Call me a nut, because what I missed most of all were the sounds of baseball. The crack of the bat. The ground rules to enjoying a game, as explained by the hometown players so you know they are not making stuff up. An echoed Deborah Kerr asking “Do you think it will ever take…
Baseball has changed again without asking. They do not know what they have done, but they are about to find out. Inning breaks will be reduced from 2:05 to 2:00 in local games and from 2:25 to 2:00 in national games. Time is needed for us to decompress; to consider what was just shown. When…
Thought experiment: if you could magically add 30 points of on base percentage to any team in baseball, who would you pick? (Ordinarily, I’d add the caveat “excluding your favorite team” but let’s face it…if you’re an MLB fan during this execrable offseason, there’s a 95 percent chance the owner of your favorite team has…
The chant begins the second he steps from the batting cage after his final round: I-chi-ro. I-chi-ro. It comes from Japanese fans who have traveled hundreds or thousands of miles to be here; from American fans wearing worn Ichiro All-Star jerseys; from professional autograph hounds to small children who only know that he is a…
Comedian Brody Stevens died last week of an apparent suicide. He was 48. Stevens was one of a kind. The phrase “comic’s comic” actually applies with him. Not even Dick Van Dyke himself could tell if Stevens was killing or bombing during sets. It wasn’t just Van Dyke and other popular comedians who commented and…
[PROLOGUE: It should be noted, after we absolutely roast this old ballplayer who was probably just having fun but in reality hates advanced stats, that after seven full major league seasons Aubrey Huff was 30 and Manny Machado was 25. We’re only talking five years difference, which is barely anything if you compare it to,…
“Cash, it’s Girsch. I know Voit isn’t available. I know I blew that, haha. I’m calling about Bird. Really.” Same phone call for months now, different locale. Arizona in the spring used to be about promise. Girsch found a possibly friendly ear attached to a man in sunglasses and a blonde wig at the local…
The Simpsons. I know you have heard of this television program. FXX runs the show five days a week. Half the time the four-hour blocks are connected by some tenuous, begrudgingly appreciated theme (tonight’s theme: Moe). Tuesdays are weird. I’m not going to bother explaining what they do on Tuesdays. Mondays and Fridays are six-hour…
*Purple Rain record scratch* *freeze frame* I know my line, but I need a minute. Okay. How did I get here? I’m sure you think you know. But it’s worse than that. “Rocktober” was created by Jimmy Page in 1969, then commercialized by radio station managers in 1971. Listeners were told to get the Led…
“Is this it?” Your friend walks up and stands beside you. “Yup.” You look, aghast, at the immense pit of mud and fencing in front of you. Though the fencing separates you and the pit, as you continue to stare at it, you feel like it’s expanding, like it might swallow you up at any…
Once in Greece, I asked for a “Wednesday” (τέταρτη) kilo of feta instead of a “quarter” (τέταρτο). The lady behind the cheese counter in a grocery store in suburban Athens looked at me for a minute, told me my Greek wasn’t very good, and then asked me to repeat what I wanted. I’ve told that…
It happens all the time now. I’m sitting on my park bench feeding the ducks most definitely named Dewey and Louie, and a text message like this comes in: Phillies signed McCutchen. Three years. “Three years?” Time stops momentarily, ironically enough. “Three years?” I said out loud before putting my right hand up against my…
Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky were so influential that “Moneyball” Michael Lewis wrote an entire book about them. Maybe the 23rd most interesting tidbit from the book about how our limited brains are out to destroy us is this: we greatly inflate the number of times in our lives we truly predicted a surprising…
Adrían Beltré did not like having his head touched. Retirement probably does not change that.