Far from my backyard, if you squint, you can just make out the edge of the Puget Sound. It lies to the east of us, and as weather systems blow in from the north or southwest our modest little view lets us see the winter storms not as they approach, but as they depart; our…
Through the generosity of a good friend I recently came into possession of one (1) Official Scorebook for the 1969 Seattle Pilots. The year is both vital for establishing cultural context, and completely unnecessary, as the 1969 Seattle Pilots were the only Seattle Pilots. The next season they left for Milwaukee, and Seattle has only…
A field guide to how baseball players should interact with kids; a Tigers game just at the end of the world; and the anniversary of the Prince Fielder contract, the end of its own little world.
Last Thursday we saw The Nutcracker. Hundreds of parents crowded into a small elementary gym worn with age and underfunded maintenance. We need a new school pretty badly. The bond for it failed the vote late last year. We sat in small, cheap, uncomfortable, plastic chairs that were set entirely too close together, and watched…
“Time, you know, takes everyone out. It’s undefeated.” — Rocky Balboa in Creed *** David Wright’s career has been a constant in my adult life, a series of memorable moments in time and space. Many of these are marked in my brain with some weird correlation to whatever was going on in my life at…
Lou Castro, as he preferred to be called, made his major league debut on April 23, 1902 for the Philadelphia Athletics. His professional baseball career lasted a paltry 42 games, in which he hit .245 with 15 RBI. On their way to winning the pennant, the Athletics removed him from the team in favor of…
It is cold outside, and the plants are dead. We have a long pot on our front porch, and whenever I look at it in the winter I wonder how it’s possible those thin brown strings covered in dead leaves can summon the strength to become vertical again each March, and yet somehow they do….
If you’ve never seen a Hallmark Channel Original Movie, they more or less go like this: Young, single woman from a small town moves to the big city for her fast-paced creative job (ad executive seems to be a particular favorite), goes home for the holidays and in the process, meets and woos/is wooed by…
It has grown dark in the Northwest. The region is best known for its rain, but for me it’s the darkness that defines our winters. Located farther north than Quebec, Seattle Decembers are marked by a sun that spends but a few hours barely cresting the southern horizon. I used to hate it. I couldn’t…
Matt Klentak: “But if we can keep the rotation as good as it is or make it better and also add balance to our pitching staff, I think that’s something worth exploring. I don’t know if we’ll actually do that, but I know that we will explore it.” Matt Klen: “But if we can keep…
To Those Concerned with Such Matters, As the Seattle Mariners lie coughing, bleeding, dying at our feet, I stand here, before all, to confess of the murder. I loved them once, long and true, through our years of plenty and our long seasons of want. We rejoiced together during The Double, 116 Wins, Ichiro, Felix,…
He was always in the cage or in batting practice, taking a few more cuts to get his reps in. Until one day, it hit him: Why take more swings, when he could just swing more bats? “Old Three-Bat Thomas,” called him. “That’s not going to help,” his teammates would shout from the dugout. “If…
Eight of the top ten grossing films of 2017 were sequels, remakes, or prequels. The same can be said for 2016, and again in only slightly decreasing numbers the deeper you trace backwards through the new millenium. Ours is the era of the remake, the rehash, the repeat. It is almost as if the future…
When I stepped into the subway car parked on the fourth floor of the Whitney Museum, I was standing in a life-sized cartoon. The floor heaved beneath my feet and I could hear the train rattling on the tracks. The papier-mâché passengers had lavish faces four times the size of mine and they were doing…
Many popular modern board games feature elegant systems, genius mathematical puzzles, and opportunities to create grand engines of efficiency. In these games, the theming is largely secondary. They are elaborate puzzles, and while you may play them with friends, you will not talk much because all of you will be so focused on being efficient….
It’s important to acknowledge what this ad is and is not. It is not a sign of some cultural sea change within the game of baseball, wherein more than a century of stodgy traditionalists, puritan-descendant Northeasterners and barely disguised racists have bludgeoned the exuberance out of the young, reckless and darker skinned. It is an…