Glory in 8 pt Font
How scoring baseball games saved my life.
The math spins in my head.
A compass home.
When I was a kid, my family moved to London.
I’d spent my whole life in the Bronx. Yankee Stadium was pretty close. Trading baseball cards on the stoop. Bubblegum heroes.
Moving to London, those Bronx days became a memory. Except for one connection I was determined to keep.
We had a paper delivered to our London home every day. The International Herald-Tribune. Printed on thin airmail friendly paper. Published in Paris. Our American newspaper in Europe.
We all read it every morning. It didn’t matter if you were an American in Berlin, Rome, or Amsterdam. The paper was the one thing that stitched us all together.
The front page was news, politics. There were stories of American culture. There were obituaries. What my father called the Irish Sports page.
And in the back was sports.
Most important to me were the baseball scores. Every game was set in 8 pt type. I leaned over the page and studied the numbers.
Win-Lose. The home run leaders. Pitchers ERA. Game summaries. The standings.
