As a writer who seems to specialize in the "xoxo" of the game, I often set out on a journalistic journey of sorts when I put words to paper. Although my intention is a good one, the motive often becomes a concentrated effort to elicit a certain response.
I'm not sure if it is a gift or simply the willingness to open up my heart, but more often than not, my goal is to make my audience feel the sorrow associated with an event. To warm the heart by moistening the heart. To make my readers feel the pain that the participants in the story felt themselves and to relate it to their own life.
And then sometimes, the story is so incredibly sad all on it's own, that I don't need to say a word. I simply need to recount the events and let the reader feel on their own.
Mike Coolbaugh was a career minor league baseball player who played nearly 1700 minor league baseball games, rode countless hours in the back of countless buses to nowhere and spent countless hours away from his wife and kids. Over the course of those 1700 games, Coolbaugh got an extraordinary number of hits and fielded an infinite number of ground balls from his position at third base.
As ...
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