Over here , there's a great article about a fella who's 110 years old who started playing baseball in the same era as the actual team I fictionalized in my novel The All Nations Team. Amazing stuff, and not the least of which is that the dude is 110 years old!

Some cool snippets about Si Simmons: "Simmons’s first games were not in the Negro leagues as they are now remembered. The first established circuit, the Negro National League, started in 1920. Before that, local all-black teams would play against one another, against all-white teams or occasionally against groups of big leaguers barnstorming in the off-season."

Yup, covered all that in the novel. Check. Check.

And he mentions the fact that black men like him couldn't even dream about making it to The Show:"'A lot of good black players, but they couldn’t play in the league,' he continued. 'So that was it. After Jackie Robinson came up, they found out how good they were and started recruiting. You have to give them a chance to play.'"

Check.

But the best part of the article was when they talked about Si finding himself in an old sepia-colored photo from almost a century ago: "'That’s me,' he declared. 'Oh, we had good times.'"

Awesome. Just awesome. Later!