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National Bobblehead Day Jan. 7

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 5, 2016| 2 Comments »

Get ready. National Bobblehead Day is just around the corner.

Bobbleheads? Karen Given at WBUR’s Only a Game can tell you more about the history of sports bobbleheads than you ever imagined.

She says that is 2015, the San Diego Padres were the only Major League Baseball team that didn’t offer fans a game where they handed out bobblehead figures of players. “For years, the Red Sox didn’t give away bobbleheads either.

“ ‘There was a long time actually when we felt like “maybe they’re not into bobbleheads,” ‘ says Red Sox Senior Vice President of Marketing Adam Grossman. ‘But even in Boston we know that the people love them and if they love them then we’ll provide them.’ …

“The Red Sox spend months getting the facial features and tattoos and the stance on their bobbleheads just right. …

“Bobbleheads even have, get this, their own Hall of Fame.

“ ‘We sort of thought of it this way–,’ says Phil Sklar, co-founder and CEO of the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, ‘if mustard deserves its own museum, bobbleheads definitely deserve their own shrine.’

“The museum doesn’t actually exist yet. Sklar and his partners are busy accumulating thousands of bobbleheads — many from private collections.”

For “the story of a business deal that would change the course of bobblehead history, [Given turns] to Todd Goldenberg of Alexander Global Promotions.  …

” ‘Malcolm Alexander, he’s our founder and former president. He’s retired now, kite skating around the world—’

“So, Alexander was trying to start a business selling promotions, and he got a meeting with the San Francisco Giants, who, you’ll remember, were trying to find a company to manufacture a promotional item that hadn’t really been made for 40 years.

“ ‘He just basically said, “What can I help you with?” and they said, “We need a bobblehead doll,” ‘ says Goldenberg. …

” ‘And Malcolm, being very cocky and very Australian said, “Yeah, sure, I’ll do it. How many do you need?” ‘ says Goldenberg. ‘And then he proceeded to leave the office and find out what a bobblehead doll was. Because even though he had just sold about a quarter of a million dollars worth of bobblehead dolls, he didn’t know what he had sold.’ ”

The rest of the story can be found at WBUR radio, here.

Photo: Karen Given/Only a Game
A Luis Tiant bobblehead doll.

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Zen Garden Under Zakim Bridge

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 6, 2015| 2 Comments »

Greg Cook has a lovely story at WBUR’s “The Artery” on Boston artist Nate Swain’s Zen garden.

Swain tells the reporter, ” ‘I worked driving a tour trolley in Charlestown, and I drove over that bridge every day to go to work, and looked down … I went down there not even knowing what I wanted to do.’

“At the edge of the Charles River, near the North Washington Street Bridge, by the dock in front of the Residence Inn by Marriott on the east end of the park, he’s been assembling ‘Low Tide City’ or ‘Barnacle City.’ It’s ‘a little city’ of bricks and stones that disappears under the river and appears when the tide goes out. ‘I realized it could be an art piece about sea level change,’ he says. ‘People could watch it flood and imagine Boston could do that if sea level rises.’

“And right under the Zakim Bridge, Swain realized he could rake the existing expanse of gravel he found there into patterns, much like a traditional Zen rock garden, to create ‘Zen Under the Zakim.’ He says, ‘If you really sit there and you listen to all the noise, some of the traffic, even though it’s really noisy, it does sound like ocean waves.’ …

” ‘I try to find places where I can do art without asking permission. In Boston, there’s so much bureaucracy. There’s no room for spontaneity. … With all the bureaucracy and the permission-asking, it sucks all the energy and all the inspiration out of the art piece itself.’ …

” ‘I have this theory,’ he adds, ‘if you put something up beautiful and colorful and fun, in good taste, uplifting, it will stay and everyone will love it and no one will bat an eye.’ ”

More here.

Photo: Greg Cook
Nate Swain’s “Zen Under the Zakim” in 2015.

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Peacetime Drones

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on October 18, 2015| 2 Comments »

Martin Del Vecchio narrates his beautiful drone shots of Gloucester, Mass.

As Greg Cook writes at WBUR’s show the Artery, drones have as many uses as human creativity can devise, some good, some not so good.

He focuses on the photography and art applications. “In April, a graffiti artist going by the name KATSU used a customized drone to (illegally) scrawl paint high up on a Manhattan billboard that had been thought inaccessible to taggers. A video posted to YouTube in March, shows a bicyclist riding high up along a cliff in (according to the post) Sedona, Arizona. People have brought back astonishing footage from flying drones into fireworks and active volcanoes.

“Video by video, drones are transforming how we see the world — and this new view is changing how we understand the world.

“ ‘It’s not a fad,’ says Randy Scott Slavin, founder of the New York City Drone Film Festival. ‘Flying cameras are here to stay for sure. Because the perspective they get is great.’ …

“[Slavin] fell for drones when he got a Phantom a few years back. ‘I would shoot everywhere I went. Every time I went on vacation, I would shoot,’ he says. ‘Before I knew it, I started showing it to some of my director friends and they were like, “Shoot for me.” ‘ ”

Helen Greiner, CEO of Massachusetts-based Drone maker CyPhy Works says, “You’re just seeing the world the way a bird sees.” More here.

Photo: Greg Cook/WBUR
As drones have become cheaper and easier to fly, many people, like Martin Del Vecchio of Gloucester, are exploring the creative possibilities.

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A Carrot Clarinet Is Just the Beginning

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 11, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Gotta love MIT. There is always something crazy going on over there. And when MIT and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) ideas come together, watch out.

At WBUR radio, Fred Thys explains about a new, multidiscipline design program.

Matt “Kressy has put MIT’s first-ever integrated design and management (IDM) students in a kind of boot camp. He wanted to immerse the engineers, designers and business school students in a project where they would have to work in concert. …

“The task: build instruments from found materials. And boy did the students find materials. Mechanical engineer Maria Tafur, from Bogota, made a clarinet from a carrot. Engineer Tammy Shen, from Taipei, has made an instrument that includes glass bottles. …

“Kressy was teaching a course at the Rhode Island School of Design when he got the idea for the new IDM master’s program. He was also teaching engineers and business students at MIT — but it was the design students from RISD that caught Kressy’s attention by asking a critical question:

‘How does this product enhance our lives?’ …

“Kressy says it took 13 years for his idea for a design program to get traction at MIT. When it did, he was able to pick 18 students with completely different criteria from what MIT typically uses.

“ ‘And that rubric had crazy metrics, such as the metric love,’ Kressy says. ‘And the love metric was basically: Does this candidate have a large capacity for love and compassion? …

“ ‘When I showed the rubric to my colleagues here, let’s just say it got mixed responses,’ he says, laughing.”

To get at the love-and-compassion metric, he asked applicants to submit a portfolio indicating their efforts to make the world a better place.

You can read here about the impressive portfolios, struggles to get to MIT from poor countries, and inventive ideas for the future.”

Photo: Jesse Costa/WBUR
MIT integrated design graduate students Maria Tafur and Masakazu Nagata play their homemade instruments along with Brave Sharab, 7, on Main Street in Cambridge.

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Tribal Skateboarding

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 24, 2015| 1 Comment »

Ken Shulman reports at WBUR’s Only a Game that skateboarding often means a lot to kids on reservations.

The story starts with an Apache artist, Doug Miles.

“Miles paints mainly on found objects: fuel cans, car hoods, panels from a trailer home. But there’s one outlier among the surfaces, a curious artifact that migrated from California to America’s inner cities to the suburbs and, finally, to the reservation: the skateboard. …

“Miles said. ‘My son needed a skateboard. I didn’t have enough money. So I painted him one. And then he rode it all around the rez. And I knew what was going to happen. I knew. So when he got home I said, “What did everybody say?” And he said, “Dad, Dad, everybody wants one.” ‘

“Today Miles’ skateboards hang in private collections and museums. Some of them sell for hundreds of dollars. But the former social worker is most proud of APACHE Skateboards — a skateboard team, shop and artist collaborative he founded on the San Carlos Reservation, about 90 miles east of Phoenix.

“Miles said that making skateboards helps his kids connect with their Apache heritage.

“We’ve been making things for centuries as native people,” he explained. …

“The San Carlos team has a thriving skate park — with colorful murals painted by Miles and his crew. The team also travels to compete against other tribes and against big city skaters. Miles said the travel is mind opening.

“ ‘The kids in the South Bronx and the other reservations and East LA, they’re just like our kids,’ he said. ‘These are all communities that are struggling. So when they meet our kids they’re really meeting themselves. And so I think it empowers kids to know that we’re struggling here, too, but we’re also making art and skateboarding and having a lot of fun in the process.’ ”

More here.

Photo: Ken Shulman/Only A Game
For some Native Americans living on Indian reservations in the American Southwest, skateboarding is more than just a recreational activity.

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Belt Sander Racing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on December 2, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Looking for an indoor sport this winter? Have you considered belt-sander racing? Bill Littlefield has been covering the unusual sport at WBUR’s  Only a Game since 2002, and as Karen Given reported recently, the sport could probably use some new blood — er, participants.

She begins by revisiting the 2002 broadcast.

” ‘Two by two, they come screaming down the 85-foot-long, waist-high wooden track, trailing rooster tails of sawdust and long, yellow extension cords that power them to the finish line.’

“That is how reporter Sean Cole began his treatise on the New England Belt Sander Racing Association,” continues Givens, “which first aired on Only A Game on April 13, 2002. But here’s the bit everyone remembers:

“NEBSRA co-founder Dave Kenyon: ‘It’s a real family event. It’s a family event with beer.’ …

“There is still beer, so there is still belt sander racing. Or is there? I went to Jamaica Plain in Boston to investigate. …

” ‘You are at the 2014 Fall Nationals Belt Sander Drag Race and Costume Ball,’ Glen Gurner tells me.

“Gurner is a woodworker and former champion of this sport. But for some reason he’s really enthusiastic about the idea that this might be the last time NEBSRA, an organization he helped found, holds a belt sander race. …

” ‘It takes a village.”

“ ‘And the village is tired?’ I ask.

“ ‘Yeah, the village is getting old.’ …

“For about 10 minutes, Kenyon fusses over the position of the crowd and a 60-pound, lithium-ion-powered sander outfitted with a motorcycle engine. It has a theoretical maximum speed of 85 miles per hour, and its name is Bruce….

“I stay long enough to watch Bruce surge to life and almost immediately slam into the spring-loaded preventer at the end of the track. It’s spectacular, but no one dies. So the crowd goes back to reminiscing about old times.

“There are other belt sander races around the country. Some even have corporate sponsors and professional crews. But NEBSRA likes to believe theirs is the first — and the best. Kenyon is proud of how far this event has come in the past quarter-century.

“ ‘It’s so much more now. It’s homecoming. This is real homecoming. People have come up to me and said, “Thank you, thank you for doing this.” That’s nice,’ Kenyon said. … ‘There’s not enough rituals in our life anymore — not enough tradition. This is what passes for tradition.’ ”

Tradition! I can almost hear Tevye singing, “Tradition!”

Photo: Jessica Coughlin/Only A Game
Two competitors get ready to race at the 2014 Fall Nationals Belt Sander Race and Costume Ball.

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Third Giant Mural in Dewey Square

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 24, 2014| 2 Comments »

I blogged about the two previous murals in Dewey Square, here, and now there is a third one. The first two were by artists who had shows at the nearby Institute for Contemporary Arts (the ICA). The new one is by an artist associated with the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA).

According to Geoff Edgers at the Boston Globe, Jill Medvedow, ICA director, was not pleased that the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy chose a different museum. “Really?” she said. “It’s walking distance to the ICA.”

WBUR radio’s “The Artery” covers more of the story: “Shinique Smith, the creator of the latest work, recalls seeing pictures on the Internet of that earlier mural by the Brazilian twins Os Gemeos. Standing in the grass below her piece, she told me she thought the wall was amazing, ‘and I wanted to do something like them.’ ” More here.

In case you’re wondering, Smith didn’t stand there painting it all herself like the Os Gemeos twins who did the first mural. Instead she gave a kind of map to skilled painters from a company that does this sort of thing, translating a smaller work into a giant one.

I took four photographs of the progress.

mural-1

mural-2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

mural-3

mural-4

 

 

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Cartoonist’s Legacy for Aged Hockey Players

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 8, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Photo: Mark Andrew Boyer
Norm Burns, member of the U.S. CanAm Oldtimers 70-B team.

Trust Bill Littlefield at WBUR’s “Only a Game” to come up with the quirky sports stories.

In July, reporter Dan Brekke checked out the unusual legacy of a cartoonist who loved ice hockey and didn’t see why anyone should quit playing just because they got old.

Brekke writes, “Less than a year ago, 69-year-old Gary Powdrill was having a quintuple bypass open-heart surgery. But right now, he’s focused on a tight game between his hockey squad, the Central Massachusetts Rusty Blades, and the hometown Woodstock Flyers. And things aren’t going so well.

“The Rusty Blades are one of 68 teams playing in ‘Snoopy’s Senior World Hockey Tournament,’ an event created by ‘Peanuts’ cartoonist Charles Schulz – ‘Sparky’ to his family and hockey buddies – at the beautifully eccentric arena he and his first wife built.

“The tournament is for players from age 40 and up, with divisions set aside for 50, 60 and 70-year-olds.

“Steve Lang, one of the thousand or so players who has suited up this year, is skating for the Woodstock Flyers – the name refers to Charles Schulz’s little yellow bird character. The Flyers and Rusty Blades are fighting for third place in a division for players 60 and up. But unfortunately, according to Lang, the Flyers ‘don’t fly like the bird.’ …

“ ‘We’ve got ages from 76 down to 62,’ Lang said. ‘I’m 75. You know, we think like rabbits, skate like turtles.’ ”

New Yorker Bob Santini, 82, says, ” ‘I try to do the best I can, but the most important thing about a tournament like this is the camaraderie.’ …

“Jean Schulz, Sparky’s widow, says that’s just the way her husband wanted it.” More here.

Photo: Dan Brekke
Jean Schulz, widow of cartoonist Charles “Sparky” Schulz

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An Artist’s Tribute to Trayvon

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on June 25, 2014| 2 Comments »

Judith Ross, who also has a WordPress blog, saw a story she knew I would like. It’s about a Mass College of Art professor who got an idea for a quiet little memorial to Trayvon Martin.

Greg Cook writes at WBUR radio’s The Artery, “For about four years, Matthew Hincman had been eyeing the old stump of a lamppost at the corner of Eliot and Centre streets in Jamaica Plain’s Monument Square. It stood there, with two screws sticking pointing up, as if calling for something to go on top. …

“And he got to thinking about the granite monument tower on the other side of the square to a couple dozen West Roxbury men who died in the Civil War. …

“ ‘Who do we memorialize?’ he began to ask himself. ‘Why do we memorialize them in the public space?’

“And so it happened that a couple Wednesdays ago, right in the middle of the day, the Boston sculptor arrived with an assistant and proceeded, without permission from any official authorities, to attach a small, secret, cylindrical metal thing atop that lamppost.

“On its flat top is a low relief depicting a hoodie sweatshirt cast to the ground. … For Hincman, it’s a street art monument to Trayvon Martin.”

Read about other art projects by Hincman at The Artery, here. I like his stealth approach to many of them.

Photo: Michael Hincman
A street art monument to Trayvon Martin

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Sewing a Championship Banner

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on May 13, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Over at Bill Littlefield’s Only a Game on WBUR radio, Karen Given recently provided the background on athletic banners made in New England. The radio show is entertaining for all sorts of listeners as it covers anything remotely related to sports.

“The sewing room at New England Flag and Banner is humming with activity,” says Given. “It’s been that way for a while now — the company’s been around since 1892. The current owner, Ned Flynn, has only been in charge since 2006. …

“Among the photos on Flynn’s wall is one of Fenway Park, adorned with red, white, and blue bunting to celebrate the return of baseball after World War II.”

After a mini tour, Given describes the banner-making process: “Staples temporarily hold together full sheets of brightly colored fabric — usually nylon. The paper is used as a stencil to mark the pattern, but the design isn’t cut out. At least not yet.

“Skilled sewers, some of whom have been working here for 30 years, deftly zigzag around the stenciled marks. And finally, the extra fabric is cut off by hand, layer by layer, revealing the design.

“ ‘It’s counterintuitive,’ Flynn said. ‘People think we sew letters on and sew logos on. It’s actually the opposite. What we do is sew the image on and then we cut everything around it off.’ ” More here.

I like to read about longtime businesses like this chugging along in New England. I also like reading about start-up businesses. With three entrepreneurs in the family — including Suzanne (Luna&Stella), Erik (Nordic Technology Group), and John (Optics for Hire) — I am pretty sure the local economy is going to be OK.

Photo: Karen Given/Only a Game

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In 1875, a Six-Day Indoor Race

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 6, 2014| 4 Comments »

Since I like to walk everyday, even going round and round indoors for much of this past winter, I was fascinated to hear about walking as a competitive sport in the 19th century.

At his WBUR radio show yesterday, Only a Game, Bill Littlefield talked to Matthew Algeo, author of Pedestrianism: When Watching People Walk Was America’s Favorite Sport.

Here’s Algeo: “Edward Payson Weston was a door-to-door books salesman from Providence, R.I. In the autumn of 1860, he made a bet with a friend on the outcome of that year’s presidential election. Weston bet that Lincoln would lose, and, of course, Weston lost the bet. The loser had to walk from Boston to Washington in 10 days and arrive in time to witness the inauguration of Lincoln on March 4, 1861.

“So Weston set out and made his way south. Of course, this was a very tense time in American history. Southern states began seceding. There wasn’t a lot of good, uplifting news. And the idea that this guy would walk from Boston to Washington in the middle of winter on terrible roads — it really did capture the imagination of the public, especially along the East Coast. Huge crowds would turn out to see him just walk through their town. Weston didn’t make it in time. He was four hours late to the inauguration. He did meet Lincoln a couple of days later and Lincoln offered to pay his rail fare home, but Weston said he would try to walk home. But the Civil War intervened.”

Littlefield then refers to Weston as one half of “the first great rivalry in the annals of American sports” and asks Algeo who the other half was.

“Daniel O’Leary, an Irish immigrant from Chicago,” says the author. “And what happened was Weston, to capitalize on his fame, decided to take his act indoors. He began walking inside roller rinks, and he would try to walk say 100 miles in 24 hours and charge people a dime for the pleasure of watching him walk in circles all day. This proved immensely popular — thousands of people would do it. Naturally competitors rose up and Daniel O’Leary actually walked 100 miles in 22 hours. And so he bested Weston’s record and so that set up the big showdown in 1875 that you mentioned. It was a 500-mile race over six days between Weston and O’Leary. …

“They would draw a dirt track on the floor of an arena. … The competitors would be sent off, and they would walk continuously day and night for six days right up until midnight the following Saturday night. And the rules were pretty simple: whoever walked the farthest was the winner.” Read more here, where you also can listen to the interview and read Littlefield’s book review.

 

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Rwandans Take Biking Seriously

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on January 9, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Here’s another good one from WBUR’s “Only a Game.”

Bill Littlefield interviewed author Tim Lewis, who has written a book called Land of Second Chances: The Impossible Rise of Rwanda’s Cycling Team.

Littlefield starts out by discussing Rwanda’s history before moving on to the subject of bikes.

Bill: “Tell us about the country’s wooden bikes.”

Tim Lewis: “If you go to Rwanda today, you still see the wooden bikes. You don’t see them on the main road anymore because they’ve been banned by the president because he feels … it isn’t the message that he wants a modern, progressive country like Rwanda to convey. But on any roads off the main roads you see people using these wooden bikes. They’re hacked out of eucalyptus trees.

“People there love using them. … They’re like the mule of Rwanda. People use them to carry bananas or goats on the back or live chickens. … Part of the reason they’ve been banned from the main roads is that they’re so horribly dangerous. They have two speeds. One of them is not moving at all or kind of very slowly going up these hills. And the other of which is going downhill, and they’re so out of control that anyone in their path gets knocked over.”

Bill: “In the chapter titled ‘The Dot Connector,’ you mention Project Rwanda, the brainchild of Tom Ritchey. What was Mr. Ritchey’s goal?”

Tim: “Tom Ritchey is a real pioneer of bicycle design, in particular, mountain bikes. In 2005 Tom Ritchey visited Rwanda. And one of the things that really affected Tom was how much people in Rwanda loved riding bicycles. And so Tom thought, ‘Can I design a bike that would be affordable for Rwandans to buy?’ and that could really change people’s lives there — in terms of coffee farmers being able to pick coffee in the morning and get them to a washing station to get it processed, which can make a big difference … At the same time an idea popped into his head which is, ‘You know, these guys look like amazing athletes. What about starting a bicycle team?’ ”

Eventually, Rwanda did get a team. It’s a great story. Read more and listen to the broadcast here.

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K9 Fit Club

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on November 29, 2013| Leave a Comment »

The day after Thanksgiving is a day that many people’s thoughts turn from an unusually wonderful and gigantic meal to fitness.

In an increasing number of locales, people who have never worked out before are now working out with their dogs. Because dogs need fitness, too.

Bill Littlefield’s sports show on WBUR radio, which covers both traditional and offbeat sports, sends Only A Game‘s Karen Given to Hinsddale, Illinois, to interview K9 Fit Club president and founder Tricia Montgomery.

Says Montgomery, “K9 Fit Club is a place where pooches and peeps get together and have a healthy and happy lifestyle. We do exercises, we do workouts, we bond, we socialize and most of all we have fun.

“K9 Fit Club was originally developed in 2008 but we didn’t open the doors here until Aug 5, 2012. We started in Hinsdale, Illinois in our first location and now we have corporate facilities, we also have locations starting all the way from Monterrey City, Mexico, all the way to New York, into Raleigh- Durham, North Carolina, up into Florida, St. Louis, all across the country. …

“Our programs were developed by veterinarians, by personal trainers, by dog trainers, and by doctors and psychologists, actually. So we’re not just a bunch of people running around with a bunch of dogs jumping up beside us. Our programs have really been developed for people who have never worked out a day in their lives to people who are very, very fit. …

“I love what I do, how cool is this? I get to come to work every day with my dog and I get to have the coolest job working with dogs and people and helping change their lives and feel better about themselves.” More.

Photo: K9 Fit Club

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Over-65 U.S.-Cuban Softball

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on September 1, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I am not ordinarily into sports, but I love Bill Littlefield’s Saturday sports wrap-up on WBUR because he is a great storyteller, and he looks for offbeat sports stories.

Today he had one on the over-65 U.S. softball players who have games with an over-65 team from Cuba.

“The Eastern Massachusetts Senior Softball Association has been sending teams to Cuba for annual exhibitions called ‘The Friendship Games.’ The first four EMASS Softball teams visited Havana in 2009 and the meeting reminded [organizer Mike] Eizenberg of kids playing pickup.

“ ‘When we went onto the field, it felt exactly the same way to all of us,’ Eizenberg recalled. ‘Most of the players didn’t speak the others’ language, but we all just loved to play ball.’

“Before that game, Cuban authorities allowed local musicians to play the U.S. and Cuban national anthems. That hadn’t happened in Cuba in 50 years. After three years of exhibitions, Eizenberg decided bringing the Cubans to the States was worth a try. He’s still amazed his Cuban friends made it.

“ ‘No one ever believed that it would be possible for them to come here. All of a sudden, magically, we received permission both from the U.S. government and the Cuban government for the players to come here,’ Eizenberg said. ‘[The Cuban players] say that this proves that nothing is impossible. If this can happen, anything can happen.’ …

“EMASS Softball player Les Gore says the Cubans and the Americans share a love of baseball and softball, but their sports resumes are a bit mismatched.

“ ‘The people playing here representing the U.S. and we’re talking about doctors, lawyers, plumbers. We’re just average guys who love to play softball,’ Gore said. ‘But the Cubans, many of the people who play for the Cuban softball leagues were in their time probably some of the most prominent baseball players that the island has ever produced, so we’re playing against those people.’ ” More.

Photograph: WBUR at  Flickr

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