Night Owl Cards

I've been doing fairly well adapting to life without baseball games to watch. At the beginning of this pandemic, I was like every fan, trying to get my fix with old games on youtube and the MLB Network. Then those reruns lost their thrill and I settled in for a long, boring summer. But it hasn't been that bad. I haven't moaned about missing baseball much at all. The one time I did miss it, noticeably so, was last Sunday, Father's Day. To me, Father's Day IS watching baseball games on TV. That's about all there is to that day. Pop open a beer and watch the game. Then watch another and another. Beer and baseball viewing go together exceeding well, as you know. And, damn, I was missing that combination dearly one week ago. Beer and baseball combine so well that I once compiled my own All-Beer Team . And here's another illustration of how well beer and baseball go together: There are some baseball players for which you remember them because of the...

I finally decided that maybe I shouldn't be going into the office all the time with everyone freaking out about being around other human beings. I'm the sports editor for a newspaper so people need to see me in person quite often. Editors, photographers, staff writers, and all those behind-the-scenes people that folks who aren't in the business never think about. (Do you wonder why the sports section is sometimes 3 pages and sometimes 6 pages? Well, don't come to me. That's not my call. Never has been. It's some other person's job to decide space in a newspaper and weirdly over the last 30 years that person never knows anything about sports). But there isn't much sports going on right now so the demands on my physical appearance are low. I was showing up out of habit as I put out the sports section from my office computer as normal but it was gnawing at me, not just because of the virus, but merely wondering: "If I had to, could I do all this...

I do not drink as much beer as I once did. I would never call myself a beer connoisseur -- talk of making your own beer, the breweries you've discovered, or other esoteric ruminations about hops and barley bore me completely -- but I enjoy a good brew. Today, though, I can mostly confine beer-imbibing to one of two categories. 1) It's summertime and I'm off. 2) I'm exhausted and the world has decided "night owl is the enemy." Today it's in the high 70s, rather humid, and I've got a busy workload tonight. None of this really falls into category 1) or 2), but for some reason -- perhaps the nine zillion beer commercials that I've watched during all of my baseball viewing has finally gotten to me -- I can't stop thinking about a beverage. In short, I need a beer. Here's the problem. There's no beer in the house. And with the budget cutbacks continuing for another week, I can't be buying any without there being ... um ... r...