We all complain about work from time to time, right? What I want to know, though, is… are you willing to admit the extremely cool things about your employer? Working for Amazon.com has a lot of perks… 3 month sabbaticals come to mind… but one of my favorites is our ‘Fishbowls’… where Authors, Bands and various others come in to talk about their goods… Today, we had a living legend, Cal Ripken (and his brother, Billy) in talking about their new book, Play Baseball the Ripken Way : The Complete Illustrated Guide to the Fundamentals.
What made it even better, was that greedy me got my grubby hands on a signed copy. Ahh… bliss.
I don’t know what I expected going in. I expected them to hawk their book (got that). However, I was pleasantly surprised to hear them talking about how much they cared about baseball, and teaching how to play, and enjoy, baseball to the youth of the World. They were definitely witty, even knowing that they’ve told the same jokes to audiences from NYC to LA. Billy’s self-deprecating style made you really think about what it must be like to live life in the shadow of a talented sibling — we all think we understand that because of our brother/sister who’s ‘smarter/faster/nicer…’ than us… but can you just imagine growing up with the Iron Man? That could really drive someone to the bottle 🙂
How do I rate it? I’ll give it 8 1/2 thumbs up, out of 9 and 3/4 🙂 If you have kids involved with youth baseball, you really should check out the book.