ABOUT EXTRA INNINGS

…the 31-year baseball veteran who started a Substack to tell remarkable but little-known stories from the history of the game?

Well…that one’s about me.

Major League Baseball was my long-time professional home. I spent more than three decades working as senior-level communications executive and broadcaster with the San Diego Padres, Boston Red Sox and Miami Marlins. I called thousands of games and was fortunate to have had a front-row seat for a lot of baseball history.

And when you spend that much time around the game, you collect a few stories along the way.

Some of them come from players. Some come from front office executives, managers, coaches or grizzled scouts. Some come from writers and broadcast colleagues who have spent decades around the sport. And many you discover when you continue a lifetime of digging into baseball’s past and are frequently reminded the game has always been brimming with moments so unusual they sound almost unbelievable.

A pitcher who refused to leave the mound after getting struck by lightning during a game.

A player who had one of the greatest Opening Day performances in history against one of the dominant aces of his era…and then disappeared from Major League Baseball.

A team so bad it forced changes to the rules of baseball ownership.

Baseball history is overflowing with stories like that. Some are funny. Some are peculiar. Some seem like they have to be made up.

And many of them are largely forgotten.

That’s where Extra Innings comes in.

Extra Innings--Baseball stories from beyond the boxscore--is a place to explore those moments. The strange ones. The overlooked ones. The stories that don’t show up in the statistics but help make baseball the endlessly fascinating game it has always been.

Think of Extra Innings as the kind of conversation you might hear if a couple of old baseball lifers were sitting around swapping stories.

“Have you heard the one about…”

I publish new stories three times a week during the season--Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Each Monday story will be free to read, at least to get started. The Wednesday and Friday posts will be exclusive to paid subscribers who want to dive deeper into the strange and fascinating recesses of baseball’s past.

By subscribing to Extra Innings you’ll have these stories delivered directly to your email inbox as soon as they’re posted.

Sometimes the stories will connect to something happening in the game today. Sometimes they’ll tie into the baseball calendar.

Most of the time, they’ll just be great stories worth telling that I think you’ll want to pass along to others. Because baseball has always been more than a collection of statistics.

Boxscores tell us what happened in a game. But the game’s rich history--the characters, the quirks and the unforgettable moments--lives just around the corner.

Those are the stories we’ll explore in Extra Innings.

And just when you think you’ve heard every story the game has to offer, someone leans forward in his chair and asks:

“Have you heard the one about…”

And that’s when the fun begins.