Out for an evening walk, I could see the lights of the diamond and the faint noise of kids playing baseball. Moose Jaw has a couple of lighted ball diamonds and this one is specifically for girls softball. Parents sitting in the stands with blankets, girls doing their very unique chants and the crack of the bat and smack of a ball meeting a glove. These are the sights and sounds of a lovely spring evening.

I’ve had an on-and-off relationship with baseball. As a kid, it may have been the first sport I played and truly loved. At age 7 I had taken a deep dive into Major League baseball. I remember I had a young college kid as a coach and I equally impressed him and annoyed him by sharing obscure statistics and other facts about the Cincinnati Reds who was my team before the Blue Jays came on the scene. Long story short, golf replaced baseball as my summer sport around age 14 and baseball faded into 3 or 4th place of my top sports.

I played slo-pitch for a few years as an adult and even coached my daughter for a couple of years but for … Read the rest