So-called artistic production hits the skillet to sizzle but is in fact routine and unmusical When new students were mentioned at the stickball game I asked for their area code and predicted they’d be awful I was writing poetry about the moon and men were calling those poems patriotic Go home and clean your drain…
It was the top of the second when Chick Hafey blooped a middle-in pitch into shallow center, but it was the AL that actually sent one across the plate a few minutes later. Wally Berger and Dick Bartell rounded out the middle of the lineup but it just wasn’t enough: for despite exciting the thousands…
thinking like a rhizome peeling into autonomous cells autonomous zones nearly inappropriate puns to get the band back together first the band has to break up assemble some supergroup a clump of resistant bacteria spoof suit per theme trips for the dog and pony show academic competition farce representing the institution expect a lot of…
The Las Cruces Vaqueros suspended baseball activity in 2015. A few months ago, a notice appeared scheduling tryouts. Anticipate the future. Think about it. Unaffiliated with majors or minors, join the Pecos League in the high or low desert. Champion Bakersfield Train Robbers fans nearly moony for bandanna’ed mascot share the same logo with two…
In 2001 he was arrested for misdemeanor criminal trespassing; the newspapers didn’t go into details, probably because they didn’t have any details. It’s the sort of crime where someone decides they don’t like where you are. The original complaint came, they said, when someone saw him trying to deposit an empty envelope into an ATM…
I sometimes like to see the flag flapping at the top of a construction crane. The loneliness of the flap, the anthem’s punch line, consoles me like the moon or a good cloud. When a vulnerable person sings the anthem, the crowd sweeps me up in the swell. I can resist strong performances; a wavering…
The teacher handed me an envelope, and my heart started racing. I never got envelopes. I never got called out. I was very much a background character of my second grade class, putting my books in my bag and thinking about Nintendo. I wondered what it could be. Had I won a prize? Had they…
I don’t care much for championships. It’s very easy to just come out and say this when the sports team that I like is bad, but I’ve always been on the record with this opinion, even when they were in the World Series. Even if I didn’t, it shouldn’t matter, because I think changing your…
Reunion answers questions better left alone. What we look like together, on a team again. If the wind has teeth it’s not to bite with but rather scratch from hip down to ankle, to strip one pinstripe away and chill your flank. What ever changed except the date on the calendar. Not you. Still, the…
Look, I’ve got no idea what’s going on at MLB HQ. The Mishandling of Everything Committee is hard at work, turning Rob Manfred mid-sleep night whispers into bylaws. The mascot spaying and neutering division has fallen way behind. People are accidentally ingesting baseball weightlessness serum and floating into ceiling fans. Who knows. All we have…
Peppering the air with cracker jack tossing it by the handful into the bullpen I think we made a mistake Everybody on the elevator did Haven’t heard a helicopter around home lately Back east it was often Middle west it’s aw shucks A hat with a fish on it A fish with a hat on…
The noises can only echo so long, Johnnie LeMaster. Each groan and sigh ricochets off the concrete And is absorbed by it, eaten by the grass. The lone and level sands erased The works of Ozymandias, and yet Still more despair: it also wore away The empty evenings, the lonely children Mistakes, misfortune, misdeeds. The…
Willians Astudillo stares out at the mound. Many would say he is waiting for the pitch, but that’s not really true. It implies some agency on the part of the pitch. Now the pitch waits for Willians Astudillo. Almost three months have passed since Astudillo last struck out. It was a bad call, a pitch…
So apparently they’re going to tinker with the mound placement in the Atlantic League. Did you see this? Did you hear about this? Moving it back is obviously going to cause the fabric of the pitching universe to collapse upon itself, but it’s still cool to try and tinker with century-old standbys. Move the mound…
Where extra does not mean free, just longer, and the outfielders have lost the brisk skip of earlier innings, a unit concludes only with a win and loss. Weeknights especially, more cost than boon to stay longer. Keith Law says no such thing as free baseball, only the unit known as a single game. This…
Have we considered this? Covering baseball, being immersed it, being able to walk up to it, listen to it, smell it and–albeit likely at the consequence of immediately revocation of my media credential–touch it, only increases the suspicion that it might actually suck. It lasts absolutely forever, demands constant travel, and touts a culture of…