That’s right, folks, July 31 promises to be a scorcher. Your old standbys (standsby?) like water, lemonade, and sport drinks may not be enough. Try these five under-the-radar options for relief: Saisons – per the Oxford Companion to Beer, the first of the threefold reasons for the existence of saisons is “to refresh the seasonal…
That Pennsylvania has a lot of farms is relatively well known, and in Lancaster County, epicenter of Amish Country and home of rolling green fields and orchards of many scales, agriculture seems to inform everything—even the baseball. The city of Lancaster houses the Lancaster Barnstormers, denizens of the independent Atlantic League and former employer of…
Deadspin published a nice piece by Joe DeLessio on Friday about digging through his late father’s massive, overwhelming collection of memorabilia, most of which was baseball stuff, most of which of that was Orioles stuff. The word “stuff” is often a filler term where a better, more precise descriptor isn’t coming to mind, but in…
Intentional violence does not inhere in baseball, though you could be fooled by, you know, watching a major-league game and seeing the not-insignificant amount of actual and threatened violence regularly on view. I apologize for the hot take because those are not this forum’s métier, but life would be better if fact matched theory in…
Sure, Shed Long pic.twitter.com/O6r1Plwrox — James Fegan (@JRFegan) May 8, 2018 What other uses does Pensacola Blue Wahoos second baseman Shed Long’s weird plastic thing–which he places on his bat for wind resistance on practice swings–possibly have? (Note: It has his name on it. His name is Shed Long.) –A nametag, obviously. It’s unwieldy and…
Lately I’ve been re-watching Murder, She Wrote. I say re-watching, because I remember watching it as a child with my grandparents, but really my memories of the show are hazy, as soft-focus as the early-80s images themselves. I remember as a kid wanting to be just like Jessica Fletcher, a famous author who also got…
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…
(after Updike, and Camus) “Word is the actual attendance at Monday’s #Rays-#White Sox game—people who used tickets to come in—was 974.” –Marc Topkin, Twitter, April 10. We’d had snow, and when the night game was rescheduled for 1:10 due to cold, that cinched it. My parents made me get this job—value of hard work and…
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…
Can the A’s young sluggers carry a team that looks short on starting pitching?
World Series: no instant replay. The games are so long. So long! And they’re just random ball-bounces anyway. Let the chaos reign. Playoffs: in the seventh inning or later, if the game is presently a save situation, then a replay umpire is allowed to call for replay of any call that can currently be challenged…
We went to the Indian Wells Tennis Garden this weekend for the BNP Paribas Open, also known as the Indian Wells Masters. We saw many tennis players, and all of them played tennis the same basic way. Sure, some were big hitters without much foot speed and some were small and fast and defense-oriented, but…
March is the worst month for baseball writing. There’s a fair case to be made for December or January, which are generally rather boring—but at least they’re unpretentiously so. They know that they’re boring. There is no great annual wave of writing that strains to make them any more interesting than they are. March, though:…
It wasn’t fair. Johnny Bench hit 40, and Pete Rose was at .300 the entire year. She knew this, she knew this in part because it’s what the newspapers said, but it’s also what was on the back of the card she got from Clark’s, when her mom let her pick out one item under…
The color green helped hook me on philosophy. When I was a boy the street lights on Ambaum Avenue were aligned sideways, a rather charming little touch for a part of town and a childhood that desperately wished to be charmed. One day the lights were rotated ninety degrees, the boring old top-to-bottom way, and…