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Among other things, Mr. Gewirtz has learned that Kerouac played an early version of the baseball game in his backyard in Lowell, Mass., hitting a marble with a nail, or possibly a toothpick, and noting where it landed. By 1946, when Kerouac was 24, he had devised a set of cards with precise verbal descriptions of various outcomes (“slow roller to ss,” for example), depending on the skill levels of the pitcher and batter. The game could be played using cards alone, but Mr. Gewirtz thinks that more often Kerouac determined the result of a pitch by tossing some sort of projectile at a diagramed chart on the wall. In 1956 he switched to a new set of cards, which used hieroglyphic symbols instead of descriptions. Carefully preserved inside plastic folders at the library, they now look as mysterious as runes.

Either our weather widget is on the fritz, or we're due for some unseasonably warm temperatures today.

Via a Gwenda Bond Twitter comes this gem--a Lexington, Kentucky, meteorologist who visits an area high school and encourages the kids to think for themselves by rejecting the idea of global warming. From his blog:

"We survived the trip into the lion’s den today. Today we went over to Henry Clay High School in Lexington and spoke to almost 50 sophomores about (cue ominous Dracula kind of music) Global Climate Change....

"My mission today was to present some facts (and since it’s history it is facts) about how climate has transpired over the past years, decades, and centuries. We presented reasons why things have likely happened in very long period cycles over time, with the sun’s changes over time a very likely driver of everything climate related. We also talked about how Lexington’s climate has evolved over the last 110 years with 4 out of the top 6 warmest decades being before 1960. Most everything that is happening now has happened before and it will happen again. We talked about research done by some very smart people that disagrees with everything they’ve learned up until today. It’s just not part of the mainstream data stream for whatever reason. My challenge to them was to be skeptical…think for yourself…find your own answers and don’t just depend on what’s been spoon fed to you…not from me or anyone else. Out of everything discussed today, that’s what I truly hope they got from the talk…not necessarily all the facts and figures that I tossed at them and left with them to look over, but just planting the seed to gain more knowledge on their own. Isn’t that what school is all about?"

"My apologies for not getting her name quite rignt (hey I’m getting old…) but Kaira (again forgive me if it’s not quiet right) was especially passionate about the subject and that kind of dedicaiton will serve her well later in life. Though a few of their arguments were ‘green’ in nature regarding deforestation (which we agreed with that tropical deforestation is a bad thing) it has little to do with the real discussion of global warming."

"Now I only hope these kids are kind to your friendly neighborhood weatherguy on their facebook pages…."

Editor Liz sends me this terrific news item: 12-year-old Mackenzie Brown threw a perfect game last week!

BAYONNE, N.J. (AP) - Mackenzie Brown is the first girl in Bayonne Little League history to throw a perfect game. She retired all 18 boys she faced on Tuesday. There are no official records of how many perfect games are thrown per season. Little League Baseball in Williamsport, Pa., estimates only 50 to 60 occur each year. No one knows how many have been thrown by girls. Brown says she knew she had something special going in the fourth inning and just tried not to mess up. She'll get to throw out the first pitch at Citi Field on Saturday when the New York Mets host the Washington Nationals.

It's Opening Day, baseball fans! This used to be a day where I would stay home from whatever I had to do and sit on the couch all day watching baseball games, but alas I have many things to do and so cannot give my whole day to it as I once did.

And, to be honest, I got a little burned out on baseball last season. (Gasp! I know!) I do love baseball, but it's almost too accessible these days, with the online and TV baseball packages that are available. I have to say too that playing fantasy baseball changed the way I watched baseball games. Maybe not in a bad way, but it did change the way I watched, and part of me longed for the days when I rooted for teams and watched the standings, rather than rooting for players and their individual stats.

So now, for the first time in a long time, I am fantasy-baseball-free as the season begins, have only an MLB online account to watch and listen to games (no Direct TV Extra Innings package, and no MLB TV!) and I am ready to renew my relationship with baseball. Let's call it a "renewal of vows." It's time to rediscover the love. (Perhaps baseball and I should go on a cruise together.)

My plan to get back to basics--and we'll see how long it lasts--is to start listening to radio broadcasts and reading newspaper accounts again, even when I could be watching games online. As a kid I could, on a good night, get AM giant 700WLW out of Cincinnati, and I would listen to Marty Brennaman and Joe Nuxhall cover Reds games. I loved those nights. Baseball games weren't all over TV, and I lived four hours from the nearest stadium. Broadcasts from Cincinnati might as well have been broadcasts from Mars--and they were just as exotic and enthralling to me. Later, as a teenager, I loved going in to my school's library every morning and checking the box scores in the newspaper. Now that almost every game played can be found on television somewhere, I miss those more personal connections to baseball, and I want to get them back.

But part of this radical transformation for me as a baseball fan has also been a transfer of allegiance from one team to another--something that I, like most sports fans, find anathema. Why I have abandoned the Cincinnati Reds after decades of fandom for a team that could not be farther away from my home and a city that could not be farther from my experience is probably best left for a rant of its own, but let us just say that it's a combination of mismanagement and inaccessiblity and leave it at that for now.

So tonight at 7:05 p.m. I may tune in to hear my new favorite team--the Los Angeles Dodgers--in their opener against Jake Peavy and the Padres.

Or, I may just read about it in tomorrow's newspaper.

Heard this story on the local NPR affiliate this morning:

FLAG POND, Tenn. — A man who police in northeastern Tennessee charged with possession of untaxed whiskey told officers he’s been buying it in the region for a decade.

Unicoi County Sheriff Kent Harris told the Johnson City Press 65-year-old Arvin Guffey of Beach Island, N.C., was stopped Sunday on Interstate 26 a few miles from the state line after his pickup truck was seen weaving.

Deputy Frank Rogers then saw the moonshine — 312 quarts of it — uncovered in the back of Guffey’s truck.

Guffey told authorities he parked his truck with nearly $3,000 inside it in Flag Pond, took a walk and came back to find it full of moonshine.

He said he has been buying whiskey like that in eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina for a decade.

Dad gum. That's a whole lotta moonshine.

Editor Liz sends this photograph of a New York State historical marker that perpetuates the myth that Abner Doubleday "founded" baseball. There is no proof that Abner Doubleday ever picked up a baseball in his life, much less that he invented the game. Alexander Cartwright is generally acknowledged as the "father of baseball" now because he and his Knickerbocker Baseball Club of Manhattan were the first to codify the modern rules of baseball, but to say that anyone invented the game is to ignore the many, many ball game antecedents played for decades before the Knickerbockers were founded.

The Doubleday myth was created by Robert Graves and Albert G. Spalding in an effort to prove that baseball was an "All-American" game, and accepted by Major League Baseball without much in-depth inquiry. The myth was compounded when MLB chose Doubleday's hometown, Cooperstown, as the site for their Hall of Fame in 1939--the supposed one hundred year anniversary of Doubleday's "invention"--and repeated in marketing and promotion materials.

I do my best to dispute the Doubleday myth in my forthcoming middle grade novel, The Brooklyn Nine.

There's a good summary of the Doubleday myth at Wikipedia.

Five minutes ago I e-mailed the latest revision of The Brooklyn Nine to editor Liz, and by total coincidence the Dodgers are today, even as I write this, playing their last ever spring training game at Dodgertown in Vero Beach, Florida. Next season, they move to new digs in Glendale, Arizona.

In 1948 the Brooklyn Dodgers were the first team to establish spring training facilities in Florida, an innovation by General Manager Branch Rickey, the man credited with developing pro baseball's first farm team system and who later made history by signing Jackie Robinson. While other teams have changed cities and stadiums, the Dodgers have been a fixture in Vero Beach, Florida for sixty years. Today that comes to an end.

It makes sense for the Dodgers to have spring training in Arizona with the rest of the West Coast teams in the Cactus League. It's closer to their fans, and closer to the players' families. In a last ditch effort to keep the Dodgers in Vero Beach, the city bought the complex from the Dodgers in 2001 and leased it back to them for just $1 per year. But Arizona has done everything it can to lure the Dodgers away from Florida, offering to pay them to move and build brand new facilities for them. In the end it was too hard to resist.

And Dodgertown, as revered as it is, is something of a relic. The dugouts are literally trenches dug out of the ground with no roof overhead, and the closest urinals for the players during the game are in the right field corner. The player entrance is the same as the fan entrance, with a sign above the ramp that says "Players left, Public right," and the stadium seats just 6,500 people--charming enough for a single-A team, but in today's world of high-attendance spring training games Holman Stadium is busting at the seams. (The new ballpark in Glendale will have room for 12,000 people.)

I've been to spring training games in Florida, but alas I never made it to Vero Beach for a game. I did visit Vero Beach for a school visit once though, and I took the opportunity to drive over to Dodgertown and take some pictures. It's not just a stadium, it's a complex--a place where players like Campanella and Koufax and Snider and Drysdale and Robinson once stayed in little motel rooms and ate together in the cafeteria and worked out on sandy baseball fields. Even in the "off-season," Dodgertown still echoed with memories:

It's February 14, 2008, and the first thing on most people's minds is Valentine's Day. Wendi and I are exchanging gifts later, and Jo is already enjoying the gift I got her--her very own lightsaber. (Here she's posing very seriously, she tells me, like Luke.) We're already enacted a few scenes from Star Wars, and one, unintentionally, from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

But it's not just Valentine's Day--it's the first day pitchers and catchers can report for spring training! Ah, the return of baseball season. Could this day get any better?

Oh, but it can! Today is also the day Samurai Shortstop is officially available in paperback!

Happy Samurai Spring Training Valentine's Day!