Short Relief

Short Relief: Retiring to the Side

by Nathan Bishop, Mary Craig, and Bryan Grosnick 5/11

My father is nearly done having to work. He belongs to perhaps one of the last generations of peoples to feel he can approach or achieve “retirement age”, and has worked for nearly fifty years, veering through largesse, near-bankruptcy, and everything in between. If you subscribe, as I do, to John Muir’s notion that everything...

Long Relief: Getting Out of Book

by Patrick Dubuque 5/10

What baseball would look like if it were modeled after different chess variants.

Short Relief: The Point At Which One Realizes

by Emma Baccellieri, RJ McDaniel, and Matt Ellis 5/09

The summer that I was 20, I worked in the D.C. bureau of a newspaper chain. It was a pretty good gig, so far as these internships go: I got to do some real reporting and make a stupid face in the background of a White House press briefing on C-SPAN2, and it paid above...

Short Relief: Murder, She Scored

by Kate Preusser and Jason Wojciechowski 5/08

Lately I’ve been re-watching Murder, She Wrote. I say re-watching, because I remember watching it as a child with my grandparents, but really my memories of the show are hazy, as soft-focus as the early-80s images themselves. I remember as a kid wanting to be just like Jessica Fletcher, a famous author who also got...

Short Relief: The Swamp of Sadness

by Holly M Wendt and Patrick Dubuque 5/07

A Bog to Sell You By: Holly M. Wendt Baseball is a game of careful measurements and fixed dimensions: 60 feet, 6 inches from the mound to home, 90 feet between the bases. Outfields vary a bit; MLB’s official ruling indicates that “parks constructed by professional teams after June 1, 1958 must have a minimum...

Short Relief: The Clues Before Us

by Emma Baccellieri, Mary Craig, and Matt Sussman 5/04

The last notable pitcher we could find who dealt with this specific injury was J.J. Putz, who missed about five weeks with it as a Mariner in 2008. Putz, however, struggled with elbow issues the next season while with the Mets, eventually needing surgery to remove bone spurs. Putz, now a special assistant with the...

Short Relief: Now in Technicolor

by Zack Moser, Beth Davies-Stofka, and RJ McDaniel 5/03

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...

Short Relief: Broken News

by Matt Ellis, Nathan Bishop, and Kate Preusser 5/02

Whenceforth I received the news that the great Bone Head from Mud City was applying saliva to the ball before releasing it to the batter, I was right steamed. Myself, returning straight from a season that saw me ace thirty-one victories for my club, well yes-sir, I feign ignorance as to why a gentleman pitching...

Short Relief: I Miss the Rains

by Patrick Dubuque, Adam Sobsey, and James Fegan 5/01

So in the evening, again, we started ahead of the porters and went down and across the highways and through a deep thicket of strip malls and across a train depot to the stadium, where the ground was broken and the walking difficult, and afternoon sun was very hot. We walked until we reached the...

Short Relief: A Little Light Syncopation

by Jason Wojciechowski and Holly M Wendt 4/30

Live sports are nonsense. Doing anything on anybody else’s schedule is nonsense, really. We spend our lives following schedules set down by other people, for school, for work, for family. What we do with our precious free time should not be at the whim of what some billionaire baseball owner thinks is the appropriate time...

Short Relief: Keep Circulating the Tapes

by Matt Sussman and Patrick Dubuque 4/27

TURN DOWN YOUR LIGHTS (Where applicable) In a not too distant future Way down in Anaheim There was a guy named Albert Not exactly in his prime He worked for the Angels baseball team Just a few hits from a milestone dream He did a good job batting every day But Mike Scioscia had Ohtani...

Short Relief: All Alone Together

by RJ McDaniel, Patrick Dubuque, and Beth Davies-Stofka 4/26

The recent controversy surrounding Ken Rosenthal’s interview with Kevin Pillar about his “recovery” from getting caught yelling a homophobic slur last year got me thinking about my own position in the world of this sport. There’s always some element of code-switching that goes on when I sit down to write about baseball. It’s not that...

Short Relief: Arguing on Behalf of the Darkest Timeline

by Emma Baccellieri, Matt Ellis, and Nathan Bishop 4/25

Yesterday, the Dallas Morning News put out this update on the condition of Tim Lincecum, who was shelved with a blister before the season started and was moved to the 60-day disabled list last week. Here are the saddest portions: 5. The phrase “attacked by a raging blister” It’s not just any blister, but an...

Short Relief: 21 Pitches For All You Fans On The Go

by Kate Preusser and Adam Sobsey 4/24

PITCH ONE, 92 MPH fastball in the zone: Barria: I want to win this count. Belt: This is a hittable pitch. I will swing. FOUL, 0-1 PITCH TWO, 92 MPH fastball, above the zone: Barria: Let’s see if he will chase this. Belt: This is not a hittable pitch. I will not swing. BALL, 1-1...

Short Relief: Thinking Ahead

by James Fegan and Holly M Wendt 4/23

Imagine a box. A rectangular space. It has windows, big triple-pane ones, with a nice view. You are not trapped here, or even locked in this box, but you are definitely expected to be there. Everyday. Once inside, a phrase is heard aloud in a declarative, confident tone. “This pitcher thinks too much.” At face...

Short Relief: The Evils of Others

by Matt Sussman, Mary Craig, and Matt Ellis 4/20

Next year will be the 100th anniversary of two events: the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I; and Babe Ruth being sold to the Yankees, which set in motion years of minor scuffles all across the Northeast corridor. Much of these skirmishes had to do with baseball players wearing different colored hats having...