Douglas Whaley

As a young man my father was headed for a career as a professional baseball player (he was a catcher) until he threw his arm out while in college. As I discussed in a prior post [“My Competitive Parents”], both of my parents were athletes all their lives. In that department, I was a disappointment to Dad, who always assumed I would share their enthusiasm for sports, but, for reasons I will discuss someday, that was more or less impossible. I was a bowler in two leagues in 1968-69 when I moved to Chicago to practice law, and, when in Bermuda [see “My Year in Bermuda”], I was the catcher for my Navy Supply Department team. I was an okay catcher, and I could bat, but I couldn’t run very fast and that made me an easy out. During that year I spent in Bermuda, I mostly lived on the Air Force Base with my parents and sister, Mary Beth (who is two years younger than me). Dad’s plane-refueling squadron fielded a softball team in the base’s slowpitch league. In this form of softball ther...

Yes, robots are taking over more and more jobs these days, and we—the luddites—mightily protest in vain.  But there are some tasks, important to us, where robots will do things much better than humans ever can, and for such tasks we should welcome the efficiency these mechanical helpers bring. Using AI to replace the job of baseball’s home plate umpire to call pitches as balls or strikes is an obvious example. I am a major baseball fan, watching close to a hundred games a year (almost all of them being my beloved Cubbies—see Related Posts below).   In recent years most televised games show us a graphic of the strike zone and whether, according to the computer, the pitched ball actually touched it or not.   The real life umpire cannot see this graphic and continues to call balls and strikes in the old fashioned way: giving his best estimate of whether the ball was actually in the strike zone.   Professional umpires are trained well an...

. I've recently returned from a trip to California where I made the keynote speech for a law school symposium at the behest the law professor organizing the event who is (a) a former student of mine and (b) gay.   At one point we were talking and he commented that when people learn he's a rabid sports fan they're usually surprised since gay men (unlike lesbians) are reputedly not interested in sports.   I told him I'd had the same experience. I grew up in a sports family.   As is related in numerous blog posts ("My Competitive Parents"), my parents were both fine athletes (as golfers they once won the Bermuda International Amateurs Couples Open), and my sister and I were raised with sports as a constant in our lives.   One post ("Put Out at Home Plate") details how the proudest my father ever was of me was the time I was the catcher for his Air Force slow-pitch team and had a stellar moment at home plate.   In other sports I was mediocre at best....

I was reared in a sports family, played some sports myself, and follow the Chicago Cubs, and the basketball and football teams from Ohio State, Maryland, and Texas (all schools where I either work or which gave me a degree).  My husband, David Vargo, is the opposite.  When we first got together over six years ago he knew nothing about sports and wasn’t keen to learn.  But he joined the chosen family I have here in Columbus, Ohio, and they are all sports fans (a little nuts for the Buckeyes) so David gamely learned something about baseball, basketball, and, most importantly in Columbus, Ohio, football.  We have the chosen family over for lots of the games. Our Chosen Family Celebrates a Buckeye Victory David and I at the Blackout Game The first year he was here we went to the famous “Black Out” game at the Horseshoe in Columbus when the Buckeyes had the crowd dress all in black to defeat Penn State in a freezing night game. ...

My Mother and Her Trophies Whaley Family 1954 Robert Whaley, my father was in the Air Force so we moved a lot when I was young.  In the summer of 1954 he was transferred to Yokota Air Force Base in Japan, where we would live for three years without returning to the States.  I turned 11 that September and was 13 when we returned in 1957, and it was an interesting immersion in a completely different world.  All of us change dramatically as we morph into teenagers, and for me it was like coming to life in Japan and not quite knowing who or what I was.  The United States seemed a mythical land which I only vaguely remembered, and appeared to be some sort of paradise for kids my age.  At the base PX I would buy, say, a Superman comic book and see advertised in it all sorts of similar comic books that were not for sale at that PX.  Did American kids really have the ability to go into a drug store in the U.S.A. and walk up to a display of all th...

Wrigley Field I grew up in a sports family [see “My Competitive Parents” at http://douglaswhaley.blogspot.com/2010/01/my-competitive-parents.html ] and to this day watch a lot of sports [“On Being a Gay Sports Fan” at http://douglaswhaley.blogspot.com/2012/03/on-being-gay-sports-fan.html ].   When I was newly out of law school and in my mid-twenties I moved to Chicago and, in my spare time, often went out to Wrigley Field to see the Chicago Cubs play.   This was a great time for watching a fabled group of Cubs: third baseman Ron Santo, first baseman Ernie Banks, pitcher Ferguson Jenkins, outfielder Billy Williams, and the manager Leo Durocher.   Wrigley Field was and is a wonderful ball park, and its fans in attendance are magical, always joining in lustily at the 7 th inning stretch for the singing of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”   Though the Cubbies failed to make the World Series either of the two years (1968, 1969) that I attended their games...