My sister lived in Cleveland for several years; while visiting her, I was riffing on the Cuyahoga River catching fire, as jerk tourists are wont to do. A friend of hers from the area just rolled her eyes and asked, “Which time?” It’s an important question, because the river caught fire at least 13 times,…
In the democratic, everybody-wins community softball environment I played in as a kid, everyone on a team had to play every position. A power pitcher could not pitch every game, even if they had the ability and inclination; you couldn’t force the same kid to play catcher every game. And on the extremely uncompetitive squad…
Today in the continued Hellscape Off-Season for Mariners fans, James Paxton was traded to the Yankees for Justus Sheffield and the Justus Sheffield Singers. I had a tip this was going down, so I spent the early part of my day looking up things about Justus Sheffield. I stumbled upon this article from MLB.com from…
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…
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’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…
On August 26, Ruben Alaniz was called upon to finish the ninth inning for his Durham Bulls against the Norfolk Tides. It was a four-run lead, so it wasn’t a save situation, and therefore not too much pressure. His catcher, Andrew Moore, a major league veteran for parts of nine seasons, dug in to start…