About

This blog was born on March 31, 2008, the first day of the 2008 season in the year when Take Me Out to the Ball Game, baseball’s de facto anthem, turned 100 years old.

Here’s a list of questions you may have. Drop me a line if you have another one.

Who are you and where do you live?

I’m Rafael Nájera. I live in Westmount, a small city very near downtown Montreal in Canada. I’ve lived in the Montreal area since 2001. Before that I lived in Washington DC for 3 years and before that in my native Costa Rica for 27 years.

Ironically only 3 years after I moved to Montreal from Washington the Expos were relocated and became the Nationals.

Wait, you’re not a real Canadian, heh?

No, I guess not. I’m sorry. I do have a Canadian passport, but, as you probably know, Canadian citizenship is given to immigrants who can withstand 3 Canadian winters in a row without getting into trouble.

You’re from Costa Rica, I imagine you played a lot of baseball when you were growing up, right?

I’m afraid you’re confused. I’m from Costa Rica, the small country in Central America where people mostly play soccer (”fútbol” as we call it), not from Puerto Rico, the even smaller island in the Caribbean that’s a protectorate of the USA and where many ball players come from.

Baseball is not very popular in Costa Rica nowadays but there are fans here and there. It used to be more popular before. When I grew up, in the 80s, they would show MLB games on open air TV and that’s when I became a fan. Now you only get baseball on cable and that pretty much leaves 75% of the population out of the picture.

We used to play baseball during the breaks in high school, with pieces of wood as bats and tennis balls instead of real baseballs. It was really hard, I’d say impossible, for me and classmates to get a hold of real equipment.

What do you do in real life?

I’m a graduate student. I’m doing a PhD at McGill University on Medieval Philosophy.

Is Philosophy related to Baseball?

Yes, of course, they’re both a species of nerdiness.