In 1989, Nodin Press published my book on the history of the Lakers basketball team. The book focuses mainly on the team’s years in Minneapolis, when they won six league titles (including five in the National Basketball Association and the Basketball Association of America, the predecessor to the NBA) in their first seven years. George Mikan was the leader of the team. Click here for my web page on the Minneapolis Lakers.
My third book was Holy Cow! The Life and Times of Halsey Hall, a biography of a Minnesota sportscasting legend and the first man to use the term “Holy Cow!” on a baseball broadcast.
In the mid-1990s, I was the collaborator on a pair of autobiographies of Minnesota sportscasters: Ray Christensen, the longtime voice of Minnesota Gophers football and basketball, and Herb Carneal, who has done the play-by-play announcing for the Minnesota Twins since 1962.
Land of the Giants: New York’s Polo Grounds came out in the fall of 2000. The Polo Grounds—which was used by several baseball teams, most notably the New York Giants—was torn down in 1964. I never saw a game there, but I’ve always been fascinated by the stadium, mainly because of its strange dimensions. It had incredibly short distances down the foul lines and incredibly long distances to the power alleys and to center field. I began researching the book in 1997. In 1999, Temple University Press agreed to publish it.
More recently, I’ve been working on some books for Minnesota Historical Society Press. Six Feet Under: A Graveyard Guide to Minnesota came out in October of 2004. Baseball in Minnesota: A Definitive History came out in the spring of 2006, and Minnesota Hoops: Basketball in the North Star State, which I co-authored with Marc Hugunin, came out in the fall of 2006.
I’ve won a few awards for my books and research. In 1988, I received a baseball research award jointly sponsored by Macmillan Publishing Company and the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) for the research that I did for On to Nicollet.
Holy Cow! The Life and Times of Halsey Hall was named the Best Regional Book of 1991 at the Midwest Book Achievement Awards. Both On to Nicollet and Holy Cow! were finalists in the Minnesota Book Awards in 1988 and 1991, respectively. A speech/slide presentation I made on the Polo Grounds at the 1998 SABR convention was voted as the convention’s best research presentation.
I’ve done a number of books for young readers. One is a science book which I co-authored with my now-wife, Brenda Himrich (that’s her, along with me and our cat, in the photo above—in case you hadn’t yet figured that out). Brenda and I thought if our relationship could survive writing a book together, it could handle marriage (and we were right). The book we wrote is Electrifying Medicine: How Electricity Sparked a Medical Revolution. It’s about uses of electricity in medicine, such as pacemakers, defibrillators, and devices for things like enhancing sight and hearing and relieving pain. The human body is essentially an electrical appliance and, like a frying pan, sometimes needs electrical remedies. Anyway, that’s what’s the book’s about. I was glad to have Brenda as a co-author since she has a pretty extensive background in science and actually understood all this stuff, something that I didn’t. The book, which was published by Lerner Publications in Minneapolis, was also a finalist in the Minnesota Book Awards, in 1996.
I’ve done several other books, all sports biographies, for Lerner as well as for Enslow Publishers, a children’s book publisher in New Jersey. One of the books I did for Enslow was on Dennis Rodman. It’s been a pretty good seller. I guess the more bizarre or controversial the subject of the book, the better it sells. A few years ago, Rodman was thinking about changing his name—to Orgasm. I suppose we would have had to change the name of the book had he done that. I asked Brenda what she would think if I had a book on the market named Orgasm. She thought it would open up a whole new career path for my writing.
In case you’re interested, the books are available through bookstores as well as from places like Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. You can also contact the publishers. A couple of them are out of print and a little hard to find. Holy Cow! turns up in used bookstores in Minnesota, and you can also find it at bookstores around the country through Bookfinder.com. On to Nicollet was really hard to find, but now it’s back in print. It had been selling for as much as $125 in some of the used book stores listed in Bookfinder, but now you should be able to order it from a bookstore or from one of the on-line vendors for under $15.
Besides writing books, I do “datacasting” of baseball games for the Major League Baseball (MLB) web site. They have a network of stringers throughout the country who transmit pitch-by-pitch data, which then goes out to the mlb.com web site, where you or anyone else can follow the game live. I do it for the Minnesota Twins games. I’ve also been an official scorer for MLB since 2007.
I’ve traveled quite a bit to cover baseball. I’ve been to a home game at each of the major league baseball teams (as well as the Mets-Cubs two-game series that opened the 2000 major league season at Tokyo Dome and a May 2007 series between the Texas Rangers and Tampa Bay Devil Rays that was played at a ballpark in Disney World outside Orlando). I’ve been to Yankee Stadium many times, but my best experience there was covering the third, fourth, and fifth games of the 2001 World Series between the Yankees and Arizona Diamondbacks. I filed reports on the game for Southside Journal. You can also view the World Series reports by clicking here.
In addition to major league games, I’ve attended games at around 25 minor league ballparks. I also saw four games in the Puerto Rican Winter League in December of 1996.
In February 2001, Brenda and I went to Cuba on a baseball tour with a 20-member contingent from the United States and Canada. We attended five games in Cuba’s National Series, visited an elite sports school, met with current and former Cuban players, and visited the grave of Martín Dihigo, at the time the only member of the Baseball Hall of Fame who is buried in Cuba, as well the graves as José Méndez and Cristóbal Torriente, who have since been inducted into the Hall of Fame.
I did public-address announcing for high school and college basketball for more than 30 years. From 1995 to 2012 I did the announcing for St. Louis Park High School. I’ve also done p. a. announcing for baseball, football, soccer, hockey, and volleyball.
Official Scoring
Along with Gregg Wong and Kyle Traynor, I am one of the official scorers for Major League Baseball assigned to Minnesota Twins games. I do half the games as official scoring and about a third of the games as the datacaster for the mlb.com web site. In 2013 I was named to the MLB Official Scoring Advisory Committee. We have annual meetings at the league headquarters in New York.
Official scoring can be stressful because players, coaches, and team officials sometimes get upset over a hit/error decision. However, I love doing it.
In March 2017 I was the official scorer for the World Baseball Classic games in Guadalajara. Brenda did the press box announcing, relaying my scoring decisions in Spanish. Brenda also does the field timing coordination for some of the Twins games. If you see that clock on the wall in the bullpen ticking down the time between innings, that’s Brenda doing that.
I am also a backup official scorer for Minnesota Timberwolves games. It’s a less controversial activity, since you don’t have to make judgment calls that can bring you a lot of grief. It’s up to the statistics crew to track things such as rebounds, assists, steals, etc.; the official scorer just has to record points, fouls, and timeouts. However, if you make a mistake and don’t get something recorded correctly, it can affect the outcome of the game. I’ve seen it happen before and hope it never happens to me.
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Hello. This is the first web page I’ve done for myself. It’s all about me, which seems like a pretty egotistical thing to do; however, it looks like this is how everyone else does a personal web page, so, being such a conformist, I thought I’d follow a similar pattern. Actually, I’m not a conformist (just the opposite), but I am kind of egotistical.
Professional
I live in Roseville, Minnesota, with my wife, Brenda Himrich, and, until 2005, our cat, 
On St. Patrick’s Day in 2006, we adopted a pair of three-month-old kittens, 
This side trip to see Gipp’s was probably the first time I ever went out of my way to see the grave of some celebrity. Some cemeteries, like Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington, D.C., and the Granary Burying Ground on the Freedom Trail in Boston, are part of a normal traveler’s itinerary. And the graves of many presidents are part of a regular tourist attraction, like an estate or presidential library. However, you usually have to get off the regular path to visit a grave while on vacation. Besides George Gipp, I had done this on a few other occasions. When Brenda and I were in Honolulu in 1995, we drove to Oahu Cemetery to see the grave of Alexander Cartwright (shown in photo), one of the true fathers of baseball. Later that year, I made a point of visiting Babe Ruth’s grave in Hawthorne, New York, about 20 miles north of New York City. (An interesting note on that: I was struck by all the offerings left at Babe Ruth’s grave, so I left one of my own: a note that said, “Babe, you’re the best.” I added an NY monogram and signed and dated the note. Apparently, officials from the Babe Ruth Birthplace Museum in Baltimore came by soon after and picked up some of the items, because my note ended up in a 
As of 2013, I’ve been to the graves of 40 U. S. Presidents (all the dead ones, including David Rice Atchison, who was president for a day when Zachary Taylor wouldn’t take office on a Sunday), as well as one Confederate States of America President (Jefferson Davis, the only CSA president).
As far as the United States goes, I’ve been to all 50 states as well as to Puerto Rico. I got to my 50th state in 1995 when Brenda and I went to Hawaii to see the Pro Bowl (the NFL All-Star Game). A year-and-a-half before that, we got to Alaska and made it up to Point Barrow, the northernmost point in the United States. The photo at the left is us in Barrow, posing under the jawbones of a bowhead whale. (An interesting thing happened on our trip to Barrow. We took a city tour, along with four other tourists. Two of the tourists were young men from Germany. We asked what part of Germany. When one of them replied, “Osnabruck,” I said something that indicated I was familiar with their city. I started to elaborate but then thought better of it. Osnabruck was the city that was the bombing target on the mission when my dad was shot down [mentioned above]. These guys were too young to have been alive when this happened, but I still thought it was better to not mention that my dad had once bombed their city.)
I started skydiving in the 1970s and made four static-line jumps (three in Stanton, Minnesota, and one in Baldwin, Wisconsin). In 2009 I took it up again with the 
