Karl Lindholm: Be careful of pickleball — it’s addictive!

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)

I relate today, loyal readers, the story of the Demolition Derby on the campus of Middlebury College in the spring of 1972, at a time in the life of the country when college students were mostly out of their minds. 

Recently I wrote to a number of area coaches, both in the high schools and at the college, asking them to reflect on their experience coaching during the pandemic — “just a few sentences, off the top of your head.” I received a number of very thoughtful r … (read more)

In May, I helped my daughter Jane coach the Monkton Little League farm team — true beginners, five- to eight-year-olds.

Sammy Smith found out five minutes before the first pitch that he was in the starting line-up last Friday in the first game of the NCAA regional baseball tournament in Rochester.

I remember walking into Farrell’s Men’s Store in Middlebury my freshman year in college. Jimmy Farrell, the proprietor, shook my hand and asked my name. I told him and he immediately said, “You’re from Rutland.”

On Friday, April 15, the Middlebury College baseball team took on NESCAC archrival Williams in the first game of a big three-game weekend series. 

It’s a good thing the baseball bigwigs ended their bickering this spring when they did.

Understand there was always going to be baseball, even if the Big Boys had not ended their acrimonious standoff.

I’m so old, I predate the jump shot.