I was born in the Bronx in 1962. The first major event in my baseball awareness was the winning of the 1969 World Series by the Amazin’ New York Mets against the powerful Baltimore Orioles. This Bronx boy became an avid fan of the team from Queens, rather than the Bronx Bombers, because of those Miracle Mets. My first favorite ballplayer was Donn Clendenon, the World Series MVP of those 1969 Miracle Mets.
Over the years, as the Met fortunes waxed and waned, I became an avid reader of baseball history. What started out as a few children’s biographies of all-time great baseball players such as Ty Cobb and Henry Aaron eventually became a baseball library of over 2000 books, magazines, and other periodicals housed in my transplanted home of Western Massachusetts, where I also became an avid member of Red Sox Nation.
I started out my professional career as a corporate attorney, but quickly moved on to teaching Marketing, which I did for almost 20 years, the last 13 at UMASS Amherst. At UMASS, I taught a baseball course entitled:”Baseball: Myths and Legends” that had a term project involving the analysis of “Moneyball” or Jose Canseco’s tell-all book “Juiced.” Already, I was interested in the “game behind the game.”
In the early 1990’s I became a member of the Society for American Baseball Research( SABR). For SABR, I have done several research presentations, and published an article in a convention publication. In addition, I have edited several baseball books, and published two entries on Native American ballplayers Robert Lee “Indian Bob” Johnson and his brother, fellow outfielder Roy, in a Native American Sports encyclopedia.
In 2012, I have embarked upon a career presenting baseball to corporate functions, at museums, and to public school teachers. The future is limitless- as baseball touches all aspects of the American story.