On June 22nd, 1914, just nine games into his career with the St. Louis Terriers, Armando Marsáns woke up to the news that he was no longer able to play professional baseball. He suffered from no illness or injury but rather something more sinister. Several days prior, August Herrmann, owner of the Cincinnati Reds and…
My sister lived in Cleveland for several years; while visiting her, I was riffing on the Cuyahoga River catching fire, as jerk tourists are wont to do. A friend of hers from the area just rolled her eyes and asked, “Which time?” It’s an important question, because the river caught fire at least 13 times,…
In the democratic, everybody-wins community softball environment I played in as a kid, everyone on a team had to play every position. A power pitcher could not pitch every game, even if they had the ability and inclination; you couldn’t force the same kid to play catcher every game. And on the extremely uncompetitive squad…
Today in the continued Hellscape Off-Season for Mariners fans, James Paxton was traded to the Yankees for Justus Sheffield and the Justus Sheffield Singers. I had a tip this was going down, so I spent the early part of my day looking up things about Justus Sheffield. I stumbled upon this article from MLB.com from…
People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for the sea to rise up and swallow me. This is a dramatic statement, I recognize. It’s the kind of statement we’re prone to making in 2018, a year of…
Baseball is over now, and I am in denial. It always takes a few days for it to really settle in that this isn’t just an off-day, it’s not the All-Star Break, I can’t turn on a game in a few days and have baseball keep me company again. There’s always a feeling of loneliness…
The margins are thin. Consider the player in the title above. Goldschmidt is one of the more famous prospect industry misses, but if his hit tool had actually slipped a bit, the margin between all-star and below-average would be razor thin. Or consider that the original title for this article was going to be “A…
If “9=8” and “Rocktober” have taught us anything, it’s that, come September and October, the English language is no friend to baseball players. So difficult is it to craft catchy yet sensical slogans, it wasn’t even attempted until the contemporary era. Yet the early stages of professional baseball teemed with dramatic storylines and plucky underdogs…
After a brief appearance in the majors in 2017, Atlanta sent Max Fried to the Arizona Fall League to continue gaining experience after losing almost two full seasons to Tommy John surgery. The AFL, “prospect graduate school,” is a weird mashup of MiLB and summer camp, flavored with a heavy dose of small sample size….
Any dramatic theorist, from Aristotle to Scooby-Doo, will tell you that in order to have true drama, there must be something at stake.
As the Dodgers and Rockies began their tiebreaker game, I filed into an auditorium that was both too hot and too cold to listen to Ken Burns give a lecture titled “Sharing The American Experience.” As a baseball fan and somebody who studies American history, Ken Burns has long been a figure that people assume…
On Saturday, the Mariners won 13-0 against the Texas Rangers for their 85th win of the season, and were officially eliminated from postseason contention. On Sunday I woke up very early (for me, a child-free person who works late at night) and drove to Kent, about half an hour outside Seattle, to watch my friend…
It was a letdown, when this year’s Women’s Baseball World Cup ended, to go back to watching men’s. Much has been written about the hard baseball details of the women’s tournament: the match-ups, the spin rates, the turf, the rain, the sharpness of the double plays and the joy of the home runs. The athletes…
It’s been raining in D.C. for either 72 hours, or possibly 40 days and 40 nights. We haven’t rounded up two of every relief pitcher for the ark quite yet, but it’s been a wet couple of days. There’s something biblical about this kind of constant, soaking rain, particularly in a city with poor drainage,…
It’s a common thing for those of us who follow the minor leagues or college baseball to sigh over particularly deliciously named players; I myself have written a “D-II baseball player or YA hero?” quiz for these very electronic pages. It’s all in good fun, but it’s also a reminder that the landscape of names…