Karl Lindholm: Kelly, Noelle, and ‘the Bat!’

“The Bat” sits prominently on the windowsill in the office of Middlebury College softball coach Kelly Bevere. It’s a crummy old bat really, not much good for anything now, worn out, pretty much out of hits, but assuming a deservedly honored spot. 

The image of a baseball scout in the popular mind is that of a wise and wizened veteran of the game, the way scouts are portrayed in “Money Ball,” for example, or like Clint Eastwood in the movie “Trouble with the Curve.” Well, the game has changed.

This weekend is the 100th Middlebury Winter Carnival and I find myself absorbed, perhaps ironically given the above, by Middlebury ski history and culture.

I love watching movies with my kids, now adults. These days, that usually means watching from home in a darkened living room on the big TV, without phones and other distractions.  

If I were the impresario of the Middlebury Men’s Alumni Basketball Weekend, I would have done it up right, with great hoopla.

About 10 years ago, I got wind of a plan to initiate a Middlebury College Athletics Hall of Fame to coincide with the construction of the new field house. I thought this was a very bad idea and I wrote to the big shots at Middlebury and told them so.

Now, dear readers, what you may not know is “Voice of the Red Sox” Joe’s relationship to Middlebury and Middlebury College. 

It seemed Sam knew everybody. He was a visible presence on campus: a robust man physically, warm and expressive. He loved teaching, he loved coaching football, and above all, he loved working with students.

Next fall, a year from now, Middlebury Union High School will add a varsity sport and have a girls’ varsity volleyball team, not a club but a fully sanctioned team.

Every time I read a reference to “pickleball,” the next words are “the fastest growing sport in America.”

Richard Hawley, a Ripton resident, has been writing his “diary” for more than a decade — and he will no doubt get to a million words.

In 1972, Peter Gammons started writing baseball “notes” in the Sunday Boston Globe, a whole page of baseball news in which the baseball beat writer “empties out the notebook.” Over the years it has become a Globe staple, a must read. 

Paul Politano hardly played golf at all growing up in southern Vermont. “My dad never let me play,” he said in a conversation last week outside the golf shop at Middlebury’s Ralph Myhre Golf Course, where Paul has been the golf pro since 2017.

It could hardly have been more exciting: in the championship winner-take-all game at Centennial Field, the Vermont Lake Monsters, defending champs in the Future College Baseball League, were down by a run, 6-5, in the bottom of the ninth to the Nashua (N. … (read more)

William Clarence Matthews and I are very close, though he was born in Selma, Alabama, in 1877 and died in Washington, D.C., in 1928. My home is festooned with pictures of Matty, I have a vast collection of Matthewsiana, eBay treasures, displayed throughou … (read more)