It’s my dad’s 63rd birthday today. I’m going to write a bit about him, if that’s okay, and hopefully talk about baseball along the way. It might not seem like it from the jump, but there will be a Yankees hook, I promise.
My dad has lived a very different life than me. He grew up in the East End of Hamilton, a rough-and-tumble area of the city known for being particularly hard-nosed. He is wickedly intelligent, but was unable to continue his education beyond high school and instead went into the trades. Like everyone else of a certain age around that time, my dad worked in a steel mill for north of 30 years before being unceremoniously forced into retirement when the factory that once ruled our city went belly up.