Rally killer.” His confidence carried over to the field, just as it had since he began playing as a kid—he batted .265, and he led all rookies with 23 home runs, 87 runs, and 86...

People have been fighting and dying over religion for thousands of years. I could understand that fear. It creeps up on you a bit more when you’re alone in a foreign land. You certainly worry...

A son for a flag is a lot of sacrifice.

If there are any curses left in baseball, they are all on the north side of Chicago.

Pete Rose” dive into cardboard boxes used for bases … whether they needed to slide or not.

I thought, Dad.Could I go to Vietnam for you?Dad, I could do it. I could do it for you. I could go to the places you fought. I could find the bits and pieces of...

Honestly, I had no idea how to respond. My senior year of college I’d taken a seminar titled Public Education: Situations and Strategies. I thought about emailing my professor, maybe suggest some new topics and...

It’s much easier to remember the World Series heroics of Tony Pérez, Pete Rose, and Joe Morgan than it is to recall who set the table for Rose during Game 7 of the 1975 World...

For the first time in a decade I felt a voice rising from deep inside my soul. It cried out ‘what will you be today?’ and I heard ‘relentless’ booming from the rafters inside an...

Far to our left I could see a commercial airliner on final approach to Soekarno-Hatta. Far to our right I could see the outline of tall city buildings. The imagery was hard to ignore. In...

I asked my dad once if his high school teachers began treating kids differently during Vietnam, when they knew some of their students would be drafted and sent to war. I was curious because for...

I’m glad there are organizations like Dale Murphy’s I Won’t Cheat Foundation. I’m glad there are athletes with standards and morals who kids can look up to and learn from. I’m glad that for every...

I’d see the arrow. I’d think about attitude and perception. Maybe the green arrow on the ceiling is to Muslims as the KJV in the Motel 6 nightstand is to Christians.

All my life my dad felt this need to protect his kids from a war he fought, a war I believed could never reach out and touch us, could never hurt us—and yet he fed...

Ortiz is now synonymous with walk-off homers. After all, he hit a total of nine game-ending blasts from 2002-07. And that was just in the regular season. It was his blasts in the 2004 postseason...

“acceptable” as my heroes if you will, because they didn’t want me being influenced by athletes who lacked morals. Cal Ripken and Dale Murphy were at the top of my mom’s list of players she...

I had assumed ‘a man’s character is his fate’ meant if my students worked hard they would get good grades, and if they were lazy they would fail—but any idiot could have seen that interpretation....

The only thing I knew for sure is I hadn’t slept in ten years. Not really. I’d been fighting my own monster since nine months after 9/11. I had regrets. I had pain that I...

The men and women who made up DoDDS Korea during the time I was there were an eclectic group to say the least, but as a group we were among the most talented, diverse, intelligent,...

Sparky Anderson wasn’t just my favorite manager … he was my mom’s favorite manager.

Cope? Adapt? Uh, no. These are military kids. They roll with it. I once asked a new student, ‘See any familiar faces?’ She pointed out various kids and replied, ‘Seattle, Tampa, Okinawa, New Jersey.’ For...

I’m clinging to one last thought: pain is the harbinger of hope. You have to be alive to feel pain. If you are alive, then you have purpose. If you have purpose, then you have...

Always Sami. I was tethered to her somehow. To that scared little girl I’d found on the staircase nearly a year earlier; to the past, when teaching was simpler and I could care about everyday...

America’s Team,” and by the 1990s the Braves were the most dominant team in baseball.

The reality for teachers is we don’t know if we’ve been successful or not. It takes years to see how a kid turns out, and it’s impossible to know what role we’ve played, for better...

There are more good people than bad people, and overall there’s more that’s good in the world than there is that’s bad. We just need to hear about it, we just need to see it.

Baseball really is a glorified game of throw and catch. And if you don’t have guys who throw it really well, you can’t compete for long.

Sometimes are feats aren’t so fabulous, they’re just dubious—but either way, they’re fun to talk about.

Some people have a heart to do evil and they don’t care if you’re Muslim or Christian.

Je parle français.” Indira gave me a weird look. Or a look that said I was weird. Whichever. The point is, I don’t really speak French, but it’s a useful phrase for confusing people you...

It’s hard to describe being an expatriate of sorts to people who’ve never lived overseas, but when you’re an American living in a geographically separated region within a country like Korea, you form bonds with...

He [Ted Williams] was only a 23-year-old kid when he batted .406 in 1941, but then the season ended and our country came under attack at Pearl Harbor—and by 1943 he was a Marine fighter...

Nine equals eight … just ask any math teacher. Well, make that a Tampa-St. Pete area math teacher, one who also likes baseball, and is a diehard Rays fan, and who knows that Joe Maddon...

Farid asked, ‘Do American teachers care about every student?’I thought about a humanities teacher I’d worked with in Korea and more recently a science teacher I’d worked with in Germany. I said, ‘I think most...

I spent half my childhood trying to be like my dad. True for most boys, I think. It turns with adolescence. The last thing I wanted was to be like my dad. It took becoming...

The Delta agent saw my itinerary and said, ‘You’re flying to Jakarta via Atlanta, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur? You must have really pissed off your travel agent.

I’m in my classroom and I’m looking at this girl, but all I can see is my dad on the ground, in front of The Wall, telling the truth, finally—his knees drawn and his chest...

It’s Curt Schilling and his bloody sock staring down the Yankees in the Bronx. It’s Derek Lowe taking the mound the very next night to complete the most improbable comeback in baseball history—and then seven...

Maybe faith really is the answer.

We all lose people. We all have to live in the aftermath. It’s how we move forward that counts, but sometimes we are tethered to something in our past that won’t let us move forward.

Ahead in the distance we could see the main gate, but there was a sea of cars, none moving, people standing, milling around, waiting nervously, perhaps fearfully, as heavily armed MPs and military working dogs...

…the Big Red Machine was exactly that—a freaking machine.

It was only a couple of chickens. Real chickens. The kind that walk around clucking and pecking. Which is what they were doing. Only no one else seemed to care, or even notice. This is...

Teaching isn’t rocket science. It’s about being engaged, listening, paying attention. Despite conventional wisdom, you don’t need to talk a lot to teach well. You do need to care, though. Not so much about what...

Tampa Bay, like any other expansion team, toiled and persevered in its infancy—but today, minus the Devil, the Rays have become one of the most exciting teams in baseball.

I don’t like it when Christianity and western cultures are used as propaganda to sway impoverished Muslims into becoming self-detonating radicals.

In large part, we are teachers precisely because we remember what it was like to be a student. Someone inspired us. Someone influenced us. Or someone hurt us. And we’ve channeled that joy (or pain)...

As long as you know ‘to let’ means to rent and not a place to pee, you’re all set to travel in the UK. The lifts and the boots and everything else don’t really matter.

It felt like we were reliving the first day of the school year, when students and teachers do the get-to-know-you dance—teachers tell students something about who they are, students pretend to care, and then vice-versa.

By any reasonable standard (i.e. he didn’t cheat), Aaron is one of the greatest sluggers in baseball history—and there shouldn’t even be a debate about who is baseball’s true all-time home run champion (again, no...