Just Who the Heck am I?

Hello fellow readers.

I never pictured myself as anything but a non-conformist rebel.  That was WHO I WAS for a long time.  As I’ve gotten older and I look back on my life now that my kids are grown, I wish that I would have done some things different.  Hey, who doesn’t right?!  The more I think about it though, I can’t help but think that I never would have got to where I am today without going through all the hell that I went through before.  Oh well, what is that Spanish saying? Eso pertenece al pasado?  It all belongs in the past?  Or something like that….

But alas, I will stop my trip down memory lane.  That part of my life and those stories are for another day….

All my life I’ve loved history.  I didn’t know why, I just did.  You know that saying (I know, I’m big on sayings here) that you just know what you’re going to do, even if you don’t know how you’re going to do it?  Well, that was me and my pal, history.  So, after graduating from high school, spending time in the military growing up, and spending most of my adult life working for the man, one day I finally just broke away from the corporate life and decided to pursue my lifelong dream of becoming a historian and an author. Well, after years of hard work, I finally accomplished one of my lifetime dreams.

I am now a Doc.

I received my PhD in American History in December 2018 specializing in baseball history at the University of Houston.  #GoCoogs!  Besides a baseball historian, I am a historian of ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s pop culture.  While I’m in school, I work.  Hey, I gotta pay the bills right?

 

On July 3, 2017, Mexican-American Baseball in Houston and Southeast Texas, became my first major contribution to the growing baseball historical literature on forgotten segments of Baseball history in the Houston area. That project earned me the Joseph Pratt Houston history prize from the University of Houston just a few weeks ago. The book is my first jump into the forgotten or little-know baseball and sports histories that I plan on writing for the rest of my life.

 

In 2010 at the Astros Winterfest held at Minute Maid park, I came across a Society of American Baseball Research (SABR) booth.  I participated in a trivia contest and although I answered only three questions correctly, I won a book on sports writing.  Now whether I was excited about winning the contest or I was excited about joining a baseball club in the city I am not sure, but I ended up joining SABR that same day.  Over the past few years as a member of SABR, I participated in several writing projects.  A few years later I wrote a chapter on 1870s baseball in the city and a section on women’s baseball in Houston Baseball: The Early Years. 

A year after that I joined another project that included a history of highlights in the history of baseball in the Astrodome called Dome Sweet Dome: History and Highlights from 35 Years of the Houston and Astrodome.  In that book, I wrote about three different games including a game that happened the weekend I graduated from high school in 1989.  That book brought back a lot of memories.

 

In the meantime, I have continued my writing about different baseball and other pop culture subjects as I work my way towards completing my PhD at UH.  Check out my other writings and projects on my Academic CV (resume) page on this site.

My page here is a work in progress.  It is something I hope to continue to improve as the years go by so please bear with me as I learn my way into being one of those webmaster guru types.

Cheers everyone!

If you want to contact me, fill out the contact info below and I will get back in touch with you.

 

Glad to have you here and go Astros!