CHICAGO — Tomorrow's Election Day, but we've still managed to read about something besides politics. Here are a few of the more interesting things we've come across. Also, check out our comprehensive election coverage here.
Opening Day: Across America today, hundreds of young men will realize their lifelong dream: making it to The Show for the first time. Senior Editor Andrew Herrmann recommends the Charlotte Observer's interview with Jeff Schaefer, a North Carolina resident who recalled making the White Sox team in 1989.
Schaefer was then a 28-year-old, off-the-radar utility player when manager Jeff Torborg pulled him aside at the end of spring training and told him, "You're going north."
After spending more than eight years in the minor leagues, walking into his first Major League locker room "was surreal," he said.
"There's [Carlton] Fisk, [Harold] Baines and [Ozzie] Guillen. There's my uniform hanging in front of my locker. I had a real number, not a spring training number like 76. I was [No.] 15," he said. Schaefer's career would last only 225 games over five years with three teams. Still, he tells the Observer's Tom Sorensen: "The dirt and the grass — that's my home."
This baseball card describes Schaefer's first Major League game. It did not go as planned. [Topps]
Cracked Rear View, Indeed: The Columbia Journalism School's report on the University of Virginia campus rape story has some wondering why no staff at the magazine was fired. If you can't get fired for possible defamation and a completely retracted story, what can you be fired for at Rolling Stone, some ask? One Chicago music writer knows. Jim DeRogatis parted ways with the magazine after complaining about how his negative review of a Hootie and the Blowfish album was replaced with a positive one. He talked to the Observer about it and was canned. A bit ironically, DeRogatis is well-known for his own in-depth reporting on sexual assault, bringing to light R. Kelly's sex crimes against teenage girls.
Hootie and the Blowfish (Tom Grizzle/Getty Images)
How Georgia Failed Ashley Diamond: The New York Times tells the heartbreaking story of transgender inmate Ashley Diamond. Diamond has been in a Georgia men's prison where she has been brutally raped and attacked throughout her sentence for a nonviolent crime.
But unlike the transgender woman inmate played by Laverne Cox on “Orange,” the Netflix series, Ms. Diamond is locked up with men, for what could be eight and a half more years, and her reality is grimmer than television fiction.
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For a period, Ms. Diamond was housed with nonviolent offenders and “ceased being a victim of sexual coercion or assault,” her lawsuit says. But when she renewed her push for hormone therapy, she says, she was told to develop better coping skills, placed in solitary confinement, and transferred back to a high-security prison.
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