Bits & Pieces

By Kim J. Harmon

A couple of times I have had people ask me how I come up with the stuff that makes it into Bits & Pieces.

There are times when I’m not getting all dramatic and emotional about great games or obsessive parents and I like to throw together a bunch of little tidbits … things I’ve seen over the course of a week or two. Like, oh, watching a baseball player wearing a paper hat he crafted out of his dinner menu enjoying a coin-operated kiddie ride outside a Cooperstown, New York, restaurant.

Stuff like that gets into Bits & Pieces.

Like being told that an earthquake apparently struck upstate New York at around 12:30 am on April 15. Although it didn’t wake me up (I understand it made a very loud BOOM), I heard it rattled the Best Western Hotel right down to its foundation. There are no reports on whether or not folks here in Newtown felt it.

Stuff like that gets into Bits & Pieces.

Like finding out there was a major run on bags of flour in upstate New York – perhaps because of rising oil prices in the Middle East – although for what nefarious purposes all that flour was purchased we can only guess.

Stuff like that gets into Bits & Pieces.

Like watching 18 large pizzas (for some unknown reason, half were mushroom) getting devoured in roughly 15 minutes and then trying to find the proper adjectives and adverbs to describe that level of hunger only to come up wanting.

Stuff like that makes it into Bits & Pieces.

Like discovering that eating a big bowl of chili as an appetizer for a large pastrami sandwich isn’t such a good idea and there is at least one coach – an innocent bystander, if you will – who will attest to that.

Yes, stuff like that makes it into Bits & Pieces.

There is more to sports and the teams that play than what happens on the field and sometimes something happens that won’t find a place in a traditional story (although that early morning earthquake probably deserves further investigation).

That’s where Bits & Pieces comes in.

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I’m know I’m getting old (the hair that is growing in my ears will attest to that) but I didn’t realize how old until I picked up a pack of 2006 baseball cards in a Cooperstown, New York, store and found out it cost $5.

That’s right, $5 for about 10 cards … without the pink neon, cardboard-flavored gum.

I used to buy packs of cards for 50 cents, dozens and dozens of packs every summer. Whenever I had half a buck in my hand, I would run down to the corner store and grab a pack. I used to flip ‘em against the wall with my friends and stick ‘em into the spokes of my bicycle and never once thought about slipping any into plastic Mylar sleeves.

Five dollars?

Good gracious.

And apparently nowadays you can just go into any store and simply buy the entire set – all 750 or so cards. Used to be, the object was to buy a pack at a time to try and get the whole set, trading your duplicates for players you didn’t have.

What is this world coming to?

Do kids even flip cards anymore? Do kids even put baseball cards in the spokes of their bicycles anymore? When is the last time anyone had a stick of that cardboard gum?

Americana ... it’s fading away right before our very eyes.

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I love the National Baseball Hall of Fame. I have been there three times now and I can’t wait to go back.

But there is one thing that ticked me off. It used to be, the famous Who’s On First? skit by Bud Abbott and Lou Costello would run constantly on a television screen hanging in the locker room display near the theater.

But once the Hall was refurbished, the screen was relocated.

I can’t remember where it was last year, but this year I was on my way out when I realized I hadn’t seen it yet. Now, I have an old Colgate Comedy Hour print of Who’s On First? but seeing it at the Hall of Fame is something special and, so, I started searching.

I found it ... stuck in the corner of an unused hallway with one small bench (for four kids or two adults). That was kind of upsetting to me, but I cured myself by watching it twice in a row.

And it’s amazing ... after all these years and the countless times I have seen that skit, I can still laugh at it. If that is not the definition of comic genius, I don’t know what is.

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Last week I heard this story –

It seems there is a high school coach who has gotten a number of calls from a parent with a lot of suggestions on what kids should be playing where and, in general, how things should be run. I know, it’s certainly not unusual for a coach to be beset by a butt-insky parent. It happens all the time – every day at every school in every state in the country.

But, oddly, in this case the butt-insky parent doesn’t even have a kid on the team.

Amusing?

Or distressing?

Take your pick. But one way or another, long gone are the days when we can simply step back and let the coach coach his or her team and believe, in our hearts, that the coach knows what he or she is going.

Every single decision on and off the field, it seems – like taking a pitcher out of a game after only a handful of pitches – is greeted with curses from the stands, on the phone, or in a registered letter and it has got to stop.

It really does.