People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for the sea to rise up and swallow me. This is a dramatic statement, I recognize. It’s the kind of statement we’re prone to making in 2018, a year of…
Chris Carpenter touched first base and the Cardinals exploded in a firestorm, springing around the field like children at a party on a hot summer’s day. Ryan Howard crumpled on the first base line. One swing ended all his hopes of restoring himself as the player he once was. I wondered if anyone noticed. My…
“You know I’ll never see Wrigley Field anymore, before my eternal rest…” – Steve Goodman * * * Last weekend, I returned to Wrigley Field for the first time since 2015. In the three years since, I’ve moved to Boston, cycled through several jobs, started writing for Short Relief, and entered a relationship long enough…
All the one-liners that weren’t traded at the deadline.
TAMPA, Fla. — The Tampa Bay Rays opened their new stadium on Friday, with Senior Vice President of Baseball Operations/General Manager Erik Neander joining team president Matthew Silverman and Tampa mayor Bob Buckhorn to unveil the ballpark that now anchors the historic Ybor City neighborhood. With 30,842 seats, the ballpark is the smallest in MLB…
My favorite summer beach read is a nice twisty, gothic mystery set in a creepy old house, so I inhaled Ruth Ware’s The Death of Mrs. Westaway. The book uses the tarot as a motif in a way that emphasizes the symbolism and storytelling of the cards, which got me rummaging around for my old…
I am the most heat-averse person I know. I have lived in the Pacific Northwest, the ideal climate for someone who hates extremes of temperature, for my entire life, and yet every summer I find myself bewailing how hot it is, hiding indoors during the daylight hours, and wearing a lot of silk robes. The…
I am trying to go to more than one major league baseball game this summer. It’s the first time in my life that I’ve had the financial means and the time available to do so, and I have to go now, because who knows what might happen in the future? Things have changed so much…
Warning! Extremely minor spoilers for AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR ahead! If you’re into that sort of thing! The surprise cameo appearance of Tobias Fünke of Arrested Development in Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War spurred one hairbrained internet theorist to test the limits of “the most ambitious crossover event in history,” ultimately connecting Adam West’s Batman to the…
This is my first Opening Day without my dad. Not that Opening Day had been a ritual for us, or that it holds any particularly special meaning beyond our shared love of baseball. But my dad and I did share many of these ceremonial beginnings, mostly of the amateur kind as he coached my Little…
Yu Darvish joins a loaded Cubs team that has averaged 97 wins per season since 2015.
A few years ago, Emma Span published an article here at Baseball Prospectus on the subject of baseball fanfiction, specifically all the many weird sex scenes and pairings that the genre offers. (Please read for the mention of the Kevin Millar/Keith Foulke/Jason Varitek threesome.) The sex is what people tend to focus on when they…
The nineteenth-century ballplayer: mustachioed, musky, Irish or perhaps aggressively not Irish, brawny, inclined to swearing and drinking, did I mention mustachioed?; an image, conjured rather easily due to the proliferation of photographs of late-nineteenth-century male baseball players; the kind who fizzle and pop into the half-lucid late-night dreams that are Ken Burns’ Baseball reruns at…
“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…
Twilight Struggle By: Zack Moser The opening section of Don DeLillo’s magnum opus, Underworld, is actually the whole of a short story he published five years earlier, with a few minor changes. That story, “Pafko at the Wall,” is a brilliant flash of mid-century American anxieties and hopes, dashing the famous Dodgers-Giants playoff game featuring…
A Box Full of Things to Fill Holes By: David G. Temple He entered the house for the last time of the night — and only to pick up his bag and his phone. “Hey,” she said. “There’s still that big box of baseball cards in the guest room. I need you to take care…