I am a “baseball lifer.” And there is no known cure for that! In high school I played with several guys who went on to have successful pro careers, including Jim Palmer and Phil Ortega. I played with Reggie Jackson in college.  I’ve been playing the game for 60 years. I was a pitcher through college and semipro, but now get my thrills from hitting and trying to run down flyballs in the outfield. I currently play in the outfield for an all-star baseball team from the Washington D.C. area. We compete in tournaments (in our age-group!) all over the country. I’m also playing weekly with a local team that has been playing inspired baseball since the summer of 2014!

Once I realized I was’t going to get any pro offers out of college, I joined the Peace Corps and introduced the game to the country of Botswana (in Southern Africa). Botswana really took to it and after winning the all-Africa championship in 1988, they participated in the Olympics in the United States that year (it was actually men’s softball, on an “experimental basis”).

From 1968 through 1998 I played softball, mostly because for most of those years I was living and working overseas, where there was no baseball. I was a U.S. Diplomat for 38 years. From 1989-1992, for example, I lived in Mali. I was able to play about 150 games a year there, including 7 annual international tournaments in well-known cities like Ouagadougou, Bamako, Ndjamena and Dakar:)

With this blog my aim is to write articles on the Washington Nationals baseball team that the average fan is not likely to notice as well as share some entertaining stories from the world of baseball.