March is the worst month for baseball writing. There’s a fair case to be made for December or January, which are generally rather boring—but at least they’re unpretentiously so. They know that they’re boring. There is no great annual wave of writing that strains to make them any more interesting than they are. March, though:…
Maybe this is crazy. Maybe it isn't. The Phillies have seen the future. Are we ready? https://t.co/mDMjUPncIw pic.twitter.com/t6OLLCq06o — Matt Gelb (@MattGelb) February 28, 2018 Excerpt From Game Report 05/10/18: Rhys Hoskins, who went 0-for-3 with a walk in the loss to the Giants, gave an emphatic response to one reporter’s question about the play…
ABBOTT: Costello, I’m happy to announce that I’m going to work with the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team as a coach. We’re very excited about the season. COSTELLO: Tampa, you say? I bet you know all the ballplayer names. ABBOTT: [brief panicked pause] Of course I do. A good coach knows all his players’ names….
By the end, it was difficult to tell whether it had merely become routine or if there was a part of him in which hope still resided. Many argued the former, positing his demand for bus fare in the latter years meant he had gone soft and treated these several weeks in April as a…
The acknowledgement of the relationship between Aristotle and baseball first occurred in the 1912 Broadway play “Elevating a Husband,” wherein one character asks another, “what do you know of Aristotle?” Surmising this to be a test of his baseball knowledge, the second character responds in kind, “who was the first fellow to lay down a…
Traducido por Martin Alonso Nunca conseguí la carta. Arriba a la izquierda, segundo desde abajo: ahí es donde un chico le había dicho a otro chico que la había conseguido. Tenía casi once años, justo al borde de la adolescencia, y parecía una metáfora perfecta, un cartón casi equivalente a la voz chillona del crecimiento….
I never got the card. Top left, second from the bottom: that was where another kid told another kid he’d gotten it. I was almost eleven, just peering over the edge of adolescence, and it felt like a perfect metaphor, the cardboard equivalent of a crack of the voice. None of my friends had gotten…
4. Tank, Cyborg, Flybot, and Motorcycle, all tied for fourth. Scabs, the lot of them. 3. (null set) 2. (null set) 1. The human players you can’t play with The 1991 release Cyber Stadium Series: Base Wars is one of several games that assumes in the future some or all (in this case all) human…
Jazz is probably the music best matched to baseball, for obvious reasons: both American inventions; both solo players collaborating on a team effort, finding variations and improvisations within rigorous structures, and so on. But who is baseball’s suited composer? It might be Charles Ives (1874-1954), who recognized early that his dissonant, dissident music would never…
The Man Who Could Walk Out of the Sea By: Kate Preusser When the sun came up on Puerto Rico on New Year’s Day, 1972, it rose on the citizens of the island already awake, lining the island beaches. They carried transistor radios and lights and babies, and they carried something much heavier, heavy the…
Mapping Cy Young By: Patrick Dubuque There is something grotesque about Cy Young’s statistics. I do not like to look at them. 453 innings pitched in 1892, a 35-10 record in 1895, a 0% home run rate in his age-43 season with the Naps in 1910. They’re reminders that baseball wasn’t really baseball, or it…
The Mystery of The Greatest Baseball Mystery By: Mary Craig Throughout July and August of 1913, the Des Moines Evening Tribune published a serial novella by A.H.C. Mitchell titled “The Triple Tie.” The novel, Mitchell’s second and second-to-last publication, was advertised by the newspaper as the “greatest baseball mystery” ever that would appeal to those…
A Boy And His Schwarb By: Matt Sussman Kyle Schwarber is on a “mission to transform his body” https://t.co/MLiyeu8XD5 — HardballTalk (@HardballTalk) November 28, 2017 The NES game A Boy And His Blob has fourteen different flavored jelly beans that transform the titular sidekick into various useful items to navigate an underground subway and later…
Major League Baseball Idealized in Cake By: Mary Craig Baseball is great, but baseball is also very bad. And it’s this contradiction that draws us to the sport and drives us to madness with its presence in the summer and absence in the winter. Sometimes it’s so bad in the summer that we consider finally…
A Doerr Closes By: Mary Craig Bobby Doerr died this week at the age of 99, having spent almost four decades of his life working in Major League Baseball in some capacity. He was a remarkable player and person, whose life, like so many others, cannot easily be summarized by one highlight or anecdote. But…
The How-To Guide for Spontaneous Affection By: Meg Rowley I’ve never understood how anyone gets out of a romantic comedy without a chipped tooth. Romantic comedies are predicated on keeping people who are obviously well-suited for one another apart for artificial reasons. The third act often features a scene when the two leads will fight…