I was going to start the blog with something else, but decided to put this first. RIP Stanley Feldman. I played baseball in the Fall of 1996 with his son Aaron. Aaron was a nice guy (like most of the guys on that team), but I wouldn’t really say we were close. I wasn’t really close with anyone on that team. I was kind of an outsider to a group of guys who played legion ball together (for the Charleston Legion team) and high school ball together (some for Bishop England, some for Wando). Aaron played for BE, which meant I liked him a little more than I would have if he’d played for Wando. Hey… I’m just being honest. Anyway, we were on the team together that one fall and that was it. Had Mr. Feldman never spoken to me after that fall, I wouldn’t have thought anything of it. Like I said, Aaron and I got along fine, but I don’t remember us being real close. But every time I saw Mr. Feldman after that fall, he would say hello. That next spring during the high school season, my JI team played Aaron’s BE team. BE had a runner on base with zero outs. The batter (maybe it was Aaron… or maybe he was the runner on second… or maybe he wasn’t involved in this play… that’s one part I don’t remember) lays a sacrifice bunt down. I sprint to first to cover the bag… Theo (my favorite defensive first basemen of all time… and I mean ALL TIME) starts in, but then sees the catcher (Moose) is going to get it, so he sprints back to the bag and calls me off. So I do what I’d been taught to do and start back peddling down the right field line to back up the throw. This was really just a “going through the motions” type thing, because Moose had a gun for an arm (and very accurate too) and Theo could catch any/everything (I know, because he saved me from having about 40 throwing errors). Well, wouldn’t you know this is the one time Moose throws high and Theo can’t get it. As I’m still back peddling, I also have to jump to catch the ball to keep it from going to the fence. Because of this, they held the runner up at third… saving us a run (the funny thing is, I'd be willing to bet that if the runner had gone home, I wouldn't have been able to throw him out). We ended up winning the game (not because of this… but I’m sure it didn’t hurt). Mr. Feldman brought this play up every time I saw him after this. Mind you, he would come up to me to say hello and then he would bring it up. How nice is that? I played with some guys for four years and I couldn’t tell you what their parents look like… and I doubt they ever talked to me. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t blame them for this… because that’s how I am. I think that’s the reason Mr. Feldman sticks out so much in my mind. Because I found him to be so nice… and he didn’t HAVE to be nice to me. He didn’t have to be anything to me. I wasn’t a longtime friend of the family or someone who he saw all of the time. Dad knew his dad… but I didn’t find that out until this week, so it’s not like our families knew each other well. But he would still come up after a game or anywhere else out in public and say hey. That’s a classy guy in my book. Stanley Feldman died earlier this week. He had brain cancer, I believe. He was just 60 years old. I know life doesn’t work this way… but someone this good shouldn’t die that young.
Oh, the best part about the story I just told you? When I sent Dad a text Tuesday morning to tell him Mr. Feldman died. I mentioned that he would always bring up a play I made against BE. Dad knew the exact play that I was talking about. He said it was a play Sonny would have never made, because Sonny only thought about himself and never backed up his teammates… ok… I might be making that part up. But if you read between the lines of what Dad texted me, I think you could see that...
I’m off tomorrow, so I’ll go ahead and wish you a Happy July 4th (or as we at I’m just sayin… like to call it, “The last time the French were worth a damn”). Forgive me, but I saw something recently about President Obama wanting women to get paid maternity leave. I won’t get into my thoughts on that just yet (because I’m not really sure what I think about it yet), but I can tell you my first thought was “No”. Why? Because one of the first arguments for it was, “France does it”. I’m getting just a little sick and tired of hearing about all of the “great things” France does. I’m not saying there aren’t any good ideas that we could take from France (and Europe in general), but I don’t want to hear “France does it” as a reason. If these United States of America always followed France’s lead, we’d all be speaking German right now. Yep, none of these “France does it, so the USA should do it too” seem to remember that. I’m sure France has some good soldiers and it’s probably not right for someone like me who never served in the military to question the military of another country… but I can’t help it.
Good news… I think I’m getting somewhere with Jeremy on this podcast idea. Right now, he’s worried that nobody would listen to it… which is kind of funny, since I’m worried that people would listen to it. Right now, I’d say the main thing stopping us is Jeremy figuring out how to do everything and then making sure we have the equipment to do it. That and all of the other little details that we didn’t really hash out the one time we emailed each other about this. I’ll keep you updated on the yet to be named podcast (one name idea I’m just now telling Jeremy about is Two Drunk Guys… Our thing could be drinking while doing the podcast… that could be fun).
How about Tim Howard?! You take that guy off the team and that match on Tuesday would have been a real ugly loss. That guy was GREAT. The US team needs to add speed. I'm sure there's other stuff (I'm no soccer expert), but speed is the main thing I saw missing.
I actually had a bunch of other stuff I wanted to talk about, but Mr. Feldman passing bumped that stuff. I’ll get to it next week… because it’s thoughts on some recent issues that I really want to get to on here.
Picture Thursday
Today is a Daniel picture day...
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