What were you doing on Friday, June 20, 2003?
George W. Bush was President of the United States, Jean Chrétien was Prime Minister of Canada, and Tony Blair was Prime Minister of the UK. The number-one song on the Billboard Hot 100 was “21 Questions” by 50 Cent (featuring Nate Dogg). I was a still-wet-behind-the-ears physics teacher, gasping for breath at the end of the school year.
José Miguel Cabrera Torres, a skinny 20-year-old from Maracay, Venezuela, a city of about a million people near the north coast of the country, stepped to the plate for the first time in a major-league baseball game.