Jimmy McAleer (1864–1931) was an American center fielder, manager, and stockholder in Major League Baseball who helped establish the American League. He spent most of his 13-season playing career with the Cleveland Spiders, and went on to manage the Cleveland Blues, St. Louis Browns, and Washington Senators. Shortly before his retirement, he became a major shareholder in the Boston Red Sox. His career ended abruptly. During his brief tenure as co-owner of the Red Sox, McAleer quarreled with longtime friend and colleague Ban Johnson, president of the American League. McAleer's rift with Johnson, along with his sudden retirement, damaged his professional reputation, and he received little recognition for his contributions to baseball. Today, he is most often remembered for initiating the customary request that the President of the United States throw out the first ball of the season.

Read the rest of this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_McAleer

_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:

1879:

Fighting in the War of the Pacific between Chile and a Peruvian–Bolivian alliance, opened with the Battle of Topáter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Pacific

1905:

1,500 Cretans, led by Eleftherios Venizelos , met at the village of Theriso to call for the island's unification with Greece, beginning the Theriso revolt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theriso_revolt

1931:

Bhagat Singh, one of the most influential revolutionaries of the Indian independence movement, and two others were executed by British authorities. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagat_Singh

1991:

The Sierra Leone Civil War began when the Revolutionary United Front, with support from the special forces of Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia, invaded Sierra Leone in an attempt to overthrow Joseph Saidu Momoh. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Leone_Civil_War

2001:

The Russian Federal Space Agency forced the space station Mir to deorbit and crash into the Pacific Ocean. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deorbit_of_Mir

_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:

couch potato (n): A person who spends a lot of time sitting or lying down, often watching television, eating snacks, and drinking alcohol http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/couch_potato

___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:

Society must be organized in such a way that man's social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it. If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature. --Erich Fromm http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Erich_Fromm