A Bog to Sell You By: Holly M. Wendt Baseball is a game of careful measurements and fixed dimensions: 60 feet, 6 inches from the mound to home, 90 feet between the bases. Outfields vary a bit; MLB’s official ruling indicates that “parks constructed by professional teams after June 1, 1958 must have a minimum…
Live sports are nonsense. Doing anything on anybody else’s schedule is nonsense, really. We spend our lives following schedules set down by other people, for school, for work, for family. What we do with our precious free time should not be at the whim of what some billionaire baseball owner thinks is the appropriate time…
Imagine a box. A rectangular space. It has windows, big triple-pane ones, with a nice view. You are not trapped here, or even locked in this box, but you are definitely expected to be there. Everyday. Once inside, a phrase is heard aloud in a declarative, confident tone. “This pitcher thinks too much.” At face…
The terrible thing about growing old in 2018 is that everyone else talks more like Lenin and I just look more like him. It’s a Saturday in mid-April, and stinging rain pelts the retractable roof of Safeco Field, and the summer is almost over. I am sick, and amongst the youthful chatter, I feel terribly…
On Saturday night, in defiance of yet another gray, decidedly unspringly day, I decided to make milkshakes. We had ice cream leftover from a birthday event, and the Phillies were starting at home early in the evening after a day off. After spending the day buried under blankets and grading, too, it seemed like a…
Somehow, I’d never been to Camden Yards prior to Saturday night, and if it wasn’t for the fact that the Phillies, Pirates, and Nationals were all opening the season out of town, that trend would likely have continued. But the schedule is as the schedule does, and we trundled our way to Baltimore to watch…
There was a black cat chasing a group of crows–a murder of crows, one might foreshadow–in the parking lot of the Camelback Ranch spring training complex near the end of the day this week. The cat got a hold of one the crows in it claws, prompting a commotion, but the crow got loose and…
In my Catholic high school religion class they taught us the value of seeing perspective from different angles; specifically the teacher talked about looking “at the light” as opposed to “in the light.” This was meant to be interpreted as, don’t mock someone for their beliefs unless you can empathize from a perspective of believing…
It’s a matter of perspective, one’s sight-line to the game. The one I’m most used to now, of course, is the television’s panopticon: a carefully curated series of angles and cuts, close-ups and B-roll, a variety of points of view that no single fan could experience in the same near-simultaneous way that the televised game…
Photo Credit: John Trupin He’s known subsistence-level baseball. Two years of junior college, riding buses over rutted roads that are in only slightly better repair than the fields they’d buried afternoons in, where the best outcome is to not twist an ankle in a patch of marshy outfield; crowds in the double digits, indifferent umpires,…
Most of the spring training stadiums have the same package of songs they cycle through every single day. Day 1 of Hearing “Boys are Back in Town” at spring training Hey, baseball is back. Major league baseball as currently constructed is played only by individuals publicly identifying as boys. And they’re back. I get it….
Recently, as part of their Fan Fest activities, several members of the San Francisco Giants engaged in an imitation game, emulating their own teammates’ batting stances and pitcher’s mound presences. As the introductory music reels out, Brandon Crawford trundles to the plate, head down and hangdog. In a little while, his act will be identified:…
On Friday night, the staggeringly popular George Saunders gave a reading and a brief talk about writing in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The event was part of Saunders’ tour for his Man Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo. The story is one that encourages a reader to get caught up in the craft, to figure it…
With Spring Training less than two weeks away and dozens of notable free agents still unsigned, the discussion of the frigid market has become much more public. Player agents and even general managers are beginning to speak openly about the factors at work, and what it means for the future of the game. Now, finally,…
My college students on the baseball and softball teams had their first official days of practice last week. Here in Pennsylvania, we’re a long way from the trappings of practice spring training promises—grass thick and lush even in the desert, the kind of sunlight that makes everyone squint. Instead, last week, this week, likely all…
What is causing the stall in free agent signings? Is it ownership collusion to suppress player revenues? Is it an elaborate troll that Scott Boras is inflicting on you, personally? Are teams torn between filling holes in their roster with available, experienced free agent baseball players, or with an escaped, government-made, 17-foot-tall robotic assassin spider,…