Happy Birthday–April 12

Vic Willis (1876)
Addie Joss (1880)
Bill Bailey (1888)
Eric McNair (1909)
Bill Wight (1922)
Bob Zuk (1927)
Johnny Antonelli (1930)
Terry Cooney (1933)
Charlie Lau (1933)
Woodie Fryman (1940)
Vicente Romo (1943)
Terry Harmon (1944)
Mike Macfarlane (1964)
Paul LoDuca (1972)
Antonio Osuna (1973)
Pedro Hernandez (1989)

Bob Zuk was a long-time scout who was responsible for signing, among others, Reggie Jackson, Willie Stargell, and Gary Carter.

Terry Cooney was an American League umpire from 1975-1992.

Continue reading Happy Birthday–April 12

2017 Game 7: Twins at Tigers

You know what's cooler than zero wins?  Five wins. -- Kirby Puckett (unconfirmed).

Twins are 5-1 and everyone is relieved we may not have to go through the crap-fest that was the 2016 season.  Of course the rain-on-the-paraders like to point out "it's only 3.7 percent of the season, that's like being in the third quarter of the first NFL game."  Huh?  Who cares? enjoy the fact we have some fun baseball being played.  And stop talking about the NFL!

Hector Santiago and his cool 1.80 ERA takes on Matt Boyd and his not-so-cool 19.29 ERA.  The Tigers are probably a .500 team this year but they did take down the Beantowners 3 out of 4 games of the weekend. Twins haven't done well in Detroit lately, so by late Thursday afternoon we should have some more answers about what kind of team we will have this year (or not, 9 games is like 6.5 minutes left to play in the first... oh for Christ sake)

Happy Birthday–April 11

Pop Corkhill (1858)
Ossee Schrecongost (1875)
Matsutaro Shoriki (1885)
Sam Chapman (1916)
Barney McCosky (1917)
Jim Hearn (1921)
Bob Casey (1925)
Sid Monge (1951)
Bret Saberhagen (1964)
Turner Ward (1965)
Sean Bergman (1970)
Robin Jennings (1972)
Jason Varitek (1972)
Trot Nixon (1974)
Todd Dunwoody (1975)
Kelvim Escobar (1976)
Mark Teixeira (1980)
Andres Blanco (1984)

Matustaro Shoriki is known as the father of Japanese baseball.

Bob Casey was the Twins' public address announcer from 1961 until his death in March of 2005.

Jason Varitek was drafted by the Twins in the first round in 1993, but did not sign.

Continue reading Happy Birthday–April 11

Minnesota Books

The Minnesota Book Awards took place last weekend, and I'm pleased to say that in 2016 I read two of the winning books. Hey, so what if one of them is a 32-page picture book with rather sparse text? It's also a delightfully transgressive tale of annelid love.

Laurie Hertzel summed up the awards better than I could--her article in the Star Tribune begins:

The finalists for the Minnesota Book Awards this year included a National Book Award winning-novelist, a New York Times bestselling writer, and a Newbery Medal-winning writer of children’s books. But this year’s Minnesota Book Awards bypassed these venerable writers and bestowed honors on a mostly new crop of authors.

The rest of the article--including a full list of winners--is here.

While the event is largely a celebration of Minnesota's literary culture, the speech that will stay with me the longest came from poet Sun Yung Shin, who spoke about the importance of listening to the voices of those who have long been marginalized. If I find her speech posted online (and I really hope it will be posted), I'll share a link here. In addition to being a poet, Shin also edited the anthology A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota, which I read last summer and highly recommend.

Along with recognizing writers (and occasionally illustrators), there's also a special award for a Minnesota book artist. This year the award went to Steven McCarthy for his project Wee Go Library. The project involved "harvesting" books from Little Free Libraries and modifying them in various ways. (Not to worry--he left a replacement book for every book he took from a LFL.) You can read more and see some photos of the finished projects here.

So what have you been reading?