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…
SAY HELLO TO YOUR NEW SCOREBOARD! • 8,369 sq ft • 258% larger than the old Coors Field board • 784 60-inch televisions • 6.8 million LEDs • HD1080P • Uniquely Colorado Rockies shape • Speaker enhancements on the lower bowl pic.twitter.com/dRMioPXnLr — Colorado Rockies (@Rockies) January 31, 2018 The National Portrait Gallery was, for…
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…
Snow Baseball By: Matt Ellis The colossal winter storm dubbed “Grayson” has been pummeling the East Coast for the past 24 hours or so. Yesterday I opened my door once to let my dogs out to do their thing, and both went right smack dab on the front porch like a couple of stupid animals….
The Los Angeles Dodgers Launch Event By: Matt Sussman Words can’t possibly express the innovation that Dodgers president Andrew Friedman unveiled at their much-anticipated launch event, so below is an audio transcript of his presentation. CLICK TO PLAY Pride and Joy By: James Fegan My father’s favorite baseball player of all time was Emil Brown….
Use Your Toolbox By: Meg Rowley It takes a lifetime to really know yourself. It’s a funny trick that being human plays. We’re constantly changing, growing, getting stuck. We aren’t ever entirely the same for very long, and yet our happiness often depends on us knowing something of ourselves. I guess we get glimpses. We…
Baseball Pros, Counterculture Baseball Game By: Matt Sussman There are two categories of NES baseball games: ones who have heard of MLB and ones who haven’t. Perhaps the oddest one I’ve come across is Quattro Sports, which is actually four games, but one of them is titled “Baseball Pros.” This was released in 1990 by…
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…
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 Treaty of Parrish By: Matt Sussman Lance Parrish was recently named the manager of the Low-A West Michigan Whitecaps. He is not to be confused with Larry Parrish, who coached the same team in 2013, as well as its parent Detroit Tigers for two seasons in the late 90s. Additionally, Larry is not to…
Believe It Or Not, We’re Batting Around By: Matt Sussman For those who remember the internet before it became a tentacle hellscape with occasional food opinions, we refreshed our browsers every Monday hoping for a new episode of Homestar Runner, a weird but lovely Flash cartoon made by two guys in Atlanta. I’m still not…
The BOTTALICO Communication Program Presented By: Patrick Dubuque Thanks for reading Short Relief! We’d like to take a moment to share a word from our sponsors. Managing a business is hard. Employees are lazy, amoral people who do things like eat non-liquid food and read non-work material like baseball articles on company time. We know…
The Cost of a Shirsey By: Mary Craig The first piece of baseball clothing I can recall owning was a Manny Ramirez shirsey. He was my favorite player because he was all the things I was not: carefree, lackadaisical, and effortlessly brilliant at baseball. But the shirsey was more than just a physical manifestation of…