In my room at my parents’ house, there’s a bookcase devoted less to books than various autographed baseball memorabilia, from balls to bats to… a few books. I’ve received few by my own hand; most arrived as gifts. If not for the authentication cards accompanying them, I wouldn’t be able to discern the names scribbled…
I am constantly in awe of the way the human body can adapt. The way that, given repeated exposure to certain fear-inducing stimuli, it will become so alert to the possibility of attack that it can signal danger even when distracted. I can walk down a mostly empty street at night, my music playing as…
Go to a game, and it’s not uncommon to see an MLB player having a catch with some lucky young fan in the stands: Aaron Judge and Mike Trout have both been photographed doing it, in the tradition of Nick Swisher and David Wright before them. It’s a charming piece of baseball arcana, another reminder…
In 1794, the newly formed Commonwealth of Pennsylvania codified a law that had existed in spirit since 1682. As part of a series of similar laws collectively known as the “Blue Laws,” this particular one made illegal the performance of “any worldly employment or business whatsoever on the Lord’s day, commonly called Sunday … or…
The old hiker’s adage “take only memories, leave only footprints” is a nice idea in principle, albeit impossible in practice. We are constantly leaving pieces of us behind: flakes of skin, errant hairs, clothing fibers, all things ready to leap overboard at the slightest bit of contact. “Every contact leaves a trace,” states Locard’s Exchange…
Reading through the number of apologies issued by players and organizations these past few weeks has reminded me of sitting down with a stack of students’ papers to grade. They’re filled with errors, products of players who have never had to apologize for anything, just as students litter papers with common errors, each the mark…
A crow sits on a traffic pole ahead of you. You are walking slowly. The sun is too harsh to move any faster. It doesn’t matter how fast you walk, anyway; you have nowhere to go this time. You are not going to be out of the sun, not until it sets. Then you will…
My grandfather passed away a while back, leading to the sad but necessary chore of cleaning out his apartment. Beyond the willed items, this was mostly wrapping up the odds and ends of everyday life: reuniting an odd silver spoon with the family set, deciding whether or not the yarmulke he wore at a relation’s…
On Monday night, the Lake Elsinore Storm, the High-A team of the Padres, did their annual “Nothing Night.” On the junior-junior-junior-junior circuit of the low minors, teams try to draw interest with a series of increasingly outlandish promotions, name changes, wild food items, and one-off jerseys that riff on seemingly every pop-culture phenomenon and ’90s…
My favorite summer beach read is a nice twisty, gothic mystery set in a creepy old house, so I inhaled Ruth Ware’s The Death of Mrs. Westaway. The book uses the tarot as a motif in a way that emphasizes the symbolism and storytelling of the cards, which got me rummaging around for my old…
In case you haven’t heard, Ichiro Suzuki snuck into the Mariners’ dugout last Thursday via a fake mustache. Like Bobby Valentine before him, he was easily discovered, and whether under his own volition or that of Major League Baseball, he was gone from the dugout by the start of the second inning. While he gave…
My father is fond of the phrase “threw up on his shoes” to indicate a person spectacularly failing at a clutch moment, usually used in conjunction with the phrase “not exactly covering himself in glory, eh?” It’s a phrase pairing that gets used a lot, because he’s a lifelong Mariners fan. Yet on Sunday, the…
The length of its existence and sheer volume of games make it essentially impossible for one to know everything about the game. Even the things we think we know can be thrown into doubt, leaving a gaping hole where once there was certainty, creating ample opportunity for speculation among the hazy visage of fact. For…
Drafting players is a difficult process, with very few guaranteed successes sprinkled amongst dozens of players who never sniff the majors for a plethora of circumstances largely beyond their control. And yet drafting is also somewhat easy as it requires one to operate within defined parameters that are over a century in the making. In…
Nothing marks time quite so clearly as being in elementary school. A flotilla of cereal-box ships for Columbus Day, Tootsie Roll pop ghosts for Halloween, turkey hands for Thanksgiving. Pieces of copy paper folded and snipped into snowflakes, then taped to windows to shiver over heating vents, to mark the long winter months, and wads…
(with apologies to Natasha Trethewey’s “Myth”) The starter is the closer is the opener again, baseball writ by Rilke’s refrain: we must change our lives or suffer being left behind. Adapt or die. Some dislike the new, what’s bad for baseball, bullpen starts. Or: the JUCO prospect who almost didn’t play. Realize the scrap of…