Today the Portfolio section begins a new Storytelling series: The sports that keep your family connected. (See below for details on sending us your stories.)

I figure it's been about 35 years since we did so, but Dad and I threw a ball back and forth for a little while in the rain the other day with my kids. He showed us the proper technique for gripping and throwing a knuckleball.

It was about 35 years ago that I hung up my spikes for cigarettes and delinquency. Dad and I have not thrown together since. We golf together now and hang out together when I have time, but we haven't played ball since I gave it up so long ago.

Dad was a powerful hitter when he was young. I heard stories of him hitting balls on top of the mill in Hazelwood from their game in a nearby parking lot. Dad's uncles were knuckleball pitchers and Dad got the pleasure of trying to catch for them as they practiced.

My brothers and I played ball when we were young. They were much better players than I but we all loved the game. For practice, Dad would take us to Frick Park and hit monster fly balls to us from one end of the softball fields to the other.

Now my daughters are players. We spend our spring weekends at ball fields and batting cages. I throw and hit them fly balls and work on their throwing accuracy. I watch as they work on their hitting at the cages and I try to help their batting eye and swings so that at game time, they'll be hitting screaming line drives.

We share a love for the game. We catch 'til my shoulder hurts and they play hard and work to be good players. It's a beautiful thing to me.

In the movie "Field of Dreams," toward the end of the movie, the character played by James Earl Jones talks about how the one constant in American life is baseball:

"America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: It's a part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good and it could be again."

So it is with my family.

Baseball carries through us as generations come and go and it is the one constant that runs through it. We steamroll through our lives and go in different directions. There is always baseball binding together the lines of my family.

For a moment the other day, the lines of my baseball family merged as three generations took 10 minutes in the rain and threw knuckleballs back and forth. It was a good moment binding together a thing that we all shared and it connected me with my dad with his uncles with my kids.

I told my older daughter a while back that I want to have a catch with her when she's 30 and her life has moved on. She laughed and said sure.

I doubt that she understood what I was reaching for -- the continued link of baseball, the continued connection that we share, the simple act of having a catch that connects us to our individual youths and times in our lives that are good and simple and together.