Ray McConnell

Married,Father of 7, Stage 4 Metastatic Malignant Melanoma Survivor, Interested in Traditional Catholic Theology & Literature. Big Baseball/Detroit Tigers Fan!

[Lynn Henning @Lynn_Henning]

The Tigers are getting another lesson this weekend in what they need to do to beat the Guardians: collect personnel the way Cleveland does. Tigers Intelligence Report Sunday Brunch column. https://t.co/gmZGORiCs7

[Ray McConnell @RayPMcConnell]

@IffyTheDopester I read that many years ago…excellent book!

[Retro Coast @RetroCoast]

1982 Kenmore Series 70
Still runs as good as new

[Randy Wells @aaaawells]

Was told by a NPS employee this tree across from Lincoln’s home in Springfield IL is the last confirmed “witness tree” that would have been standing when Lincoln lived here and would have seen. Last night’s storm has destroyed it, staff say it can’t be saved #History #Lincoln

[Dietrich 🇻🇦 @jarldietrich]

Hardest CS Lewis quote of all time

[Mark W. @DurhamWASP]

“The function of the Church in every age has been conservative—to transmit undiminished and uncontaminated the creed inherited from its predecessors.”

Evelyn Waugh

Waugh by Henry Lamb

[ʙʏ ᴍᴏʀᴛᴀʟ ʜᴀɴᴅ @bymortalhand]

This is the Basilica of St. Josaphat in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, its massive dome was the second largest in the US upon completion in 1901.

[Mambo Italiano @mamboitaliano__]

If you had just one trip left in your lifetime, which country would you choose? 🧳🇮🇹

[𝙃𝙚𝙡𝙢𝙚𝙩 𝘼𝙙𝙙𝙞𝙘𝙩 @HelmetAddict]

There is something haunting about the numerous long ago abandoned baseball back stops that still exist in towns across the US. Rotting benches that haven't been used for a game in decades. Infields long ago vanished.

[Jim Koenigsberger @Jimfrombaseball]

"Mickey Lolich was starting with one less day of rest.
He pitched the first two innings like a man defusing a live bomb, working slowly and unhappily, and studying the problem at length before each new move."
Roger Angell.
"When we got to the World Series, the people of St. Louis were convinced that the Tigers were no match for their team.
I met Bob Gibson at an autograph signing function years later and he told me that as far as St. Louis was concerned, the 1968 World Series never happened."
Mickey Lolich.
"Mickey Lolich was far from a conventional athlete.
Labelled as too heavy, too slow, and too unconventional, Lolich was dismissed by scouts and sportswriters early in his career.
But with a devastating fastball and deceptive left-handed delivery, he steadily rose through the ranks, eventually joining the Detroit Tigers in 1963.
Over the next 13 seasons, Mickey Lolich would become one of the most durable pitchers of his era, known for throwing complete games with near-superhuman consistency."
"It doesn't seem like such a big deal to me."
Mickey Lolich after becoming the eighth pitcher to win three games in a seven-game Series.
Mickey Lolich won 14 games and started 30+ games for 11 years straight (1964-1974). His HOF credentials rival many who are there. 3.44 ERA, over 200 wins and over 2,800 Ks. World Series MVP.
ALWAYS in my HOF!!!

[John Ocasio-Rodham Nolte @NolteNC]

Last night's movie...

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), A

I love this movie the more I watch it, even though it really shouldn't work. It's stage-bound, John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart are 30 years too old for their roles, and some of the performances are pretty broad.

Its themes are what work, the underlying story of how a wilderness becomes a garden (as Vera Miles' character tells it); the idea that legends (or lies) can lead to more good than a truth, even when the carrier of that lie -- a good man -- is left to burden it; the tragedy of Wayne's character Tom Doniphon, another of Ford's men who civilized the West but find they have no place in civilization.

Also satisfying are the hat tips to "Stagecoach" (1939)...

How Wayne's characters in both classics light cigarettes with a lantern and can only promise the woman he loves a half-built cabin.

How Aces & Eights (Wild Bill Hickok's famous dead man's hand) foreshadows the death of characters.

How Andy Devine's character in "Stagecoach" is working to save money to marry Julietta, even though she has a larger family than he would like. Then, in "Liberty Valance," his character is married to Julietta and her massive family.

How the "Overland Stagecoach" is used in both.

And both are basically four-act movies. After the Stagecoach survives the Indian attack, there's the fourth act with the famous shootout between Ringo and the three Plummer Brothers. After Liberty Valance is killed, "Liberty Valance" has a fourth act with the vote for a DC representative.

Wonderful stuff.

[Ray McConnell @RayPMcConnell]

RT @Lynn_Henning: Everyone's acting as if the Tigers need to decide -- now -- whether to peddle Skubal, Mize and others. But for reasons ob…

[JoeBoo @JoeBoo3]

He's allowed to do that? #DNMW

[Ray McConnell @RayPMcConnell]

@kturet I had been trying to find that Mitchell and Ness shirt for many years, and I finally found one in my size for sale on eBay, and it still had the tag!

[Ray McConnell @RayPMcConnell]

Sporting my new Tigers 1935 World Series shirt

[🎶𝗖𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗠𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗱𝗶𝗲𝘀 ✨ @Old_But_Gold50s]

You've never seen a scene convey so much meaning without any dialogue.

[Hidden History @HiddenHistoryYT]

82 years ago today, eight American sailors jumped onto a sinking Nazi submarine in the middle of the Atlantic.

What they pulled out of it changed the war. And the Navy buried the whole story for years.

First, you need to know that U-505 was already cursed. German sailors called her the unluckiest boat in the fleet. In October 1943, during a brutal British depth-charge attack, her own captain shot himself in the head in the control room, in front of his crew. He remains the only submarine commander in history known to have killed himself underwater in combat. His second-in-command calmly took over, rode out the attack, and sailed her home.

Eight months later, her luck ran out completely.

June 4, 1944. Two days before D-Day. Captain Daniel Gallery's hunter-killer group, built around the escort carrier USS Guadalcanal, had been stalking U-boats off West Africa. Gallery had an idea his superiors considered borderline insane: don't sink the next one. Capture it. No US Navy crew had boarded and taken an enemy warship on the high seas since 1815.

The destroyer escort USS Chatelain caught U-505 on sonar and fired a salvo of hedgehog bombs. The U-boat broke the surface 700 yards away. Gunfire raked the conning tower, wounding her captain. He gave the order to abandon ship.

The Germans rushed out so fast they botched the scuttling. The sub was flooding, but her engines were still running. She was circling the battle at six knots, empty, sinking, and very possibly rigged with demolition charges.

So Lt. Albert David and eight men from USS Pillsbury chased her down in a whaleboat, leaped aboard, and climbed down the hatch into a dark, flooding submarine that could explode or go under at any second. They shut the scuttling valves, disarmed the charges, and stopped the flooding.

Down there they found the prize: Enigma cipher machines and roughly 900 pounds of codebooks and charts. Current settings. The keys to the German navy's secret communications.

But here's the catch. The treasure was only valuable if Germany never found out. One leak and Berlin changes every code overnight.

So the Navy ran one of the great cover-ups of the war. The sub was towed 1,700 miles to Bermuda and given a fake American name: USS Nemo. Around 3,000 sailors were sworn to total silence. The 58 captured German crewmen vanished into a POW camp in rural Louisiana, hidden even from the Red Cross. Germany declared U-505 lost with all hands and notified the families. The dead men were alive in Louisiana, and their boat was working for the US Navy.

The secret held until the war ended.

Lt. David received the Medal of Honor, the only one awarded in the Atlantic Fleet in all of WWII.

And the submarine? In 1954, Chicagoans raised $250,000 to bring her home. She was towed across Lake Michigan and dragged through the streets of Chicago to the Museum of Science and Industry.

She's still sitting there right now. You can walk through her.

[Matt @matttillotson]

The problem with Michigan weather:

Summer and fall are unbeatable and unreplicable.

You can move away to a warmer climate. I did.

But it's not the same.

Not the same cool breeze. Not the same sound the wind makes moving through the trees. Not the same pine smell. The grass feels and smells different.

So you can leave, and miss all that. Or you can stay, and put up with rest of it. The cold, the clouds, the mud and snow. And find something good in that, too. I did.

[Ray McConnell @RayPMcConnell]

So much vital information in this short book, especially in the conclusion: