Four Baggers and Foreclosures

Better know an Expo edition! In early 1992, I was looking at Montreal Expos box scores in the daily newspaper. I would often see a player listed as: “Cnffrco” or “C’nf’o” if space was very limited. Sometimes listed as a pinch hitter, the mystery man was usually playing first or third base.  Took a while, but I finally read a game recap mentioning this player by first and last name; Archi Cianfrocco.  This was weeks after I first saw his poorly abbreviated name in a newspaper. There was no MLB Network in 1992. Beyond the daily newspapers (and USA Today's Baseball Weekly) you only had whatever MLB coverage ESPN was willing to air on a given day, for coverage of out of market games. It's also fair to say the Montreal Expos probably ranked 26th out of the (then) 26 MLB teams, in terms of who was deemed worthy of ESPN's air time.  Being an Expos fan in Minnesota was difficult. No interleague play in the early 1990's, so the National League Expos would never play the Ameri...

An unforeseen tragedy struck the Gates Demolition Diary Project. On Sunday, February 2nd, 2014, I took my usual set of Gates demolition photos, plus wherever else I went that morning. Upon getting home, I copied them to my laptop, from the digital camera, re-saved all of them in Photoshop, then wet about my business. A few days after taking that week's pictures, the hard drive on my already old Mac PowerBook G4 fried. Despite being very consistent in keeping my files backed up, I hadn't yet copied that week's photos to an external storage device. Worse yet, I already deleted them off my digital camera. And I never do that before they're backed up. There was no avoiding it. Gates demolition pictures from Sunday February 2, 2014 were lost forever.  I was so distraught over this, that I skipped the week of Feb 9th completely. During that time, I had a conversation with the Mac guru at my job. He had me send him the model number and he'd steer me in the direction of har...