I actually thought I had nothing left to say.

And then you all gave me the greatest day of my life on Thursday with the exceptions of the day I married a woman whom I can’t wait to run home to every day, and the day the two greatest kids in the world were born.

For many years, on days I would struggle with things, I watched this — one of the greatest moments in the history of television.

And I always thought, wouldn’t it be nice to go out with such love?

And then, at 4:29 p.m. on Thursday, I did.

It would be my preference you listen to the extended interview and then all 2 1/2 hours, but if you want to cut to the chase, then scroll on No. 3 to 29:40 and  you’ll pretty well get the picture. Let the love wash over you. And take note of the song that plays after.

After that, I got a chance to cry my way through my goodbyes to the staff of The Current, providing a wobbly  bookend to the day, which started with a poor attempt to get through my remarks to the newsroom.

As I told my colleagues later, “this  is what happens when you wait 27 years to tell people how much you love them.”

Then it was a session with Jana Shortal and Carly Danek. And, again with the crying.

And then Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan read a proclamation declaring Friday Bob Collins Day in Minnesota.

Tomorrow is Bob Collins Day here in Minnesota. Lt. Gov ⁦⁦@peggyflanagan⁩ presents the proclamation in the newsroom. Bob: “I dedicate this to all the bosses who tried to fire me!” pic.twitter.com/sOwTg1Bnwi

— Tom Crann, MPR News (@TomCrann) May 30, 2019

All that and two lengthy pieces from both Morning Edition and All Things Considered too.

It’s going to take awhile for me to process what happened and at some point I’ll write something meaningful, probably at my old blog, Stirrings From the Empty Nest.

Though I’ve made my living in the last 21 years online, I will always be a “radio person.”

I don’t read scripts when I’m on the radio (one of the reasons, I think, I was banned years ago from membership drives at MPR) and I never let show hosts tell me what questions they’re going to ask, because I always figured if I can’t tell the story off the top of my head with the words from my heart, then I’m not ready to tell the story at all, especially on a medium that should be nothing more than a conversation.

I wasn’t sure how this radio career would end at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday. I trusted Mary — as I’ve always trusted Mary — to get us to the moment we needed to get to, and allow you to share it with us, just as radio intended.

And so it gives me a great satisfaction that the last words I’ll ever utter on a radio station — and the last words I’ll write on this blog are the same:  “I love you…”

But the one time I got to meet Bob in person turned into my favorite NewsCut moment, and it doesn’t even appear on this blog.

After Bob published “Nothing irks some white people like accurate history,” I noticed that a considerable amount of traffic came from the Twin Cities subreddit.

I had to share the first two comments with Bob.

Had to share these Reddit comments with Collins.

No one should be surprised by his response.

“Pick one.”

Which led to this gem on YouTube.

I was lucky enough to be in the St. Paul office that day, and when I introduced myself, we shared a chuckle over him reading a bedtime story to the internet.

As editor of NewsCut for about seven years, I’ve read many NewsCuts. Some were brilliant. A few had the feel of a get-me-over fastball on a 3-0 count: kind of a grace-under-pressure circumstance.

But the thing is, you couldn’t scroll past Bob Collins.

He came in every day and made stuff that people wanted – really wanted – to read. That’s the best compliment anyone could ever get as a writer and reporter.

He has one more post scheduled for later this afternoon. You’re gonna want to read it.

Before then, here are some of the stories I remember best. If you have a favorite, please add it in the comment section or tweet about it with the #bestofnewscut hashtag.

• “Minnesota’s drive-in movie era fades, but some won’t let it die.” NewsCut was always at his best when he sprung himself from NewsCut World Headquarters to do some reporting. This was a lovely read on a family keeping a drive-in movie theater going when the entire modern world says drive-in theaters should no longer exist.
• “Give the kid the ball.” There is a series in NewsCut where Collins appropriately kicks adults in the shins for trying to steal that bit of gold — a baseball — from a kid. A few also double as meditations on life. This one is the best.
• “Battle for Riverview Circle.” This is some of the best flood reporting you’ll ever find. He found a street in Moorhead in 2009 to tell the real stories of a flood’s damage and the resilience of people who refuse to be damaged.
• Wrenshall Wrens. Maybe his single favorite post. “The girls of Wrenshall High School have a right to be dispirited. Amazingly, they’re not.” He wrote several posts on the Wrens that came down to a single sentence: “Be like the women of Wrenshall.”
• “Last Men of Luverne.” Not sure how he found these guys and their story. But once he did, he was all in. He had to tell their stories, had to make sure they were not forgotten.

There are more, but you see the themes. Resilience. Perseverance. Keep going. Find a way forward. Remember the past.

Those are his heroes. He made them ours.

Here are a couple that appear ordinary until you read them.

Grace through the hospital doors doesn’t seem like much on its surface. But then he writes:

The chances are pretty good that just down the street from you right now, there is incredible drama taking place, none of which we can tell you about on the news. Joy, tragedy, people going above and beyond to help someone they may not have known a day or two ago, and grace — so much grace.

In the absence of these stories, we can often succumb to the perception that life is just as awful as the steady drumbeat of tweets and posts tells us it is.

Yes, you will read the rest of that.

Then there’s this one: On birthday, soldier surprises dad at the ballpark. You’ve read this one a million times, right? You’ve probably seen these live at the ballpark.

So, I’m reading it (I’m his editor, after all), and I get to this:

What happened next was that moment when your heart is sort of broken, and then it’s not. That moment when your kid shows up.

Man, I just went someplace and cried for a few minutes.

He came in every day and made these things for you, for us.

Here comes Tom Weber, an MPR News reporter and news host from 2008-2018.

By Tom Weber

When Bob Collins announced last year that today (his 65th birthday) would be his last day at MPR, he also tweeted he wouldn’t write a farewell post on the blog he created, NewsCut. Classic Bob.

I hope he’s changed his mind and a swan song is imminent. But just in case, I’ve invited myself to sing a little on behalf of a friend who’s made immeasurable contributions to MPR and Minnesota.

“It’s exhausting,” Bob told me over lunch last year, to make a blog that “didn’t suck.” That’s one reason to retire! But take a moment to realize how much it didn’t suck: Bob has tweeted recently that these final months of NewsCut have been the blog’s most read. Ever.

I remember daily emails at MPR, ranking stories with the most web traffic. Bob usually made multiple appearances in the top ten. I suspect that’s even more true today and it’s not a coincidence. That’s because Bob figured out something the rest of journalism has been slower to adopt. More on that in a moment.

After realizing he was literally at the top of his game, Bob probably could’ve delayed his departure. But he’s not. Aside from going out on top and being exhausted, Meniere’s is a third reason. It’s an inner ear disease that leaves him essentially deaf some days.

At its worst, Bob can’t make phone calls – a must for journalists. Even in-person interviews offered no guarantee he’d be able to hear. Depends on the day. He was doing better last month but noted this week he can’t really understand anyone. The disease also took away his true love: Being a pilot. It’s unfair at so many altitudes.

Hosting The Current’s morning show in 2009 with Mary Lucia. Collins gets around.

But Bob remains jovial and upbeat, and he’s been shedding an “ornery curmudgeon” persona in recent months with every tweet about his new dog and update from Target Field, where he’s an usher. But let’s be clear: The grump thing was never real.

The real Bob Collins was — and is — the guy who buys baseballs with his own money before each game just to give away to young fans. Please, Meniere’s, stay away from Bob’s ability to stand in the upper deck. And please, Twins, let Bob throw out the first pitch soon.

A curmudgeon wouldn’t care about MPR’s history enough to give tours to new employees so they could learn their past.

Where he is ornery is in advocating for proper digital archives. With every new iteration of MPR’s website, more of the oldest NewsCut posts and other early MPR website features disappear. It’s a crisis on the Internet — archiving its oldest material. Bob’s has been a constant clarion call, with little to show. Those stories are gone.

But back to my initial point: Bob’s departure is a critical junction for my former newsroom colleagues. Journalism, writ large, is navigating several areas of tumult. But I believe Bob’s blog, quietly churning out content that often drew the most traffic to MPR’s website, was part of the answer.

NewsCut has come to occupy a place somewhat akin to a newspaper columnist. Thoughtful journalism but the freedom to throw an elbow. Yet, most of the time the elbows weren’t opinion – they were just boring old truth. However, in a world where people no longer accept the same facts, truth comes off as opinion.

Bob didn’t care. What a grump. And if you didn’t pass the smell test, Bob said that, too. Those were the elbows.

When a phony-but-triggering controversy was manufactured over a sign at Fort Snelling, Bob’s headline read “Nothing irks some white people like accurate history.” Just this week, Bob noted a high school’s inability to call something racist when – wait for it – the yearbook included a photo of a student in blackface. In each case, Bob smelled something and said so. I suspect each post got a lot of readers.

But it’s lazy to label Bob an opinion writer and be done. Bob has been navigating new journalism better than most of public radio, which still treats us to stories that regurgitate sound bites from two sides and end with a creative version of “we’ll see what happens.”

Audiences now expect journalists to go the next step and tell us when someone is just wrong. Media that still try to split the difference will be left behind, I believe.

Public radio faces several crises. This content conundrum is one. It’s hard to blame reporters, given ever-increasing demands and quotas to churn out more product on more platforms. A lot of journalism today is keeping your head above water and as such, we should forgive stories that can be quickly written with decades-old templates.

But the inability to say in a “fair and neutral” news story that someone is just wrong is what will eventually drive away audiences. It’s not about biases; we all have them. It’s about transparency and how we admit our biases so we can get to work. I see this working better at newer media companies like Crooked, which produces the podcast “Pod Save America.”

Pod Save isn’t journalism; it’s left-leaning analysis. But the company did produce a stellar bit of journalism in a podcast called “the Wilderness.” It studied the ails of the Democratic Party and what Dems have to do to win. It started from the perspective that the host, former Obama aide Jon Favreau, wants them to win. From there, actual journalism ensued.

I think Bob was doing some of this all along: Starting from a different place than other reporters, then letting the journalism happen. There’s a lot of newsroom timidity in what and how to cover that Bob just didn’t have time for. He was ahead of journalism in decrying unwritten rules to largely avoid reporting on suicides.

He relentlessly reported about mental health before others caught on. And his overarching goal was to tell stories about everyday Minnesotans while also saying, bluntly, when they were dealt a crummy hand. From there, good journalism ensued. We should be grateful for people who give out baseballs to youngsters and finds ways to break through the media noise. Both things are good for Minnesota.

I have no information on the fate of NewsCut, but Bob has said he thinks it will end when he leaves. That would be tragic because NewsCut has been the thing MPR produces that’s closest to the new kind of journalism that audiences expect.

Bob also once told me his blog never got any real promotion (but still thrived) because the company never really knew what NewsCut was.

I have an answer: It was part of the future of journalism. And it’s walking out the door.

Building an airplane solo is among the more noteworthy accomplishments in Bob Collins’ remarkable turn on this planet.

It was a yearslong, painstaking journey that turned out beautifully.

After all the expense of purchasing the airframe parts, the tooling, the engine, the electronics, the safety harnesses, he also had to pay a pilot to test fly his new bird to achieve FAA certification.

That’s a white-knuckle day at the airstrip. But November 614 Echo Foxtrot received her airworthiness certification in May, 2012.

Being a wannabe pilot, I’d followed Bob’s progress and gave him a bottle of Champagne worthy of the occasion and the accomplishment. And he invited me to take a ride with him in his new two-seater RV-7.

So, on a perfect day for flying in early September, we met at his hangar at the South St. Paul airport.

The plane was wasn’t painted yet, and the glare off the shiny aluminum was searing.

Up we went, and headed south across Minnesota, following the Mississippi River to Winona. We passed over a squadron of pelicans on the way and landed at the otherwise deserted airport. We hung out, chatted with a guy who seemed to be the resident elder, whether in an official capacity or not. We mentioned the pelicans. He said they’re dumb as rocks.

Then we were wheels up again, heading back north to Rushford, to enjoy one of the well-hidden perks of general aviation.

The Rushford “airport” is a strip, two hangar buildings, a fuel pump, and a house masquerading as a terminal building, “with accommodations that you’ll have to see to believe,” according to the city.

Inside it looked like a home with lots of comfy furniture and stocked with provisions. I seem to recall burger patties in the freezer, and maybe a grill and charcoal. There was ice cream and pop, for sure. So, we helped ourselves to some root beer floats and sat on the deck watching the hummingbirds zoom around the feeder.

We probably left a few bucks in the kitty.

Then we headed back to South St. Paul. On final approach, close to touch down in a crosswind, Bob felt a wind shear, pushed the throttle forward, cool as a cucumber, and we went around again. A few more glorious minutes aloft.

Bob finished the paint job and eventually decided to sell N614EF.

Now he’s building another aircraft — because, well, planes.

Happy landings, Bob, and thanks! In thrust we trust.

You can credit (or blame) NewsCut on what insurers call an “act of God,” a slow-moving hurricane that, combined with man-made failures, would leave truly biblical devastation in its wake. And NewsCut.

I’m not sure Bob realizes the seed for this blog was planted with Katrina, but this seems like the appropriate time to tell the story.

Katrina formed in August, 2005, a few months into my stint here as news director. Bob was our one-man online unit, spending most of his time converting radio scripts into web stories, as I recall.

While we all recognized Katrina’s magnitude as a news event, Bob alone thought it required coverage by MPR News staff. As in Minnesota Public Radio News; as in, send someone to the Gulf to report.

I thought then that Bob was wrong, and still do. This was a job for National Public Radio, not us.

But it will come to no surprise to NewsCut readers that Bob was passionate and relentless on this point. Many a discussion over the next few days would end with him saying “If I only had a reporter…” before he walked off.

And, so, while I thought Bob was wrong, I also began to see he was right. Maybe there was little possibility for Katrina stories aimed at a Minnesota audience, but I began to concede in my own mind the possibility of possibilities.

Bob and I would have more “if-I-only-had-a-reporter” conversations over the following months, but this was a era in which we, like newsrooms everywhere, were just lucky not to lose staff. Adding a digital-only reporter was not high on my list.

When Bob took an extended leave in 2007, I saw an opportunity. Our online staff had expanded marginally by then and I thought we would realize we could survive without Bob working all hours to produce online material.

I told him that when he returned I wanted him in a new role. While I couldn’t give him his long-desired reporter, I wanted him generating content. If that sounds vague and jargony, it was by design. The nascent blogosphere had quickly filled with rants, ravings and, worse, the mundane musings of multitudes of people with access to these cheap, easy platforms.

“Blogger” was a potential trigger word I would avoid using with Bob early on.

By the time Bob came back from his leave, a new newsroom boss had come on board. Chris Worthington was a former newspaper guy who saw the peril newsrooms faced, the need to adapt and the potential in a smart, passionate guy like Bob to do that.

Together, they took the idea that started with Katrina and turned it into the blog (yes, blog) you’re reading now.

Many in the rank-and-file in the MPR newsroom were justifiably concerned when the authorities created NewsCut in 2007. After all, it wasn’t entirely compatible with the earnestness — and, perhaps, dignity — that established public radio’s brand and credibility.

It created a tension — sometimes it felt like an embarrassment, I’m sure — that would come to exist in some fashion for nearly 12 more years. More than once, one of the bosses tried to come up with a description for what exactly NewsCut is — if not actual journalism — in order to respond to some lodged complaint (whatever complaint it was, by the way, they were wrong), and each time they failed.

The setting sun on this blog today illuminates faintly what is still and will remain an unanswered question.

So maybe Paul Tosto was thrust into a difficult situation when they tapped him to be NewsCut’s editor (after Mike Reszler moved up the MPR ladder. I’ve written about Mike in this Twitter thread).

Somebody had to cast an editorial eye on the thing so why not one of the best? And Tosto was more than qualified to save you from the assault of split infinitives, verb-tense disagreements, and boring headlines, while he gently guided this blog along a path that could occasionally be seen as, as they say, “bad for the brand.”

Tosto brought something else: an enthusiasm for the newsroom experiment. He understood fully its role, its possibilities, and its value to the audience in a company whose internal slogan is “audience first.”

Enthusiasm is occasionally hard to come by in a dignified newsroom (as an aside, I would also put MPR legend Sara Meyer in this valued and exclusive club, but I wrote nicely about her when Gary Eichten retired and I try to limit myself to saying one nice thing about a colleague per career).

Anyway, Tosto’s arrival from the Pioneer Press years ago (along with PiPress alums Mike Reszler, Chris Worthington, Laura Yuen, Nancy Yang, and Tim Nelson) helped resuscitate a news organization that had grown too comfortable with the Public Radio way we’d always done things. So he understood the value that NewsCut could bring to give a little sparkle to the daily online news cycle.

Paul applauded, supported, defended, and created a fair amount of the material that found its way onto these pages, and he did so without getting or needing attention. At least until today.

Writing a blog can be a devastatingly isolating and, often, depressing endeavor, particularly when one finds oneself suddenly one of the oldest people in a newsroom full of young people with unlimited talent.

Blogs and first-person narratives are a dying part of the nation’s newsrooms. There are now brighter, shinier objects that command our attention in a changing media landscape than something that was the “next big thing” several next big things ago. So Paul’s role included being a coach with a well-timed good word to raise occasional sagging morale and ease the constant doubt that any of this experiment was working.

Above all, Tosto had what everyone trying something new in a mature core medium needs: someone who has your back. Every day.

He provides the heartbeat in the MPR newsroom, rarely pausing for air and sustenance while making not only this blog, but also every radio and web story he touches, better.

A radio newsroom is an iceberg. The part above water gets the attention. What’s underneath provides the strength.

Every name you know at MPR News is a person who stands on the shoulders of the giants whose names you probably don’t.

Paul is one such giant upon whose shoulders this blog stood for years.

It’s 6:08 a.m. as I write this, another typical morning on Planet NewsCut. The dogs have been fed, the coffee brewed, there are two newspapers waiting to be read in a desperate search for something — anything — that I can gin up into the currency of continued employment: a blog post.

The quick look at Wednesday’s web traffic statistics reveals it was a good day: 12 percent of the MPR News website traffic was to NewsCut — thanks, I guess, to some meteorologist in Ohio who had a moment, and a woman who can’t throw a baseball.

Good, I fooled everyone for one more day. But what the heck am I going to come up with to fool them today?

The voice in my head, the feeling in my stomach, conspire to tell me the answer: nothing. Apparently, this is the day when I can’t fool anyone anymore. I knew it would come sooner or later. And I was so darned close to getting away with it.

The chances are pretty good that you recognize the “imposter syndrome”: the feeling that regardless of where we are, we don’t really belong there, and to the extent that people say nice things about the job we do, it’s only because of our ability to fake our way through the day.

It’s exhausting. It’s isolating. And I’m not going to miss it.

I’ve been getting very nice notes in the last few days from people who have felt a kinship with NewsCut and/or five minutes of my day on The Current. They’re often people whose names you don’t see in the comment section, who have uncloaked to say something important: their story is important. Their lives, their purpose, their jobs have meaning they didn’t realize they had.

“My favorites are the stories you find of ‘ordinary’ people who don’t think they have a story to tell, yet you always uncover the story they didn’t know they possessed. It’s inspiring, primarily because whenever I’m reading one of those stories I always think about what my story would be,” one reader said in an email.

“I’m not sure what mine is. I’m curious to know it, but like so many others I don’t see myself as particularly interesting and/or lack the confidence to see it in myself,” he said.

But he’s going to try today.

There isn’t anyone I’ve interviewed in the past 12 years about their journey in this life that didn’t start with this: “I’m not that interesting.” There isn’t anyone who was right about their assessment.

There are no ordinary people.

You don’t need me to show this to you in a blog post. You just have to ask someone one question: What’s your story?

You matter. You make a difference. You are a thread in a growing community quilt. And when you tell someone your story, you help them see the meaning in theirs, just as you have for me this week.

And that’s the cure for the imposter syndrome: tell your story, and just watch what happens next.

Hosting The Current’s morning show in 2009 with Mary Lucia. We’ll recreate the experience between 2 and 4:30 p.m. at 89.3, The Current.

Monday May 30, 2019
Posting will be light here today.

9 a.m. – MPR News with Kerri Miller
Steffanie Strathdee, an epidemiologist, and her husband Tom Patterson were on vacation in Egypt. Suddenly Patterson came down with a stomach bug. Turns out it was a superbug that was antibiotic resistant. Strathdee did what any scientist would do; she researched as much as she could to find a way to save her husband.

Guest: Steffanie Strathdee and Tom Patterson. Strathdee is author of “The Perfect Predator: A Scientist’s Race to Save her Husband from a Deadly Superbug.”

10 a.m.- 1A with Joshua Johnson
Tim Ryan was just 29 years old when he won his first term in Congress back in 2002. Today, he is one of more than 20 Democrats running for the White House. So what stands him out from all the others?

11 a.m. – MPR News with Angela Davis
In her new memoir, “Finding My Voice: My Journey to the West Wing and the Path Forward,” Valerie Jarrett shares the details of her early childhood in Iran, the racism and segregation her family endured in Chicago in the 1950s, the challenge of being a single mother after her divorce, and her time in the Obama White House.

12 p.m. – MPR News Presents
Scott Pelley of CBS News and 60 Minutes spoke at the National Press Club about his new memoir, “Truth Worth Telling: A Reporter’s Search for Meaning in the Stories of Our Times.” He says freedom of the press is what protects all of our other rights, and what worries him most is that “we’ve gone from the information age to the disinformation age.” (Recorded 5/22/19)

1 p.m. – The Takeaway
After Robert Mueller delivered his remarks regarding the special counsel’s investigation, The Takeaway talks with Democratic lawmaker Representative Jamie Raskin, who sits on the House Judiciary Committee. Raskin has called for an impeachment inquiry into behavior and actions uncovered by the Mueller Report, which puts him at odds with Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Severe weather across the US continues: massive thunderstorms dumping torrential rains in Oklahoma, Kansas and surrounding states during the past two weeks. The Takeaway checks in on communities in the region to see how they are faring, as concerns grow over what this prolonged flooding could mean not just for people’s homes and daily lives, but for farmers and food.

By 2020, 70 percent of the dams in the US will be at least 50 years old, and the number of dams that are potentially hazardous is growing. With storms testing dams like the Keystone in Oklahoma, The Takeaway looks at the state of dams in the US in the face of growing potential for climate change-related disaster.

A loo at police department pursuit policies and how they intersect with what’s known as the felony murder rule. Under the legal doctrine of felony murder, if someone dies as a result of a felony, anyone who participated in that felony — even if they didn’t kill or even mean to kill anyone — is as guilty as a killer.

A new documentary on Netflix chronicles three Puerto Rican women and their families who were displaced by Hurricane Maria and ended up in New York City. The Takeaway talks to filmmaker and professor Frances Negrón-Muntaner about the blacklash the film is receiving.

2 p.m. – BBC NewsHour
A deadly boat accident in the Hungarian capital, Budapest; the political deadlock in Israel leads to a new general election; and what difference will a summit in Saudi Arabia make to tensions with Iran?

3 p.m. – All Things Considered
A federal push to raise the tobacco age to 21; the NBA finals; predicting tornadoes; fathers win parental leave; and almost 13 years after its finale, HBO’s Deadwood is back as a TV movie.

6:00 p.m. – Marketplace
America’s first offshore windfarm started off the coast of Rhode Island three years ago. Now, as states set more renewable energy goals, more are set to develop. But the project is proving controversial.

6:30 p.m. – The Daily
Robert Mueller, the special counsel, discussed his investigation of Russian election interference for the first time on Wednesday. He did not absolve President Trump of obstruction of justice, saying: “If we had enough confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”

7 p.m. – The World
Sampling new flavors and the words that describe them. We’re in a marketplace in Bangkok.

8 p.m. – Fresh Air
Journalist Adam Liptak is Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times. He’ll discuss the court’s recent rulings on abortion, and what they could mean for the future of Roe v. Wade; the role the court might play in congressional committees subpoenas that President Trump is resisting, and how the court is changing with Trump’s two appointees, Justices Gorusch and Kanaugh.

Sit down, 50 Cent. Meet Nameless Woman, who had never thrown a baseball in her life, apparently, and wasn’t all that interested in the guy she plunked. (Update: The Chicago Tribune reports she apparently received the first-pitch honor for being White Sox “employee of the homestand”.)

You can just leave this on autoplay for the full effect.

If the White Sox photographer had waited another half second, he’d have gotten a classic shot. As it is, he at least captured why the attempt was doomed right from the start.

Chicago White Sox

As long as we’re on the subject and at the end of the NewsCut road, here’s a request: The week NewsCut started in 2007 I threw out the first pitch at a St. Paul Saints game at Midway Stadium (I’m pretty sure MPR paid the Saints for me to do that).

There were photographers taking pictures, but I never saw a photo and it’d be a nice thing to take with me into retirement. For a time reference, it was the same game that Al Franken also threw out a first pitch (and brought an aide with him to warm up first).

Surely, that picture exists somewhere.

For the record, I nailed it. Solid heat.

(h/t: Paul Tosto).