Don’t think about the last time you attended a funeral in Pittsburgh. Don’t think about your great aunt’s funeral on one of those cold gray days the city specializes in. A city with less sunshine than Seattle; a city clouded in funereal gray. Your sister stands next to you, and your shoes sink in the…
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….
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…
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…
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…
For many fans, to love baseball is to love it unconditionally. It doesn’t matter how bad one’s team is or how many disagreements one has with the minutiae of the game. There will always be the next game, the next season, the next great draft pick to root for. But loving baseball is not an…
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…