Seventeen years back: The Lansing Lugnuts had lost three of four to the West Michigan Whitecaps. I used this as an occasion to slam the Luggie defense. A couple years later I was still ranting about them.
Everyone should read a county history sometime. This one’s structured around identifying the first settlers in each township, and how they arrived in the county; he also discusses early township leaders, school beginnings, and suchlike. There are also stories, digressions, and the occasional poem. A few of the stories are repeated, but in each case the perspective’s changed and the tale with it. All in all, an interesting diversion, especially if you’ve Eaton County connections. The potentially dry material is relieved by the author’s wry humor; he’s particularly interested in conflicting claims about the meaning of “first settler.”
As with the original volume, this book’s chapters devoted to treatment are surprisingly interesting, and justify the book’s existence. This is clearly material the author’s known and pondered upon for his entire adult life.
Some of you have likely noticed that I’ve been changing the look and feel of the website. Since I’m still dissatisfied, you can expect the experimentation to continue.
Although blogs hadn’t yet been invented, seventeen years ago I kept a Lansing Lugnuts weblog, which I called Joel’s Lansing Lugnut Notes. The 1996 Luggies were a new team. I began keeping the online journal because I’d been watching Midwest League (MWL) play for several summers and figured I had something to contribute to the Lansing discussion. As things worked out I did a writeup after each series, and composed a few other pages as inspiration struck. I plan to repost all of the weblog entries, and most of the other pages, to this journal over the next few months. Most will be posted 17 years to the day after they were originally written.
Nicely done; Schollmeyer’s got a good sense of how to assemble a story from what seem to be interview responses. Not really a history of the show; more a portrait of the relationship, and how that affected the show.
This was the first time I saw Brock Hanke’s name in print. The same is true of several of the book’s other contributors: John Benson, Sherri Nichols, Stuart Shea, and Sean Lahman come quickly to mind. (Tom Tippett was there, too, as the project’s programmer.) Just bringing these folks (and Pankin, in the previous edition) into my life is plenty of justification for the effort.
While this work necessarily has some biographical content, it’s largely about how GM Jon Daniels runs the Ranger’s organization–the things he emphasizes, the people he hires, the objectives he sets, the ways he communicates, the methods he uses to collect information, and the reasons behind those practices. Newberg, who’s been writing about the Rangers organization since the late 1990s, clearly knows the material.
Admiral Bolitho leads a small squadron tasked with destroying the small craft the French are building to convey an invasion force across the Channel, shortly before the anticipated Treaty of Amiens brings a temporary peace. His captains include Thomas Herrick (a commodore in this book), Francis Inch, Oliver Browne-with-an-e, John Neale, and Valentine Keen. And old Phalarope–Bolito’s frigate in To Glory We Steer–joins the fleet on location, with Adam Pascoe as first lieutenant. Things go wrong, then they go right.
Besides the Life Lessons, the book contains a quite a bit of biographical material, and a surprising amount of information and commentary about Sparky’s managerial methods. Sparky was more a motivator and molder than a tactician, as anyone who followed his teams knows. Ewald witnessed that during Anderson’s Tiger years, and heard many tales about how he worked with the Cincinnati team’s egos.
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