Chet The Dog

Posts Tagged ‘baseball’

Not Beginnings

Sunday is usually for beginnings – where we take a look at the start of one of my novels – but today, with the World Series underway, how about baseball? This is the best month for baseball lovers! Football, basketball, hockey – they’d all be basically understandable right away to a newcomer seeing a game for the first time, but baseball: never! Baseball comes up quite a bit in my work – in the YA thriller Bullet Point, for example, the kids’ picture book Quacky Baseball, and of course The Fan was all about baseball. (Cal Ripken, Jr., paying me a very nice compliment on its accuracy, asked how far I’d gone in baseball. That was a funny conversation.) Baseball also comes up in the Chet and Bernie series, in Bark To The Future, for example. Here’s a little something from Thereby Hangs A Tail:

We drove toward the sun, through a few neighborhoods a lot like our own, then past a baseball field with a kids’ game going on. I didn’t understand baseball but it always looked like fun, and the ball itself I loved. Who’d have guessed what the insides were like? At that very moment a kid swung his bat and the ball went soaring into the sky. We weren’t going very fast. Would it be totally impossible to –

Baseball’s Back!

And baseball’s important in Bark To The Future, the next Chet and Bernie novel (8/9, available for preorder). Bernie pitched for Chisholm High back in the day (high school also being important in this story). For example:

“The girls must have loved you,” she said.

“Huh? What girls?”

“The Chisholm girls, of course. They had a reputation back in the day.”

“Oh? Like what?”

“A reputation, Bernie,” Weatherly said. She ran her bare foot under the hem of his jeans. “Capisce?”

“Um,” said Bernie. “I, uh … well, in retrospect, maybe …” His voice got strangely thick and he came to a halt.

“Plus what with you being the big flamethrower and all, dot dot dot,” Weatherly said. She seemed to be having lots of fun all of a sudden, for reasons I didn’t know but felt quite nearby, possibly even in my eventual grasp. And that didn’t happen often! All of a sudden I was having lots of fun, too! Imagine that! Just lounging on the patio and doing zip could be a tip top experience.

“Flamethrower?” said Bernie.

“Up there on the mound,” Weatherly went on. Then came a long pause, “mound” somehow staying around for a bit. “Dishing out the heat,” she added after a while. “What did you like better? A windup or pitching out of the stretch?”

“Stop,” Bernie said.

“Stop?” Weatherly’s eyes, deep and dark, opened wide. “Stop what? Stop with the inside baseball?”

Bernie laughed. Weatherly joined in. They laughed together, laughed and laughed. It turned into a kind of music. I came very close to prancing around before the laughter died out.

Baseball’s Back! Sort Of!

How are we feeling about all those empty seats?

Last Night

My dad, Ed Abrahams, 95, WW2 vet (USN) threw out the first pitch at last night’s Rays/Red Sox game in Port Charlotte. (I went down in the afternoon to warm him up.) Here he is showing some incredulous Rays his high school glove, a Luke Appling model bought in 1941. “You caught with that?”one said.