Hi folks,

Happy Friday! I hope it is as nice where you are as it has been here in Vermont over the last few days. Summer time weather in April in these parts never lasts for long but I’ll take it as long as we can get it.

A bit of an update on the plans for this blog in the weeks ahead.

Today is the 30-year anniversary of the first stop on my 1991 baseball trip. On April 9, 1991 we visited the first of the 178 ballparks we saw that summer on “Bill & Sue’s Excellent Adventure” and the weather in Oakland, CA that day was as lovely as it is here this afternoon. The A’s who were the defending American League Champions that season bested the Minnesota Twins 7-2 that evening, although it would be the Twins that ended up World Champions after our last game in October.

My absence from this site over the last few weeks has certainly had something to do with college basketball, as I predicted in my last post. However, I have also begun work on a new, actually quite old, writing gig and have been spending my keyboard time dedicated to that. After several fits and starts over the years I have finally picked up the project of writing a book about my excellent adventure of 1991. I am planning to use the title I have always intended, In League with America, and have about seven chapters completed in draft form. My hope is to finish sometime later this spring or summer. Stay tuned.

But here’s the thing…

This site, since I first launched it nearly six years ago, has really had one central theme, helping Americans try to rediscover common cause with each other. To be clear, I still care very deeply about this mission and plan to write about it more as ideas that might help occur to me.

But last summer, discouraged by politics and searching for things to do in my pandemic-isolated world I began to blog about the baseball parks I has visited 29 years earlier and included a video series called the Low Mileage Tour.

While I would not say that either of these topics has earned me a large audience, they have both seemed to strike a chord with a few people that found value in them and like most writers I would guess, that makes me want to keep writing. However, I do not think the are necessarily the same people.

A Venn Diagram of the PFA audiences might go something like this. There are the folks that started reading the Project to Find America over the years and found the discussion of how to get Americans to listen to each other again worthwhile, I’ll label them the Common Causers.

Then, more recently, there have been some folks that were kind enough to take interest in my baseball travels…Baseball Boosters, let’s say.

And then there is a probably growing list of folks that started in one of the other two camps and are now just confused and wondering how I keep showing up in their inbox.

So, over the next few months as I work on trying to finally finish In League with America, I will be also be writing a very short daily post about where we were thirty years ago today. If you are in the Baseball Booster camp or just think it might be occasionally interesting and want to get it I would like to have you along for the ride. You will find today’s first post at inleaguewithamericabook.wordpress.com and can sign up for daily updates there. You can also find the daily posts on my In League with America Facebook page

On the other hand, if baseball isn’t your thing I do not want to keep sending you daily missives about a baseball road trip that took place 30 years ago. The discussion here will remain focused on the topic of reconnecting America.

Whichever camp you are in, thanks for reading! I hope you have a joyful Friday night.