It’s On the Syllabus By: Holly M. Wendt It’s the first of the year, and I’m planning for the spring semester, charting out assignments and due dates for a brand new baseball literature course I’m teaching, its roster full of students who aren’t English majors. A syllabus is a series of hopeful resolutions, a declaration…
Mapping Cy Young By: Patrick Dubuque There is something grotesque about Cy Young’s statistics. I do not like to look at them. 453 innings pitched in 1892, a 35-10 record in 1895, a 0% home run rate in his age-43 season with the Naps in 1910. They’re reminders that baseball wasn’t really baseball, or it…
The Victorian Lady’s Guide to Baseball Players By: Kate Preusser Back before ladies could use the internet to quickly google remedies for earaches or how to whiten yellowed piano keys or where to procure Icelandic moss for a blancmange, slim volumes like Things a Woman Wants to Know (1901) or Good Things Made, Said, and…
1930s Tabletop Coin Games By: Matt Ellis It’s a banality by now that one could point to any number of consumer goods that mimicked the game of baseball throughout the twentieth century. Sure, there are any number of iterations of The Show over the past couple of years, and yes, sure, pinball and tabletop games…
Traducido por Martin Alonso Solo me quiero sentar Por: Meg Rowley Estoy a favor del ejercicio, pero es importante sentarse. El mundo nos cansa, y debemos ser capaces de descansar. No ser capaz de sentarme es la razón por la cual me cansé de vivir en Nueva York. Estás constantemente luchando contra las personas—en el…
I Just Want to Sit Down By: Meg Rowley I’m all for exercise, but it’s important to be able to sit down. The world wears us out, and we ought to be able to take a rest. Not being able to sit is why I got tired of living in New York. You’re constantly battling…
Moving, and Moving On By: Emma Baccellieri My parents, like many couples, made some life changes as their youngest child prepared to leave for college. They’d been talking about downsizing for a while, but they ultimately figured that they weren’t interested in half-measures here; rather than simply picking a smaller house, my father decided to…
Time is a Serpent Eating Its Own Tail By: Emma Baccellieri Participating in baseball’s Hall of Fame season requires establishing a friendly relationship with baseball’s history—watching players from the past, putting them in context by reading about the past, calibrating standards by analyzing elections of the past. The whole thing is predicated on looking back….
Yannigan of the Year By: Emma Baccellieri The term “rookie” is said to have come from “recruit,” with the sounds chopped up and tossed around more than a century ago to form a more casual word. It’s not limited to baseball, of course; it supposedly started in the military and spread then to baseball and…
Hunter Pence and the Good Death By: Kate Preusser © D. Ross Cameron-USA TODAY Sports I learned a lot from reading Caitlyn Doughty’s Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, but my primary takeaway was this: Americans are bad at death. In her book, Doughty details various cultural practices and rituals around earthly departure, and continually circles…
Gotta Know, Gotta Know! By: Emma Baccellieri I recently finished reading a Chinese science-fiction trilogy called Remembrance of Earth’s Past, which features an alien species with no need for any sort of spoken or written communication: The contents of their minds are simply there for everyone around them, able to be processed and understood. The…
Sometimes, it’s easier to have your starter get lit up for eight runs in three innings so that you know you’re out and there’s no sense in trying and you can just let the best members of your bullpen rest for tomorrow.
The Fairness Doctrine By: Emma Baccellieri There is this idea that sports are like life. This is tossed around most often, it seems, when it comes to conversation around the relative merits of kids playing sports: They’ll learn life lessons. Because sports are like life! Justice and honesty and responsibility and respect and winning and…
All Your Perfect Imperfections By: Emma Baccellieri It has now been exactly one week, give or take a few hours, since this play: Jose Lobaton beat the tag. He was safe. And then, upon further examination, he was discovered to have beat the tag but to have lifted his foot up off the base ever…
Houston took Game 1 behind Dallas Keuchel, Jose Altuve, and Marwin Gonzalez.
Sentiments regarding bonds both paternal and matrimonial.