equally under the law.  Tom Noe deserved a defense just like anyone else, and if he was going to choose my boss and, by extension, me to give it to him, I felt duty-bound to give it to him.

It was the second reason, however, that made me quite happy to defend Tom Noe day-in-day-out for nearly two years: he's a neat guy. He's funny. He's strange in a harmless though highly interesting way. For all the malevolence of which he has been accused (and convicted, I probably need to add), he's the kind of guy you just want to hang around.  And before you assume that I was either a victim of Stockholm syndrome or hypnotized by his power, wealth and charisma, let me note that by the time he entered my life he had no power or wealth left and little in the way of charisma, if indeed he ever had any. Because of the scandal and media circus that preceded his indictment, by the time I met him he was basically an unemployed guy living off of the generosity of his family and the very small number of friends who hadn't abandoned him while waiting for his inevitable trip to prison.

I have about 50 Tom Noe anecdotes, most of which I can't share due to the attorney-client privilege. This one, however, kind of sums up his personality during his limbo of 2005-06, and it's the kind of thing that made me come to like him.

Tom was living in Florida when he got indicted.  The indictment came down on a Thursday.  He surrendered himself to the local authorities, was arrested, booked, and cavity-searched on Friday, flown to Ohio for his arraignment on the following Monday during which he had to pledge both his home and his elderly mother's home in order to make bail. He was given the perp-walk to end all perp-walks, his kids were tracked down and interviewed at school, and his name and face led every newscast in the state.  When he was finally released late Monday evening he flew back home to Florida.

Our co-counsel up in Toledo was handling the nuts and bolts of the arraignment and bail, so I hadn't heard from Tom this entire time.  On Tuesday morning he calls me.  I answer the phone.

"Hey buddy!" he says cheerfully.

I jokingly ask him if anything is new.

"You bethca!  They gave me a first class upgrade on the flight back last night.  Free booze!  And man, there's a lot of legroom! You shoulda been there! Really nice. You and me fly anywhere, we gotta fly first class. It's the best!"

I laugh, thinking he's joking around, but Noe is genuinely jazzed about his upgrade.  Talks about it forever. Asks me to help him figure out the best way to get upgrades the next time he flies. This, by the way, from a man who was just indicted for stealing tens of millions of dollars. If he actually had any of the money they said he stole, he certainly wasn't using it on airfare.

Anyway, it was at that point I decided that Tom was either (a) in total denial as to the seriousness of his situation; (b) had plans to take a boat to Belize soon; and/or (c) was some kind of sociopath criminal mastermind like the Joker or something, completely dismissive of the trouble he was in.  It's been nearly four years since that conversation and I haven't been able to rule out any of those options (though if he still has plans to book it to Belize, it's gonna take a jailbreak at this point). All I know for sure is that he spent three nights wearing blaze orange in jail cells, and first class seats on a two hour flight home was all he wanted to talk about.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not defending any of Tom Noe's actions here, proven, alleged or otherwise. And none of this makes Tom Noe a good guy. The judicial system and public opinion has decided pretty clearly that he isn't. I'm just saying that little stupid things like that are the reason I liked defending the guy. And given how few of my clients in my eleven years of practice I can say that about, it has to count for something.


*Given that I haven't worked for my old law firm since 2008 and haven't talked to Tom Noe since well before that, it should probably go without saying that the opinions expressed in this post are that of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of my old law firm, Tom Noe or anyone else except me.  I'm sure the old law firm will give a bunch of no comments about the court's decision if they haven't already and would probably call me a whack job if asked about that. At this point I'm sure Tom Noe would talk to you if you asked him.

The Car Wreck

I don’t recall exactly how or when I met Shawn and Dave.  I just seem to remember them hanging out around backstage during play rehearsals and near the sidelines at football practices.  They weren’t in the plays and didn’t play football, mind you.  They were just there, and eventually I began spending more and more time with them.  They weren’t bad guys, really – I’d call them nothing worse than low-grade knuckleheads – but hanging out with those two brought me closer to real trouble than anything else I did growing up.

I had my first beer with them.  A Bud Ice on a cold March night when we were in the eighth grade.  Vile stuff, which I choked down while pretending I really liked the taste.  Many more followed in the next year.  Getting the beer was easy.  Shawn’s mom managed a convenience store and the three of us would stop in while she was working.  While Shawn would distract her with some invented problem, Dave and I would swipe a case from the cooler and sneak out the back.

There was an elementary school nearby that you could get up on the roof of pretty easily, and we’d drink up there while looking at the stars and listening to Metallica or Iron Maiden or something while never thinking all that much about the ethics of theft, underage drinking and trespassing on school property.  When I’d come home the next morning and my folks would ask me how my sleepover went I’d tell them that nothing really happened.  And I actually believed it.  We never really felt like we were raising any kind of hell.  We figured that all of the fourteen year-olds were out drinking stolen beer on rooftops somewhere.

The beerfests – maybe one or two a month – continued until April of my freshman year.  My family was moving to another town that month, so the parties were going to end, at least for me.  My sendoff was one final sleepover at Shawn’s house, which included one final stop by the convenience store.  Unlike previous affairs we had another kid with us, Jeff, who was basically the same brand of knucklehead as Shawn, Dave and me.  This time it was going to be a late night outing, so rather than going straight to the school after snagging our beer, we hid it in Shawn’s garage and hung out in the basement watching TV until we knew his dad was asleep.  It was just after midnight when we grabbed our stash and slipped out of the house and down the road to the school.

The four of us each had three beers, killing the 12 pack we had ripped off.  After a few minutes of staring at the spring stars, a beat up Chevy Chevette squealed into the parking lot and came to a stop.  Behind the wheel was a kid named Scott.  We knew him, but not well.  What we did know was that Scott had failed at least two grades and was the only person in our ninth grade class with a driver's license, which he obtained barely a week before.

Scott climbed up to see us, saw that we were out of beer, and suggested that we get some more.  We thought that was a great idea, but another trip to Shawn’s mother's store wasn't an option seeing as we were all supposed to be back home asleep.  Scott claimed he knew a place where he could get some, so the five of us piled into his Chevette and drove off into the night.

Though Scott hadn't had anything to drink that night, getting into the car with him wasn't the smartest thing we had ever done.  We all liked him well enough, but he wasn't a bright kid, and after a mile or two in his car, we realized he wasn't a good driver.  The trip to the store was fairly terrifying, but we somehow made it.  After a couple minutes inside, Scott came out with a case of Budweiser, and we were off again.

Scott’s driving was no better coming back than it was heading out.  Two miles from home he took a sharp curve too fast, the front wheels went off the road onto the right shoulder, he over-corrected left, and the car flipped over.

I was sitting in the back seat directly behind the driver.  As we began to tumble I reached out for the headrest in front of me and held on.  Everything began to move in slow motion and take place a step or two removed from immediate reality.  The sound of the roof hitting the pavement was nothing more than a distant and muffled thump to me.  When I noticed that my feet were above my head, it was much like you might notice when some clouds moved in on an otherwise pleasant afternoon.  “That’s strange,” I thought.  “This was not at all what I was expecting.  The car should be proceeding upright, and yet it’s not.  Hmm.”

Just as I was about to turn to my right and ask Shawn what he felt about this most curious turn of events, the car stooped flipping and came to rest upside down in the middle of the road.  Real time and my appreciation for the gravity of my circumstances returned as soon as the car stopped.  I instinctively reached for the door handle next to me, opened it, rolled out, realized that I was laying in broken glass and sprang to my feet.  My heart was racing, but a quick self-examination confirmed that I was not bleeding and that all of my  parts were where they were supposed to be.  I didn't even get a scratch.  Soon Shawn, Dave and Scott appeared, and with the exception of small bloody scratch to Dave’s cheek, none of them were hurt either.

Jeff wasn't as lucky.  Sitting in the passenger seat with the window open, he had been partially thrown out of the car as it flipped and came to rest half in and half out, seemingly pinned by the collapsed passenger door.  He was conscious, but the back of his head was bleeding badly and his hands were shredded due to the impact with the asphalt.

As we ran to his side, he seemed stunned and non-responsive.  Then, in an instant, he thrust himself out from under the door and leapt to his feet, shouting that he smelled gasoline, though none of the rest of us did.  He paced around for five or ten seconds before he noticed his hands and felt the blood running down the back of his head, at which point he crouched to his knees and started breathing in and out slowly and deeply.

As the Chevette lay on its back with its rear wheels still spinning, four shocked teenagers paced about, and twenty four cans of beer littered the road.  Within a minute or two a sheriff's deputy rolled onto the scene, lights flashing.  Shawn, his priorities not exactly in order, ran to the beer cans and began pitching them off the side of the road and into a ditch when he saw the deputy, apparently believing that being caught with some beer was our most serious concern at the moment.  Maybe the deputy’s priorities were screwed up too, because rather than rush into the scene to see if everyone was OK, he shined his spotlight on Shawn and yelled at him to quit tossing cans.  Once he saw bloody Jeff he left Shawn alone, but not before ordering him to go and pick up the cans he had already thrown down into the ditch.

An ambulance soon arrived.  They looked Jeff over and found that his injuries weren’t anywhere near as bad as they looked.  His hands were a mess, but the head injury, though bloody, was fairly superficial.  Rather than put him on a stretcher or anything, he climbed into the ambulance himself and sat down when they took him away.

A couple more deputies showed up.  Scott was ushered away from the rest of us to take a sobriety test, which he passed.  He was still taken away though, for paperwork, to have his parents called and to do whatever else they do to sixteen year-old drivers who flip cars at 2 A.M.

Shawn, Dave and I sat in the back of the first deputy’s cruiser as they dealt with Jeff and Scott.  Eventually the deputy came back and asked us to tell him what happened.  I did most of the talking, giving him as much of the truth as I felt he needed (i.e. I didn’t think he needed to know that we had been drinking up on the school roof before everything went down).  Then the deputy said something quite unexpected:

“You boys got somewhere to be?”

We nodded.

“Then y'all best git there,” he said.

He didn't need to tell us twice.  We ran off on foot, covering the two miles back to Shawn’s house in what seemed like a minute.  After sneaking back into the house undetected, we crawled into sleeping bags on his basement floor and eventually managed to get to sleep.

We woke up the next morning and had breakfast with Shawn’s parents, who somehow didn't notice Jeff's absence.  After ten minutes of wondering if we had truly gotten away with it, the phone rang and the jig was up.  It was my mom.  Jeff's mother had called her once she realized that there were other kids in the wreck besides her son.  To say that my mom was angry and hysterical would be something of an understatement.  I didn't help matters when I calmly asked if we could discuss all of this later, seeing as Shawn, Dave and I had plans to go bowling that morning.  There would be no bowling.

Everyone's parents were at Shawn’s house within an hour taking turns yelling at the three of us.  Dave more or less saved our butts when he reminded everyone that the sheriff's deputy just let us go like he did.  In an instant all of the grownups’ ire was off us for being dumbasses and onto the sheriff’s office for being outrageously negligent.  Sitting here more than twenty years later I can’t remember what, if anything, happened as a result of all of that.  I mean, I have to think that someone’s parents complained, but no one ever asked me to go on the record about anything.  Maybe our parents just let it drop to save us some sort of charge related to the beer all over the road.  I have no idea.  At any rate, by the time our parents' attention was turned back to us, their anger had subsided and was replaced by relief that we weren't hurt.

My mom and dad took me home, constantly watching me as we drove, wondering why I wasn't nervous to be in a car so soon after being in an accident like that.  Not quite sure how to react when I told them I was fine, they eventually settled on trying to convince me how terrified and damaged I should truly be.  Later that day they took me to the hospital to visit Jeff, who had been kept for observation.  If they intended this to be a sobering experience, it backfired massively when Jeff, seeing me come in the door, smiled broadly, gave me a bandage-covered high five, and said “Dude!  How cool was it that we walked away from that shit?!”

By that evening I was back to normal activities:  watching an Atlanta Braves game while shooting stuff on my Commodore 64.  I think such normalcy must have pissed my parents off something fierce, because it was only then that they came into my room to tell me that I was grounded.  Still, it was a fairly empty gesture given that six days later we would be moving to a different town where I knew no one and would have nothing to do anyway.  In light of this, I think my response to the grounding was “um, OK, whatever.  Is that it?”  I really wanted to get back to the ballgame.  I’m surprised my parents didn’t give up with the constructive discipline and just smack the living shit out of me.

It would be several years until I would truly appreciate how idiotic we had been and how lucky we were to still be alive.  Hell, if anything the wreck made things worse for a while in that it gave me a vague sense of indestructibility that lasted until well after I got my own driver’s license a year later.  I sometimes marvel that I got out of my teens alive.

They were great guys and all, but if I hadn’t moved away from Shawn and Dave, I might not have.

My Christmas List

Since Anna started reading herself she doesn't usually want us reading books to her before bed anymore. Instead we talk or, more recently, write things with her or watch her write in her little spiral notebook. Sometimes she draws pictures. Sometimes we play hangman. Sometimes she writes stories or lists.

This week it's been Christmas lists. She wrote one for herself (Barbies, Littlest Pet Shop toys, a fuzzy sweater). She wrote one for her stuffed cow (hay, hay, fuzzy sweater). She wrote one for Carlo (seventeen Bakugans; fuzzy sweater). Not sure where she got the idea that everyone wants a fuzzy sweater, but I probably need to go to the store tomorrow and get her one.

Tonight she decided to write one for me, so as I sat next to her in her bed, she asked me what I wanted.  I decided to be Super Dad and say "I just want to be with my family."

Anna protested.  "No, daddy, we have to write something for Santa to bring you." I didn't want to offer up anything real because then she'd just bug Carleen to go out to the store and buy it for me.  So I said "I can't think of anything I want.  How about you just write what you think I want."

So she did. And the first four items she put on it were "beer," "wine," "a sandwich," and "fuzzy sweater."  Then she drew a picture of a Christmas tree with all four of those things underneath it and the words "for Daddy" above it.

If you're looking for me this Christmas, I'll probably be talking to Children's Services.

Fruit Helper

Today was Carlo's preschool Christmas party. So instead of picking him up at 3:15, I went at 2:45 to help out and join in the festivities.

When I got there all the kids were at their tables waiting for snacks. Two or three moms were there to help out. I was the only dad. The teacher put us all to work handing out the plates, cups, napkins and food. My job was to hand out the apple and pineapple slices. Carlo said I was the "fruit helper." Soon the other kids called me fruit helper too. A couple of them called me "Mr. Carlo's daddy."

As the kids ate, the moms and I stood to the side and talked. One of them asked me "So, what do you, um . . ." and left it hanging, obviously intending to ask me what I did for a living. In half an instant, her brain seemed to process the fact that she was talking to a jean-sneakers-and-hoodie-wearing, one-or-two-day unshaven father who was free to hand out fruit in the middle of a Thursday afternoon, and realized that I was quite probably unemployed.

I get the sense that your average suburban mom doesn't encounter too many dads at these sorts of things.

I briefly toyed with the notion of allowing her to feel awkward for a while, but I let her off the hook and told her what I do now.  "Oh, like the guy from 'Everybody Loves Raymond!'" she said.  That's the second time I have heard that this week. Do people not know what sports writers do outside of the context of that show?

The party soon broke up and I took Carlo home. In the car he told me that I was a really good fruit helper.

"Thanks Buddy."

"I don't have school again for two weeks. That's fourteen days."

"I know Buddy."

"It'll be 2010 when I go back to school."

"Yep, Buddy."

"That's next year so it's a long time."

On the whole I'd rather be in Darfur

I spent most of last week in Indianapolis covering the Winter Meetings.  All of the baseball stuff can be found over at NBC.  The best thing that happened there, however, had nothing to do with the game.

Tuesday night:  Though it's a under a mile from the meetings to my hotel, I take a cab back because it's snowing and blowing and the temperature is plummeting. I love talking to cab drivers for some reason, so I immediately launch into conversation with my driver, who is quite obviously a newcomer to our shores.

We talk about the weather. He says it's very hard for him to get used to, what with him being from Africa and all.  Yeah, that would be difficult I agree.  Africa, eh? Whereabouts? Darfur, he says. Wow, I'm impressed. I've never met anyone from Darfur before. Must be some culture (and weather) shock to be in Indianapolis, eh? Yeah, he says, but Indianapolis is way better than where he spent the first few months after he got to the U.S.

Me: Where was that?

Him: Lima, Ohio.

Me: What did you think of Lima?

Him: After two weeks there I wanted to go back to Darfur, and people were trying to kill me there, brother. 

Radio Days

I got my job at WCIR through my dad. He had met the program director, who let slip that he was in desperate need of a gopher/office slave. Dad told him I’d be interested and soon enough I began sorting cds, copying reel-to-reel tapes, handing out contest prizes, setting up the transmitter for remote broadcasts and doing all sorts of other odd jobs for the radio station to the tune of $3.35 an hour, which was the minimum wage in 1989. I was 16, though, and it seemed like a pretty good deal.

I didn't really have a desire to get on the air, but eventually did as the result of some dumb luck. There was a week-long teacher's strike in March 1990. With no school, I’d drive up to the station every day to see if there was anything they needed me to do. One morning I arrived to find the P.D. in a heated argument with the overnight guy, whose shift had ended an hour or two before. The overnight guy had somehow locked himself out of the station at 4AM, leaving nearly two hours of dead air until the morning guy arrived, making no effort to bust back in or call anyone about his dilemma. He just sat on the hood of his car and smoked. The P.D. hadn't planned on firing Mr. Overnight, but when people argue for a long enough time someone is going to eventually say something stupid. Mr. Overnight did, and he was gone.

A few minutes later the P.D. came by where I was copying some tapes and asked me if I wanted to go on the air. After an hour or two of the most basic training, he told me to go home and come back that night, as I would be working the 11pm-6am shift until the teacher's strike was over. If things worked out, the weekend overnight guy would move to full time, and I would take over the weekend shifts. Things worked out, and I had the job for the next couple of years.

Like almost everyone else at the station, I was given an awful air name. Following 1950s-era conventional wisdom which held that people won't want to listen to a DJ with an "ethnic" name, the P.D. changed me from Craig Calcaterra to Craig Miller. Within the first couple of weeks the jock who worked before me took to calling me "Madman Miller" as I was coming on the air. While it was stupid I didn't really object, and Craig “The Madman” Miller stuck.

Though it was by far the biggest, most popular station in town, WCIR had antiquated equipment, making the technical part of the job pretty easy. The 1960s-era control board consisted of several round mixing "pots" as opposed to the more modern sliders and equalizers, and the two cd players were haphazardly patched into the board. A rarely-used turntable sat off to the left. Commercials were all played on cartridges that resembled old eight track tapes which would give off a deep and satisfying clunk when you pressed the play button. Rather than sit as if at a desk, the DJ would stand in front of the board while on the air with the microphone hanging at mouth level, much like it would in a recording studio. There was a comfy leather chair in which to sit for the three to five minutes one had to wait before the next station identification, weather report, or segue between songs.

And, oh, were those songs terrible. The pop charts of the late 80s and early 90s were dominated by hair metal bands singing power ballads and some of the most soulless R&B ever recorded. There were some bright spots – REM had a couple of mainstream hits by that point, and you could always count on war horses like Tom Petty and Madonna to have a hit or two – but my play lists were dominated by the likes of Milli Vanilli, M.C. Hammer, Wilson Phillips, Poison, and Michael Bolton. Since the P.D. slept during my graveyard shift I could get away with a bit more freelancing than the other jocks, but I usually found it easier to simply play what was programmed, mostly because people would call in to complain if I didn't play the hits on a constant rotation. Today there is no small amount of grumbling about the bland repetition of top 40 radio, but Clear Channel and the other corporate radio behemoths are giving the people what they want. Or at the very least, are giving the people what they've trained them to want and with what they now feel they cannot do without.

Music aside, I loved the job. No dress code. No paperwork. No manual labor. Working from 11pm until 6am gave me almost total solitude, and as long as I was able to do the station ID at the top of every hour, play the commercials when programmed, and segue from song to song without dead air, I could do almost anything I wanted. Some nights I spent reading a book. Others I spent on the phone, talking to girlfriends, buddies, or whoever was bored enough to call the DJ to chat. When I got really bored I would make up contests. Within a month or two of beginning the job, I met the guy who worked the same shift at the big country station in town, WJLS. He and I would talk on the phone all night, comparing the weirdos who would call in and daring each other to do silly things on the air.

Perhaps the oddest thing about the job was that there were groupies. I thought the P.D. was joking when he told me to expect it, but I’ll be damned if I didn't have women calling me at all hours of the night. I was flattered at first, but it quickly became obvious that only the truly deranged among us obsess about someone just because they’re on the air at a piddling little radio station in a podunk little mountain town. Maybe “deranged” is too strong a word. For the most part they were simply lonely people who felt comforted by a familiar voice coming out of their radio each night. In this way the DJ isn’t all that different than a bartender. You listen to people talk. You act interested but you never pry. When the person asks for a drink – or in my case a song – you give it to them.

I never had a stalker, and despite some random threats over the phone, I never came face to face with an angry fan. The weirdest thing that would ever happen would be when women would call in and ask me how old I was. Seeing no reason to lie about it, I would tell them that I was sixteen or seventeen or whatever. Most giggled about it. A visible minority seemed aroused by the idea, which creeped me out quite a bit. One took to calling me "baby," and referred to herself as "mama." I quickly memorized her phone number and avoided her whenever it popped up on the ID. For the most part, however, it was harmless, and given the format of the station, the vast majority of callers were teenagers wanting to here the latest tripe from the New Kids on the Block or Bell Biv Devoe. I got a lot of nice cards and letters from twelve year-old girls.

Within a month or two of starting, the guy working the weekday overnight shift quit, and it would be over a year until the P.D. could find a stable replacement. Despite school still being in session, I pulled several seven-night weeks during the frequent intervals between replacements. I would work until 6am, leave the station, grab breakfast, and then go on to school. I'd go home after school, crash for a couple of hours, eat dinner with my parents, and then crash for a few more until it was time to work again. I'm sure all of this was in violation of all kinds of labor laws, but as long as my grades stayed solid Mom and Dad didn't much care.

After some initial bumps I quickly developed a fairly smooth and confident on-air persona. Maybe too confident. On one occasion I got in trouble for allegedly interfering with police business. On most Saturday nights, the first hour of my shift was a remote broadcast from the lobby of the movie theater, promoting the theater's Midnight Movie series. Following my last break at 11:45, I would get in the car and race to the station, hopefully in time to make my first commercial break after midnight. If I didn't, the guy who played the prerecorded show from 8pm until midnight and manned the boards for my remote would have to do the break. I hated that, so I usually drove like a maniac to make it.

One night, doing about 60 m.p.h. in a 35 zone, I was pulled over by a policeman running a speed trap. Obviously dead to rights, I figured that I would quickly cop to being a lead foot, accept my ticket, and do my best to get to the station as soon as I could. The cop, thinking he had pulled over a partying teenager on a Saturday night, took forever to walk up to my window. When he got there I apologized for my speed, explained that I was late for work, and basically did everything I could think of to make the whole transaction go smoothly. Rather than ticket me, he asked a hundred questions about where I was going and why. He thought I was lying about working at the radio station and gave me a hard time about that. Then he made me get out of the car while he gave the backseat a once-over, looking for drugs or beer or whatever he assumed I was on. Eventually he went back to his car. After an extended lecture about my speed (which I deserved) and a bunch of criticisms about the radio station (which I didn't) he gave me my ticket and let me go. The stop probably took three times as long as a usual traffic stop and by the time I finally got to the station I was pissed and the guy working the board was having a meltdown.

During my first commercial break I took the opportunity to alert anyone who may be out driving where the speed trap was and to watch out because it was manned by a cop who liked to hassle people. About twenty minutes later someone at the police station called me. It wasn't the cop who had pulled me over, but he was angry all the same. Immediately sensing that I may be in trouble, but not knowing for what, I hit "record" on the reel to reel machine attached to the phone. After a minute it seemed clear to me that the call was less than official. Yes, it was a cop (caller ID confirmed that), but it wasn't anyone in a position of authority. Maybe Officer Speed Trap's buddy. He complained that by saying what I said I not only was disrespecting a police officer, but I was "interfering in official law enforcement business." Though I knew enough about the First Amendment to be pretty confident that I hadn't done anything wrong, I kept my responses to simple "yes sirs" and "no sirs" out of an abundance of caution. After a couple of minutes the cop hung up.

I got my wits about me and listened to the tape. I hadn't realized it during the call, but it turns out that the conversation was pretty damn funny. As my "yes sirs" and "no sirs" got quieter and less respectful, the cop got angrier and angrier. Eventually he was ranting incoherently, calling me "son" and starting every sentence with "listen here!" and stuff like that. I decided it was too good not to use, so at the next break I took to the mic in a solemn tone, referenced my earlier comments about the speed trap and apologized for being disrespectful to the professionals of the Beckley Police Department. Then I played the tape over the theme to the Dukes of Hazard. A couple of days later someone at the police department called my boss to voice his "profound disappointment" that a station as active in the community as WCIR would exhibit such an immature disrespect for law enforcement. I had to write another letter of apology. If I wasn't working an impossible-to-fill shift for minimum wage, I suppose I could have been fired.

I manned the DJ booth from March 1990 until I left for college in September 1991. Just before leaving, the P.D. sat me down and told me that, my mouth aside, he thought I had what it took to make a career out of it, and that he'd be willing to offer me a full time job on the spot with actual adult pay and benefits and everything. Though I agreed to think about it for a couple of days I knew I would never seriously consider the offer. I didn’t yet know what I wanted to do for a living, but I knew I wanted something more stable than radio. For all of the fun and flair of the job, the DJ was becoming increasingly superfluous to the modern radio business. My sense was that any stations that weren't already automated or run by giant corporations soon would be, and even if you could make a life out of radio, it would be a pretty itinerant one. I thanked the P.D. for the offer, politely declined, and went off to college. With the exception of a couple of months back at the station the summer after my freshman year, my radio days were over.

Though I still have a lot of life left at this point, I’m pretty sure that I'll never have a better job. And that’s true even if it would take me a decade or so of full time overnights at the wages I made back them to make what I now make in a single year.