John Bolton - November 21, 2023


Baseball Memories from Sarnia Ontario


Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

168.56317

Word count

953

Sentence count

39

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, John Bolton talks about a photo he holds of a baseball team he played on in the late 80s and early 90s. He also talks about some of the other players he played with on that team.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.880 Hi, it's John Bolton in Calgary, and I understand that there was some interest in a photo posted
00:00:06.820 of one of my baseball teams from way back when, and it was interesting, my sister texted
00:00:12.880 that photo to me, and I texted back to her, I don't know why you're wasting my time with 0.99
00:00:17.400 this, and I sent a picture of me holding that exact photo from this little book right here,
00:00:23.600 and this photo album that I've got, and I'm going to go through some of the names, not
00:00:26.940 a lot of them because it'll take too long, but it might bring back some memories for
00:00:30.480 people.
00:00:31.400 So first up, this is the team that went to Puerto Rico, and there were some other players
00:00:35.600 that went along with us, we brought some other players to play as Team Canada, one of which
00:00:39.460 was Mike Gardner, of course he went on to play in Major League Baseball, but let me go through
00:00:44.000 the names real quick here, that's me right there, then you've got Mohamed Rabi, you've
00:00:47.920 got Mike Hinchberger, Glenn Harding, then this is Mark Bryan, moving along to the second row
00:00:54.780 we've got Andy Schott, Jeff Panik, just some quick thoughts on the Panik family, I often
00:01:00.620 think of Jeff and Joe and Jamie and Irene and the whole family, I didn't know the older
00:01:05.160 brother, I believe it was Joe Jr. as well, but I think of them often, just tragic circumstances
00:01:11.100 with them, a great, great family.
00:01:12.720 My dad, when he went to Puerto Rico with this team, along with Mark McGugan's father, they
00:01:18.300 stayed in the same room and they had a bar set up there, and there's some great photos somewhere
00:01:22.400 in a box of Irene Panik, my dad, Mr. McGugan, and all the parents partying in my dad's room
00:01:28.620 while they were in Puerto Rico.
00:01:30.280 You've got Dave Dot, you've got Don Dabonovich, then you've got Tim Lannan up here, we've
00:01:36.320 got coach Len Cook, you've got Steve Rand, Mark McGugan, Jack Rand in the back row who helped
00:01:43.180 out coaching, and then you've got Dave Crombine and my favorite coach of all time, Gary Gallant.
00:01:47.860 Now, I understand Mike Paggio had posted a comment under that original photo, Mike's
00:01:53.420 not in this picture, it says right down here, absent is Mike Paggio, so Mike, you might pop
00:01:57.460 up in one of these pictures.
00:01:58.540 Let me show you some other ones.
00:02:00.720 Just some of the clippings, remember Dave Brody from the Sarnia Observer, I don't know
00:02:05.040 what ever happened to Dave, I haven't lived in Sarnia for more than 30 years.
00:02:08.920 Over here, we came fourth in Puerto Rico, and I even have the airline ticket.
00:02:13.260 When did we leave?
00:02:14.140 Is the date even on there?
00:02:15.360 Did they do that back then?
00:02:17.580 Doesn't even say the date on there, isn't that something?
00:02:22.260 Just some of the other clippings from the newspapers.
00:02:24.960 Remember this guy, anybody who may have played on this team?
00:02:27.800 Perry Mader, who played for Chatham, they called him Chatham Fireballer, and I think he
00:02:32.200 was the hardest pitcher we went up against when we played on these teams, way back when.
00:02:38.780 Guys who are on the team, remember this, we won the OBA title.
00:02:41.940 This is Kelly Kindersmaugh right here and Randy Petrie, and we went to Kingston in one
00:02:47.800 game, I remember, under the lights we played.
00:02:49.680 I think we won two to one.
00:02:51.160 Maybe somebody who was there can tell me what the score was.
00:02:54.260 It was a low-scoring game because you could hardly see because the lights were so bad.
00:02:58.160 A couple of more pictures from the championship-winning team.
00:03:15.980 And down at the bottom, you can see we've got Ed Fiorini, who was the coach of that team
00:03:22.600 as well, with Kelly Kindersmaugh and Randy Petrie.
00:03:28.980 There's a championship team right there.
00:03:30.800 I'll go through the names really, really quick for you.
00:03:33.160 We're going to start at the front and go left to right.
00:03:35.520 So you've got Daryl Fader, Rick Shansky, Dave Mercurio, Doug Wheeler, Andy Shaw.
00:03:42.540 In the back row, we'll go up here.
00:03:44.600 Let me just take a look.
00:03:45.720 My eyesight is poor.
00:03:46.820 I'm almost 60 now.
00:03:47.800 Lynn Armstrong, Ted Hewitt, Carl Shaw, and you've got Kelly Kindersmaugh, Randy Petrie,
00:03:55.240 got Brad Collier, Todd Lindsey, Jeff Panik, Mike Dabonovich, Tim Miracle, and me, along with
00:04:05.160 Coach Ed Fiorini.
00:04:13.260 There's a picture of me and Jeff Panik both working out the next season at the Sarnia Township
00:04:20.740 Arena with Frank Keane, who was one of the coaches.
00:04:25.240 Some of you might remember Harry Moore.
00:04:33.200 He was a Montreal Expo scout, and he was a bit of a poet as well.
00:04:37.240 Now, what I remember about Harry is he was always down at the ballpark, at Errol Russell
00:04:42.220 Park, talking to the players about how to get the barrel of the bat around to hit the ball.
00:04:47.640 He was a poet, and he did up a couple of poets for our teams.
00:04:51.020 One of these is from the 1979 SMAA, Ontario Champions, and the other one from just out
00:04:57.880 of his amazing imagination, and it mentions all of the players on the team in these poems.
00:05:03.640 So, they're pretty cool.
00:05:04.680 I hope you can see the text on these, but if you're on the team and you'd like me to send
00:05:09.140 you the actual poem in text, I'd be happy to do that for you.
00:05:21.020 And finally, some of the patches that were kept over the years from some of the baseball teams
00:05:30.580 from way back when.
00:05:32.600 It seems like yesterday, but it also seems like oh so long ago.
00:05:37.360 Thanks to Dad for keeping all this stuff.