For the first couple of weeks, he tries to learn everyone’s names, from the trio of outfielders who all look alike, young and tanned and hungry, to the seemingly unending stream of guys coming out of the bullpen, a clown car unloading. So many he sorts them into two groups: Beard and No Beard, 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…
Whenceforth I received the news that the great Bone Head from Mud City was applying saliva to the ball before releasing it to the batter, I was right steamed. Myself, returning straight from a season that saw me ace thirty-one victories for my club, well yes-sir, I feign ignorance as to why a gentleman pitching…
PITCH ONE, 92 MPH fastball in the zone: Barria: I want to win this count. Belt: This is a hittable pitch. I will swing. FOUL, 0-1 PITCH TWO, 92 MPH fastball, above the zone: Barria: Let’s see if he will chase this. Belt: This is not a hittable pitch. I will not swing. BALL, 1-1…
(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…
The British Virgin Islands Marlins celebrate home runs by setting off the miniature volcano in left field. “This is just how the islands themselves were created!” the team’s publicity office crows when the great gurgling mass is unveiled. When a television reporter discovers a few weeks later that the “highly technical live-action sculpture” actually runs…
Taylor, a marketing manager, and Lindsey, who designs high-end clothing for dogs, are on the hunt for their first MLB player. Taylor likes the classics: clean lines, stirrup socks, and OBP for days. Lindsey, who has a taste for luxury, wants something modern, with a high launch angle the couple can have their friends over…
Whenever I hear the phrase “compact swing,” I think immediately of Bill Madlock. He somehow became identified with that particular piece of scout-speak—“his swing so compact it wouldn’t disturb the cobwebs in a ghost-town phone booth,” one journalist wrote—and in turn I began to identify with him. Not because I had a compact swing myself—I…
The Mariners claimed a pitcher. His name is Ashton, or Austin, or Chase, or Chasen. His minor-league FIP is in the mid-3s, or the low-4s. He wears his socks high, or he doesn’t. He has no real social media presence, maybe a locked Instagram account with a handful of pictures–an off-season fishing trip, his first…
Why is it that the Mariners feel like the baseball equivalent of Blue Oyster Cult playing their hits at the local casino?
Minor league baseball cards look different than their major league counterparts. Perhaps it’s the youth of the talent, or the inexperience of the photographers; maybe it’s just baseball lacking that last coat of the varnish of seriousness. Minor leaguers make more faces, contort themselves into unnatural positions never seen during play. Often times they are…
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,…
All the score sheets from the Durham Bulls games I covered in my five years as a beat writer are sheaved in file folders except one: game three of the 2013 International League Championship series between the Bulls and the Pawtucket Red Sox. It was the second-most exciting game I ever saw. (This was the…
The smell of the grass, the crack of the bat, the snap of the glove. In the world of spring training sensations and signs of renewal, these are all trash leftovers for the losers in life. This entire country is obsessed with lawns. You can whack things with a bat with near impunity. The glove…
In Medieval times, your church was just a drafty hunk of stone without some good compelling holy relics. Bigger, better churches had bigger, better reliquaries. These objects were prized relative to their imagined power: Pieces of the True Cross or Jesus’s baby teeth, for example, would have significantly higher desirability than, say, a bone fragment…
I often enter my office building by the rear door, which opens onto a parking lot across the street from a big downtown hotel’s main entrance. A few years ago, as I crossed the parking lot, my path led near someone talking on a cellphone just a few feet from my door. The lot is…