Ray Ratto delivers the best–and least self-important–Hall of Fame column of the season.
The vote comes this afternoon and word around the web says that Maddux, Glavine, Biggio and the Big Hurt all make it.
Wednesday
April 8, 2026
Since 2002
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Goldbricker’s Delight
I was hipped to Belgian and French comics as a kid. Tintin and Asterix, of course, but Gaston LaGaffe was my favorite. I couldn’t read french but I loved Gaston’s slapstick comedy and Andre Franquin’s drawing style. Gaston is a goofball, a guy forever trying to find ways to avoid work.
This here image is one that struck me as the ultimate escape. It’s Gaston’s cave, underneath a mountain of paperwork. Cozy and serene. Yeah.
Afternoon Art
“The Penitent Magdalen” by Georges de La Tour (1640)
Taster’s Cherce
Today is strangely warm, tomorrow will be frigid. Case you get sick, this might help.
Royko: Stacked
Yesterday, I brought my Stacks show on the road to The Daily Beast. I’ll have a reprint there each weekend. First up, John Schulian’s great Mike Royko profile.
Dig:
They were drinking their dinner in a joint outside Chicago. It was just Mike Royko and his pal, Big Shack, and whatever their bleary musings happened to be that night three years ago. They probably never even gave a thought to the fact that they were in Niles, Illinois, which qualifies as a suburb and therefore should have been treated by Royko as if it were jock itch. But Niles is where a lot of the Milwaukee Avenue Poles he grew up with fled when they started finding themselves living next door to neighbors named Willie and Jose. So this was shot-and-a-beer territory after all. The only thing it lacked was a DO NOT DISTURB sign.
“Hey, you’re Mike Royko!”
It happens to him all the time even though newspaper guys are supposed to be bylines, not recognizable faces with bald heads, crooked smiles and ski-jump noses. How Royko, who is a baggy-pants character no matter what he wears, cracked the celebrity lineup is no mystery, though. Nor is it a tribute to the tiny picture of him that has decorated his column in each of the three Chicago papers he has worked for. The secret is words. The words that in 1971 paid off with a Pulitzer Prize for his newspaper commentary and a best-selling book called Boss, in which he dissected Mayor Richard J. Daley. The words that now appear, via syndication, in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Daily News, and 223 other papers. The words that always have originated in his hometown, Chicago, five times a week, year after year after year.
“I’ve read you all my life.”
Royko’s admirer was male, white, crowding 40, with a pretty wife who quickly made it known that she was a more voracious reader than her husband. Soon the three of them were so wrapped up in one another that they failed to notice Big Shack, all 220 pounds of him, lumber off to the can. But Big Shack is important to this story, first, because he is the source of it, and second, because he returned just in time to save Royko.
“The guy was choking Mike,” Big Shack says. “I guess his wife had gotten a little too friendly, and Mike, well, you know Mike. So there I was, peeling the guy’s fingers off Mike’s throat one at a time.”
Big Shack can laugh about it now.
“What can I tell you? In ten minutes Mike went from hero to bad guy.”
It wasn’t his maiden voyage.
Morning Art
“Still Life with Oranges” by Piet Mondrian (1899)
"This ain't football. We do this every day."
--Earl Weaver
--Earl Weaver