Click the pic to see it clearly.

This is from the Norwalk paper, 1988. My Ridgefield Little League All-Star team was destined for glory that year...until we gave up 11 runs in one inning to Norwalk. Several of those were given up by me, in relief. But I did bat leadoff, so I had that goin' for me. And please note, no walks given up. I had control if nothing else. Looks like my friend Mike and I, who I'll be seeing this weekend, both had rough outings that day. But Mike may be the sliding kid in the picture--I know he wore #5 for his regular-season team, but Jason Landon could have...well...I'll stop there.

The point of this is that searching old newspapers on Google is really fun. I never thought to check for myself in the archives until the other day. My dad asked me why he can't see his local paper from when he was a kid. I told him how a lot of papers are in Google now, and you can scroll through actual images of them. I decided to look him up, and found an article proving once and for all that the story he always told us about almost being on The Ed Sullivan Show is really true. (He won some kind of essay contest for Pop Warner football and went to New York to be on the show, but Teresa Brewer ran long and he never made it on the air.)

So then I checked for myself, and there was this one story from the '88 Ridgefield-Norwalk game at Aldrich Field. I don't think I knew at the time that the Norwalk paper reported on this game. If Google ever archives The Ridgefield Press, that'd be like the holy grail--I was in the game stories every time, and not just because my mom often penned them. But we never had boxscores, like this Norwalk paper did! I think this is the first time I've seen my name in a printed boxscore. Or Matt Suffoletto's, for that matter.