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?
My name is Rafael. I’m Costa Rican and Canadian and I currently live in the Montreal area.
Ironically, only 3 years after I moved to Montreal from Washington DC the Expos were relocated there, became the Nationals and managed, go figure, to stink even more than when they were here.
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 country that is an 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, indeed almost 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. In my previous life in Costa Rica and the USA I was an engineer.
Is Philosophy related to Baseball?
Yes, of course, they’re both a species of nerdiness.
