The great play-by-play man Jason Benetti and I had wanted to do something together. This is it. For far too long, baseball scouts have been comparing ballplayers to, well, only ballplayers. We all know that’s not a wide enough focus. Zoom out, people.

In Good Comp, Bad Comp, Benetti and I compare a ballplayer we appreciate to absolutely anything. We may go high-minded; a player has been a painter, a musician, a novel, and a TV series. Or we may go low brow; players have been likened to a milkshake, a tractor, and a big tall statue. You don’t know. Neither do we, until we do it.

Then you vote. Who got it righter? Or wrongest? You decide.

All episodes will be archived here. The first one was Bartolo Colon.

During the second one, we reveal who won the first one. And so on. And they told two friends. And so on.

The second one was Rickey Henderson. Spoiler alert: I nailed it.

Episode 3 is Randy Johnson. Obelisk or Novel? Watch.

Episode 4? The incomparable Old Hoss Radbourn.

Suggest candidates in the comments below.

Check back for COMP goodness; they’ll all be right here.

You are never, ever done growing. You’re never finished learning. If you’re lucky.

You’ve been on or near the air in Chicago since fall 1994, when a long haired singer in a 10 piece funk band was given the opportunity to intern at Sportsradio 820. This came on the heels of 4 broadcasting-filled years in college, followed by a 2 year sabbatical to fritter about in pursuit of rock stardom.

Since that internship, when you showed up so often in wildly tattered ripped black jeans, you’ve become more professional, more comfortable, and have gotten closer and closer to the games. Decades later, the Score carried the White Sox for 5 years after you’d risen to midday host. A season-long all access pass teaches you the secret lesson on how to be comfortable at the ballpark: it’s the people, stupid.

Genuinely noticing and interacting with the parking lot guys, the elevator attendants, the PR folks, or the soundmen in the back of the radio booth….this is the stuff that cements your sense of place. You’re on the clock daily there, everyone, and it’s a unique process of assimilation. You’ve all learned how the sausage is made, via varying personal timelines. You have to balance your irrepressible excitement of WORKING AT A BASEBALL GAME with acknowledging glances that indicate the banality of professional repetition. The trick is to outwardly portray that it’s not overwhelming to be there, while protecting the inner gratitude and truth of just how damn lucky you are.

And over the years you share some of that with people who get it. You talk baseball, kids, rock and roll, life. You finally feel mostly at home in ballparks on both sides of a 2 team town. It’s a dream you don’t want to end.

In 2016, you infiltrated baseball life as insidiously as a talk radio guy could; covering 4 of the World Series games as media, including Game 7 in Cleveland. Crazily, you ended up watching the celebration over the shoulders of Pat Hughes and Ron Coomer in the flagship station’s booth.

You hosted midday coverage of the Cubs parade, culminating with an open air broadcast perch between the masses and the podium. Insane.

“What if this is as good as it gets?” You figured it was. Especially when, less than 2 years later, professional humbling came at the hands of a newly re-crowned executive-king, determined to reshuffle an already winning hand now that the table was his. It’s his card game, you accepted, though the bitterness lingered and threatened to cripple.

But don’t use the wheelchair just because it has become available. You saw others quit, and that will not be you. You have to keep grinding, like a slugging corner outfielder who suddenly finds himself Designated For Assignment. It was clearly time to grab a first baseman’s mitt, and see if you could play there, or even DH.

This brings us present, and finds me offered a few days of doing pregame and postgame for the Cubs radio network. Thanks, Mitch Rosen.

And thank you, Zach Zaidman. Zach is an absolute gem of a radio teammate, and always has been, withstanding abuse as a Bears guest on snarky shows while never losing his cool. Now, he’s been tasked with highly structured pre/post for Hughes and Coomer, and playing foil/producer/backup/appreciative chorus during 162 baseball games. He does it with passion, curiosity, and humility. He has enhanced a really good radio team, and along with engineer Dave Miska fills the room with genuinely warm, excellent people.

Zach has been supportive of Spiegelian inclusion, conceptually, and has patiently guided the newbie’s education while simultaneously stepping up to fill the full time play by play shoes of an absolute legend. He has made it sound easy, when it is most definitely not, and still frequently turned around to make sure I was doing okay. Class.

And thank you, Ron Coomer. “You need anything in the locker room, you let me know,” said the long time big leaguer who has a daily audience with the manager. I’ve been around the players and the clubhouse plenty, so I’m good, but knowing he had my back if anything got weird was beautiful. And when it came time for Coom and I to interact with his “Keys To The Game,” or the occasional mid-inning banter, he was attentive and encouraging.

Oh by the way, he’s brilliant. What he deduces from a baseball game from above is waaaay more than he sometimes chooses to share and describe. That self-editing is usually done for the quality of the broadcast, so as to not overwhelm the listener, and so as to not distract the flow of the mellifluous Hughes. But I have gotten much smarter between innings.

Back to you. The first time you did pregame; there were serious nerves. You receive those butterflies like a challenging, non-threatening reacquaintance; this is not the occasional performance anxiety hosting a talk show solo can bring. This is the exhilaration of the new. Get the sponsorships in. Fill the gaps with facts and numbers, harder core baseball content than normal conversation. Somehow, eventually, put your own personality and entertainment in the shows, but slow down…just complete the task as instructed for the moment.

Don’t miss the national anthem. Do the legal ID. Give the producer clean in-cues for the pre-produced pieces. Hit all your commercial break out-cues cleanly. Don’t curse or say anything offensive that will mark the end of your career. Be interesting. Overall, try and sound like the audio equivalent of what you learned to physically represent all those years ago at the ballpark: comfortable assurance that does not negate the absurd joy of being there.

Because here’s the thing: any of us who got into the sports media business, along with the millions who thought about it but went another way, got hooked on the idea because of the Games. The Games are the thing, around which have sprung sports sections, talk shows, blogs, podcasts, Twitter, and the rest of it. Most of us have worked for the Remora fish while the Great White shark hunts and eats. The Game, man, this new job has brought you into the Game.

You finally made it to the show. You can attest to have seen no fungus on anyone’s shower shoes. Yes Crash, they hit white baseballs for batting practice, and the ballpark is like a cathedral.

Postgame is a unique animal. You’ve fully embraced and experienced the laconic pace of a 3 hour ballgame. Then, bam. With the insane pace of sponsored elements, the drive to include all you have gleaned and written during the course of the game, commercial breaks, waiting for the manager’s postgame comments, and cycling through full highlights, a beginner’s in-show mental state can properly be summed up this way: BLBLBLLBLBLBLFNNDKSKBLLDJFJSKKAAKLFJFGNDFNJSDKDFKKFKLDEIEIDSKDDF.

Afterwards, breathe. Thank Herb Lawrence and Dave Miska for their awesomeness. Gather your things. Text your wife that you’re headed towards transportation. Walk quietly, solitarily, down the hall and the stairs, emerging to an impossibly quiet and barren upper concourse. The stillness is beautiful. Pause and mindfully try to take it in. Walk down the ramps, or lazily use the elevator. Exit the ballpark and dart skillfully through drunks, cops, and traffic like a slow motion Devin Hester. On your way home, dissect the job you’ve done, making sure to re-frame mistakes that elicited shame as teachable moments that will make you better. Breathe some more. Call your wife, if she responded to the earlier text. If she’s managed to fall asleep without you, don’t dare disturb her.

That calm assurance you portrayed fades away, and you try to let the exuberant gratitude fill the void, laughingly dismissing the useless doubt.

Do it again, better, tomorrow. Let yourself dream about just how good it could be.

 I just married the most ardent Cubs fan in town.

OK, I guess we have to define “”ardent.” She doesn’t use face paint. She doesn’t have any logo jewelry, tattoos or piercings. Our home isn’t festooned with memorabilia. She can’t recite endless stats of the current team, nor rattle off rosters from previous years.

But she feels the love for her team as passionately as anyone I’ve ever been around. Her father brought her to the Wrigley Field bleachers as a little girl, usually with her sister and four young female cousins, six Pierce Street cuties watching the game while the old man had a couple. It was her Sunday bliss.

So now she maintains one can never be in a bad mood at Wrigley Field. She glows there.

Our wedding day was scheduled with an afternoon game in mind. Morning ceremony, followed by Bloody Marys and breakfast, all wrapped up by noon so guests who’d want in could make it to first pitch of the Cubs game.

Well of course guests wanted in. We were paying.

To read the full article, with it’s thrilling conclusion and genuine “One To Grow On” lesson, click here.

Curiosity can masquerade as a sneaky byproduct of procrastination. Inertia can then be intellectually rationalized.

I have not written about the baseball season of two years ago nearly as much as I wish I had. Sometimes I think that’s holding me back from being truly present and productive. A life long deep-seated need to document all good experiences and capture them forever has met its match.

2016 is the greatest year in which I have ever been close to baseball.

That was a difficult sentence to phrase, because the feelings and experiences I desperately need to package and file away are about the year. The whole thing. And like a young hitter’s progress, they’re not necessarily linear.

For starters, I am not “in” baseball. I have been “around” baseball, and therefore “close to” baseball a great deal. I have spent time in the dugouts and press boxes of Fenway, Wrigley, Comiskey 2, Dodger, and several more.

I have seen games in all of those, plus old Yankee, old Shea, Baltimore’s old Memorial Stadium, Milwaukee’s old County Stadium, The Vet in Philly, and others….19 in all. I recently wrote about ballpark collecting.

Funny. Here I am, trying to write about 2016 in so completist and perfect a fashion that I have started with the history of my baseball everything. Such is the power of that season.

The history of my baseball everything begins with Dad. And he was part of 2016. It continued with brother Bob. And he was part of 2016. It is felt deeply in my son, and he was there. It is revitalized by my fiery Latina, and she was there.

The history of my baseball everything was dominated by a love of the Red Sox for my first 21 years, then control was wrestled slowly, achingly away via new long-lasting proximity to the intense character and history of the Chicago Cubs and White Sox. For 26 years I have worked here, lived with these teams, covered them, and felt the fans’ roller coaster with as much sports empathy as I could muster.

The Red Sox finally broke their curse 12 years into my Chicago immersion, and I felt an odd, wistful distance from that title in 2004. 7 years later, the Red Sox’ mastermind came to me.

Theo Epstein brought hope and credibility to Wrigley, and an inconceivable 5 years culminated with a title in 2016.

My baseball everything had found me and smacked me in the present, bringing levels of satisfaction, understanding, and access that will never be topped. I was on the field after the Cubs beat the Dodgers to go their first World Series since 1945. I went to 4 games of that Fall Classic as media, and 3 as a fan. I have stories of postgame interactions I can never tell.

It’s not going to get better. I have to admit that.

This, I think, is my fear of the writing; that the writing will be letting it go.

But I have to trust that by writing it, I am doing the opposite of letting it go. I am strengthening the experience. I am setting myself up for the kind of legible refresher I’ll need for however long I live. And this is me sharing stories that my son will need in order to truly know his dad. These are stories maybe you will someday need. They might be stories we need right now.

You’ve been there with me, as I’ve tried to write the truth.

I took you to Mesa, as the future started to take shape.
I took you to the playoffs, when they vanquished the cardinals in 2015.
I took you to “the big bed” in my home during the Giants series in 2016, when my son so obviously cemented himself as a Cubs fan that all I could do was lean back and grin.
I took you to Game 7.

So, where else have we not gone?

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