By JOHN JAMES MARSHALL/Designated Writers

Players Weekend in Major League Baseball is over and there was plenty of good and bad to go around. This is what happens when baseball tries to skew younger. Last year it was “let the kids play” and this is just another version of that. Baseball has had this weekend before, but not to this degree. It’s an idea some MLB flunkie decided to take too far. The idea itself is still OK, but someone needs to tap the brakes if this is going to continue.

THE GOOD: OK, let’s keep in mind that this is only one weekend. Three games in a 162-game season. So settle down to all those people who think Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams are rolling around in their graves (or where Ted is these days). The personalized nicknames on the back are fine and actually kind of interesting and original (unless you are the Yankees’ Brett Gardner who put “Gardner” on the back of his). There was some imagination — Braves closer Mark Melancon put the phonetic spelling of his name on the back — and some were in Spanish, so most Americans had no idea what those meant. But it’s a nice touch and if 9-year-old Johnny thinks it’s cool and therefore wants to watch more baseball on TV, good for everyone.

THE BAD: In the previous two Players Weekends, teams wore a pullover version of their normal jersey. Basically, it was a spring training jersey. Same colors, similar style and nobody really complained. This year? Not so much. The monochromatic look (all white for the home team; all black for the visitors) were simply disgusting. The Cubs “protested” by wearing their normal blue hats on Friday before MLB called and put the kibosh on that. The Yankees and Dodgers — ever heard of them? — played during the weekend and those classic jerseys were left on the shelf in favor of something that you’d see in independent league with teams that have goofy nicknames.

Baseball has a good idea. It needs to stop trying too hard.

Originally ran in Sunday editions of The Times and The News-Star Sunday, August 25.

She’s still standing there, a ghost of fading white, her plate glass front a window to the soul of all those lunchtime yesterdays.

But time wins again, and she’s just back to being only building now, a body without a soul. The Deli-Casino Sandwich Shoppe is gone.

The soul is in well-deserved retirement. That would be Dayle and Sam George, married 57 years now, the dynamic duo who ran the place with efficiency and love for 40 years, from May 15 of 1979 until August 2 of this year. That’s four decades of some mighty fine sammiches. And soups. And milkshakes. And salads…

Kosher pickle, anyone?

“I was 43 when we opened the place,” Sam said with a shake of his head the day before closing. “Never thought we’d be open this long. Time…”

It’s the great mystery.

I was sitting with him and Deli-Casino regular Bill Pou at the first table inside the front door that day, eating a piece of chocolate Retirement Cake and enjoying my final Casino Po-Boy, nine-inch, add extra cheddar. Dayle told me it was the easiest of all their sandwiches to make.

I’ve always tried to be a low-maintenance customer.

Somehow, a sandwich here was not just a sandwich. It was like eating at home. I’m looking right now at one of those paper menus they kept by the register…

Las Vegas Special. Atomic Sub. Black Jack Supreme. Italian Po-Boy. And the most popular Deli-Casino sandwich of them all, the One-Armed Bandit, called by local pediatrician David Pace the “never-fail Holy Grail of Sandwiches,” a man who raised daughter Melanie as a second generation Bandit lover thanks to Dayle and Sam, who define what a mom and pop operation should be.

I’m looking too at my last receipt. $11.28.

Bittersweet.

For years when The Times was on Lake Street, I was usually “the runner” at lunchtime. Lane and Maggie and Kathie and Terri and sometimes Judy would order and somebody would call it in and with cash money I’d head for the drive-thru at 637 E. Kings Highway. Sam and I would make the swap, and back to the paper I’d go with white sacks of sandwich heaven.

There were no chain stores of any kind in my hometown except for the IGA, and the Dairy Maid was the only thing that passed for a fast food joint, even though you couldn’t go inside. Just ride your bike to the little chest high screen, where Mrs. Sarah Joe or Betty Sue or Mrs. Eutha would take your order. Or sometimes it’d be Mrs. Edna Barfield or Mrs. Albertine Sanderson, a pair who already forgot more about milkshake making than I’ll ever know. When they raised the screen again and yelled “Honey!,” your order was ready to be picked up and eaten at one of the four round picnic tables.

I went back to my hometown four years ago for the funeral of my growing-up bestie, and that very month, the Dairy Maid had shut down. Two deaths in one week. Tough day. I almost took the faded wooden “Place Order Here” sign, hanging from two short rusty chains. But I didn’t. Felt it’d be like lifting a watch off a dead man’s wrist. Instead, I just said goodbye.

We get attached to places, sometimes because of the places and sometimes because of the people in the places and sometimes because of both. Nothing lasts forever, so I tried to appreciate Deli-Casino every time I went. I got my money’s worth and still do, just thinking about it. Same with the Dairy Maid and the city pool back home that’s filled in now, the Louisiana Tech Golf Course, the Teddy Bear Sandwich Den in Bossier City. Mercy.

I wonder sometimes if some of us are miserable because we ignore the ordinary. A dog, filled with joy, running toward you through the grass or skidding on a wood floor. A cat sleeping on its back, impossibly contorted. The smell of a baby or the sound of a choir. Of course it’s the ordinary that makes life worth living. A good book when you’re alone, a conversation in the shade, a sandwich made by familiar hands in a safe and cozy, entirely comfortable place.

Those are the kinds of things that can always travel with you, no matter what road you’re on.

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