Year Three on The Stack...

Never thought I've have that much to say...guess I did.

Happy Anniversary to me!

(And I hope also to you, my gently growing collection of readers, in the 900’s now.)

It was exactly two years ago - May 8, 2024 - right around this time of the morning that I sat down on the edge of my couch in Tallahassee, cranked up my HP Laptop and thought I’d try out this Substack thing. Two years removed from being a classroom teacher with four preps, (AP Lit, AP Lang, Journalism, English IV), I guess you could say the dome cleared a bit. And I’d read about this Substack thing somewhere.

It was free, seemed like fun and like Bob Dylan once said “I had a headful of ideas that are driving me insane,” - I JUST HEARD HIM SING THAT VERY LINE AT THE SAME TIME I WROTE THIS SENTENCE….REALLY….WEIRD….(I am playing the “Fragments” collection, a review of which was one of the 13 posts I naively posted on my first day in the Substack world. Duh. Of course, I didn’t know that when I picked up the box set off my shelf a few minutes ago. Just happened to put it on. )

(Ever get the feeling that something is happening you don’t quite understand?)

So, about that first day. I’ll guess I’ll start with, uh, 13 posts! Really.

“Hi everybody. I’m new here. Here’s 13 different things I wrote so let’s get started…”

One got all of six views. Hahaha.. So from my perspective now, 655 posts in, I can reassess my opening strategy was perhaps a bit abrupt. But that’s Ok. It was fun. Writing always has been for me.

The father of 655 Substack posts over a two-year span. Chatty, ain’t he?

Once I got going, these ideas kept on coming, creeping up on me lying in bed, driving to the store, like they were just hanging around, waiting for me to sit my ass down and write ‘em up.

The drive, I mean, that never shut off. In my newspaper days, I was writing pretty much every day. And in teaching, there was some of that but I was supposedly retired. Nobody told my brain, I guess. Or more likely, it wasn’t listening.

Then the other day, I was reading this brand new Bob Dylan book - like I need to read another one - and I came upon this passage that just about knocked the ever-loving aspirations out of me (stole that from Mark Twain). It was in the Introduction to Robert Polito’s “Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace,” and it went like this:

“As his first manager, Terry Thai, recalled to Ray Padgett: “One of the things Bob had, and I didn’t realize this until a couple years ago, Bob had, and still has, I presume, a kind of odd ability to take in information. He can retain parts of that he wants, discard the parts of it that he doesn’t want, and tuck away parts of it for future use. Which most people, I think, can’t do. They lose it. They don’t remember it. If they want it, they can’t pull it out. He can.”

Me, too. Which is why it clobbered me so. In writing these 655 Substacks, it’s happened again and again and again. I’m writing a piece about Elvis Presley, I remember a passage from a Peter Guralnick book I’d read FORTY years ago, knew right where it was, it was perfect. That ain’t normal, is it?

But in writing all this and this often - which is important I think - I can’t help but think of a letter Mark Twain wrote to a friend when he was writing “Huckleberry Finn” - "Your letter has stirred me to the bottom. The fountains of my great deep are broken up & I have rained reminiscences for four and twenty hours.” Mine might not be fountains, exactly but they're at least a sprinkle. Hell, I wrote about my first day of school yesterday.

Maybe, just maybe, all these pieces will add up to something bigger or if not bigger, deeper, maybe? I’ve been thinking about that, working on a few things, making connections across the months and posts and themes and interjections, the books I’ve read, the music I’ve listened to, the strange and twisting life that’s unfolded before me ever since I came down those half-finished stairs that Reb, the crooked carpenter built leading up to my plywood and sheet-rocked upstairs bedroom in Brookline.

It has been surprising, revealing, exciting, freaky, emotional at times, wandering back through the halls of your life, moments that stay with you somehow. And it forms a story, a reflecting pool of sorts that is as improbable as it is intimate. I was paying attention after all. I think you’ll see that for yourself.

I’m grateful - more than I can say - to those who’ve sort of hopped on the Nogo Train with me, this two-year run that’s mostly stayed on the tracks. A friend of mine asked me once a while back what my intent with this Substack thing was. “It’s sort of a one-sided conversation with a friend. But I am listening.”

So, it seems, are many of you. Thanks, friends….

The author with his creations so far - my Neil Young book due soon.

HERE’S THE ONE OPENING PIECE THAT GOT OVER 200 VIEWS.

“I’ll be home soon, Ma. They’re throwin’ me the curve”

Learning how - and why - to make a baseball curve and how it can help you

May 08, 2024

What do you do when you’re growing up in a small New Hampshire town that doesn’t offer Little League, your Dad doesn’t know a darn thing about the game and you want to learn how to pitch?

In my case, it was to go to the Fairgrounds Junior High library, take out “Sports Illustrated’s Book of Baseball” and bring the damn book OUT TO THE MOUND WITH YOU and figure it out.

Thanks for reading John’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This was the book that taught me how to throw a curveball

Though the Dodgers’ Al Downing was left-handed and I’m right-handed, there were illustrations, showing how to grip the ball and how to release it to make it spin like a top. By making the laces spin a particular way, that would make the ball curve, sort of like a backwards “j” if you do it right.

It took a few tries to get it right but once you did, wow! As a pitcher with only a medium fastball, adding that curveball was a genuine weapon. At least it was in the Tiny Town League, a Babe Ruth League back in the late 1960’s for towns along the New Hampshire-Massachusetts border. My team was the Brookline Devils. (No, I didn’t like the name one bit.)

And that season, I threw 56 2/3 innings and struck out 122 batters. My son didn’t believe it, of course, those are sick numbers. But I showed him a clip from the newspaper.

It was rural New Hampshire, many kids hadn’t really ever seen a curveball and that season, at least, I had it going. In one practice, it was really breaking. I struck out every single player on the team in a row, throwing all curves. My coaches got so irritated that nobody could hit me, they hopped in. I struck them out, too. When it’s really breaking, it has a mind of its own. You cannot hit it. Period.

Though you learn to pick up the spin out of the pitcher’s hand as you move up the ladder, at that stage, kids were just trying to make contact. So if you could throw the ball near the batter’s head out of your hand and make it break over the plate, darn few hitters would stand in to hit it.

As I grew up in the game and heard about Mordecai “Three-Finger” Brown, who’d lost part of his index finger in a farm accident, I could see just how devastating spin could be. You can see from the photos below, there is almost no way a ball would travel straight, coming out of his hand. And he was a Hall of Fame pitcher. Imagine facing a pitcher like that? Spin is the thing. That’s all the pitchers are after now.

Mordecai “Three-Finger” Brown was one of the game’s greatest early hurlers

As for me, I pitched on through high school and American Legion baseball. I never quite had the curve I had that one magical season but it was decent and on one occasion, it gave me one of my biggest thrills on a baseball field.

Though I attended high school and played baseball for Nashua High, the big city, in the summer, it was easier for me to play American Legion baseball in Milford, the next town over. Having played at Nashua gave me status, too, I have to say and when I didn’t get to start our season opener, I was a bit surprised. But my coach, a fellow gentleman of Polish persuasion, threw his arm around my shoulder before the game. “I’ve got something special for you, ‘Ski.”

Two days later, I found out I was to start against Nashua’s Coffey Post at Holman Stadium, my old high school field, facing many of my old high school teammates. And you bet, I beat ‘em.

The moment I will always remember, came in the first inning. Though I was concentrating on the second hitter, my eyes wandered over to the on-deck circle and there was Dave Foran, senior QB, second baseman, big-man-on-campus and the most stuck-up teammate I ever had.

A lowly junior, I was way down the totem pole, I guess you could say and in batting practice, Foran was the only player to take more swings than anyone else, to treat underclassmen as if they were lower than plankton. He wouldn’t even use, didn’t even know - or care to - your name.

Unfortunately, the coach looked the other way. And as I looked over to him on-deck, I could see him laughing and gesturing to the other guys in the dugout, “Look who this is” gesturing with his thumb at me. I was burning.

After the second out, he stepped into the batter’s box, holding his hand up like he was a big-leaguer, making everyone wait until he was set. I wound and threw and my anger added a foot to my fastball. ZING! Strike One! You could tell that he was surprised, no amazed at the velocity heading his way. He blinked once and here it came again, just as fast. He swung, late, fouling it off to the right.

There was a lot of noise from both dugouts. I had a lot of friends on the Nashua team and I suspected they felt about Foran the way I did. I was wanted to throw one so hard by him he’d never forget it. I was up 0-2, I could waste one, I thought. Maybe dust him.

Instead, I thought back quickly to those afternoons out at the Brookline ballpark with that Sports Illustrated book and Al Downing’s curve. I shook off my catcher. And wound up and threw the most beautiful 12-to-6 curveball that the good Lord will let you throw. It broke down and across the plate with a majesty and power and yes, I thought, the hammer of justice had arrived. STRIKE THREE!

The bat went flying, I bounced off the mound and everybody was up at the top of the dugout to greet me. Talk about excited. And it was only the first inning.

Later in the game, I lined a double to left center field, just missing a home run. As I trotted into second base, guess who was waiting to greet me.

“Hey, Nogo,” he said. “Nice hit.”

I smiled. “My curve was better.’

I pitched until the sixth with a lead. Then went out to centerfield. Foran was up with two outs and two on in the 7th. He hit a deep fly to center that sent me right back to the storm fence. But I caught it. Ballgame. Still have it.

The author, shortly after learning how to throw a curveball.