So here we are again, on yet another Thursday Blog Day, and I’m going to get right to the fun part first. All of you who have read my book “Bats, Balls, & Burnouts” should recognize the name Pete Delkus. He’s all through the book, starting with the fact that he wrote one of the two “Foreward” sections for it (along with Del Worsham). After that, he appears regularly as a former teammate and roommate of mine, who became a very close friend. He is currently the Chief Meteorologist for WFAA TV in Dallas.

Pete is very big into social media as a way to communicate with WFAA viewers to keep them up to speed on the weather situation around the Dallas – Fort Worth area. He tweets a lot, posts numerous times a day on Facebook, and every now and then he’ll do a Facebook Live video stream. Viewers can make posts while he’s on, and he’ll answer their questions. It’s a pretty cool deal, even if you’re not in the DFW area.

I saw a teaser post he made, about doing the FB Live deal last Friday, so I knew what I had to do. When I logged in, I couldn’t resist the chance to actually post something that only Pete and I would know in common. And then I waited. Fortunately, the whole post is archived and still there.

So here’s what you need to do…  Go to this link:

https://www.facebook.com/petedelkus/

Once you’re on his FB page, you’re going to have to scroll down for a while. It’s all in chronological order, of course, and he makes many posts per day, especially if any noteworthy weather is about to arrive. You can see the date for each post at the top of it, and you need to scroll down until you get to May 4, then keep scrolling until you get to about midday on the 4th (which would be Cuatro de Mayo but that’s irrelevant.)

Once you see the archive of the streaming video (it will look exactly like the screen grab shot above) hit “Play” and enjoy. He notices my post about one minute and 20 seconds in, but it’s easier to just let it play because it’s a long show and it’s hard to nail a specific spot. The look on his face and the tone of his voice when he sees my post are both priceless.

Once he gets back to the regular stream of people’s questions, if you wait another minute or so you’ll see that he looks down and to his right. Turns out, he was looking at his phone because his wife Jacque was watching and she texted him a message about me, and a good one it was.

This whole deal totally cracked me up. And I think it did the same to Pete. And look at the bottom of the screen grab up above. Another baseball character from the book, John Parke (aka JP) is one of the people who “liked” Pete’s live stream. Small planet!

Question: What was the wording of my post, that only he and I would understand?

Answer: When we were living together in suburban St. Louis, during the winter of 1989-1990, I was really big into Melissa Etheridge and played her CD “Brave And Crazy” incessantly. The first track on the CD is “No Souvenirs” and it starts with Melissa singing “a capella” with the opening lines being “Hello, hello. This is Romeo. Calling from a jackpot telephone…” I played the digits out of that CD and Pete was so sick of it I drove him absolutely crazy. Even if he was upstairs in his bedroom, if I’d hit “Play” and those opening lines came on the stereo, I could hear him yell “NO!” and then scream. So, of course, I played it every single day as soon as he got home. Because that’s what roomies do.

So, my post on his FB Live show was “Just for old time’s sake, Hello Hello, this is Romeo…”

That was your assignment for today. Have you done it yet? Have you seen it? I’ll wait…

And if you have seen it you know he talks about my dad, and his 1-0 record as manager of the Texas Rangers. Coincidentally, the Rangers are another big topic today. Elon Werner has been in touch with John Blake, the club’s Executive VP – Communications, and just today, about an hour ago, he sent me a note about my next book project, the planned book “1-0” which will be my dad’s biography. After I got that note from John Blake I replied and submitted a long list of guys who played for my father between 1971 and 1975, when he was the manager of the Rangers Triple-A team (two years in Denver and three years in Spokane.) Hopefully, they’ll be able to provide some contact info for a number of those guys and that will really jumpstart the project. It’s been kind of dormant for the last month, because I really want to do all the research and interviews first. Getting that note this morning got me excited again, and that’s a good thing.

And speaking of books, I bought one on Amazon at least a month ago but had yet to open it until yesterday. I guess I’ve just been busy.

It’s entitled “Endurance” and it’s written by Scott Kelly (as you can see.) As an astronaut, Scott Kelly spent a full year in space, aboard the International Space Station. He performed a lot of experiments and chores up there but the biggest experiment was on his body and brain. If we’re ever going to Mars, scientists really need to know more about what that will put the human body through.

So far, I’m about 125 pages in and it’s fascinating. He’s a good writer, and I like the way he intertwines his early life, his high school and college years, and his career in space in a weaving sort of method. In a lot of ways, our younger years were very similar. As a bit of a space geek, I’m really digging the in-depth descriptions of what it’s like up there and how, now that the Shuttle fleet is grounded, the only way to get there is aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket. Hopefully Space X will develop a manned craft soon. And, as you may have seen on the internet or read in the news, Kelly has an identical twin brother and he represented the “baseline” for seeing how much Scott’s body and brain changed during the mission. Basically, it all changed and it changed a lot, right down to his DNA. Fascinating stuff.

Here at the ranch, it was just three blogs ago when I wrote about the huge blizzard we rode out up on the North Shore of Lake Superior. Last week I wrote about how Spring was finally springing and the pollen was popping. In just this last week, everything has changed even more dramatically. It’s crazy how fast this all happened. As you can see, in just a week our crabapple tree has gone from having buds on it to having leaves and tiny little apples.

As I’m sitting in my office typing this, I can hear another “first” happening in our neighborhood. The company our HOA contracts with to do lawn care and snow removal is working just a few houses down from here, and they’re not scraping snow. They’re mowing lawns. Just a little more than three weeks ago they were removing snow drifts as high as three feet. Spring happened in a real hurry this year.

And now, to the second part of today’s headline…

I posted this on Facebook a couple of days ago and got a lot of positive reaction to it, but I also wanted to mention it here to make sure as many people as possible know about it.

I have a few unopened cases of “Bats, Balls, & Burnouts” left in my possession, and now that we are just 12 days away from the one-year anniversary of its publication I’d like to put those books in readers’ hands. I bought them for a bit over $20 apiece, but I’m willing to ship them out to anyone who is interested, and I’ll do that at a big discount, compared to Amazon. If you’ve never ordered it on Amazon because of the price they charge, you might be interested in what I can now do it for. For more details, message me on Facebook or send me an email (bobwilber@me.com) and I’ll fill you in. So far, 12 people have responded to the original Facebook post, so that’s great. That also leaves me with about 14 more books, so it will have to be first-come, first-served.

That’s about it for today. It’s after 1:00 and I haven’t eaten anything yet. Time for some lunch!

As always, if you just read this blog and liked what it contained, please click on the “Like” button at the top. The more “likes” the merrier, and I like being merry.

Now, if you haven’t gone to Pete’s Facebook Live post from last Friday…  GO THERE NOW!

Bob Wilber, at your service and still driving Pete nuts.