Every year we come down for the baseball conference, it’s cold and rainy, and every year, every earthworm and slug within six feet of the front-entrance apron at the Crestwood Suites decides it’s going to try to cross to the other side. None of them ever gets there — the earthworms run out of gas and die, and the slugs could make it if they could clamber over the dead earthworms, but they can’t — so the front apron turns into a killing field-slash-hopscotch court, the hotel guests hopping from empty space to empty space. I inevitably lose my balance and land on a juicy worm.

Just as inevitably, I get the Lassie-esque music from the “Sluggy” skit stuck in my head. “Son, go in the house. Get my spatula.”

We got home from the conference to find this horrendous story in the headlines — a historic car crash on a stretch of I-65 I’d just traveled down on Thursday, in a Smart, in the rain, battling crosswinds. If I hadn’t wanted to get off the interstates before, I definitely do now.

The conference itself went quite well. Ferguson Jenkins is not the most organized public speaker I’ve ever heard, but he’s a good storyteller (and very handsome). And if you’d like to read the collected presentations from 2008-9, you can find it right here.

A few quotations from the proceedings:

Jim Carothers, University of Kansas, on “Baseball Facts and Fictions”: “Anyway: back to midgets.”

One of our fearless organizers, Warren Tormey, Middle Tennessee State University, on the 1919 Black Sox: “Fantastic team, talent-wise, just dysfunctional.”

Fergie Jenkins: “What you learn, you learn.”

I learned that apparently I look like the woman on PBS’s History Detectives. I’ve never watched that show, so I had to look it up; which woman did he mean, Elyse Luray or Gwen Wright? I guess I could look a little like Elyse, but I had my glasses on, so maybe it’s Gwen?

Next stop: Memphis, TN.

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