Short Relief

Short Relief: The Pastoral Game

by Holly M Wendt and Patrick Dubuque 2/12

On Friday night, the staggeringly popular George Saunders gave a reading and a brief talk about writing in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The event was part of Saunders’ tour for his Man Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo. The story is one that encourages a reader to get caught up in the craft, to figure it...

Short Relief: Shacho, Aristotle, and Sutter, the Great Baseballers of Antiquity

by Matt Sussman, Mary Craig, and Patrick Dubuque 2/09

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...

Short Relief: Symbiotic Relationships

by RJ McDaniel, Emma Baccellieri, and Beth Davies-Stofka 2/08

(photo credit: © Steve Mitchell-USA TODAY Sports) In the midst of their already-historic fire sale, the Miami Marlins recently announced that yet another head was rolling: The man who had, to that point, worn the suit known as Billy Marlin had been terminated from his position. While it was already sad and disturbing to see...

Short Relief: Permitting One’s Self to be Altered

by Patrick Dubuque, Jason Wojciechowski, and Matt Ellis 2/07

The color green helped hook me on philosophy. When I was a boy the street lights on Ambaum Avenue were aligned sideways, a rather charming little touch for a part of town and a childhood that desperately wished to be charmed. One day the lights were rotated ninety degrees, the boring old top-to-bottom way, and...

Short Relief: Just a Moment

by Adam Sobsey and Kate Preusser 2/06

I often enter my office building by the rear door, which opens onto a parking lot across the street from a big downtown hotel’s main entrance. A few years ago, as I crossed the parking lot, my path led near someone talking on a cellphone just a few feet from my door. The lot is...

Short Relief: Great Pulls

by James Fegan, Holly M Wendt, and Kevin Jebens 2/05

With Spring Training less than two weeks away and dozens of notable free agents still unsigned, the discussion of the frigid market has become much more public. Player agents and even general managers are beginning to speak openly about the factors at work, and what it means for the future of the game. Now, finally,...

Short Relief: Everything in its Proper Place

by Matt Sussman, Emma Baccellieri, and Bryan Grosnick 2/02

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...

Short Relief: A Leaf Blossoming Brown

by Matt Ellis, Jason Wojciechowski, and RJ McDaniel 2/01

A year earlier DeGaulle fled Paris, resigning rule to the feuding students and labor leaders that took the streets as their own. Across the United States there were bombings and marches, and a year later four American college students would be shot dead on a campus by armed guardsmen, protesting the Vietnam war. But instead...

Short Relief: The Difference Between Boys and Men

by Zack Moser and Patrick Dubuque 1/31

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...

Short Relief: The Clothes Make the Fan

by Kate Preusser and Adam Sobsey 1/30

The heaviest snow Durham had in eighteen years fell a couple of weeks ago. It briefly quieted the city’s limbic system, which has been upheaved by development for a few years now, and lately with a frenetic intensity: Durham is a riot of cranes, excavations, ugly construction, overpriced restaurants, and the destitute flung into the...

Short Relief: Winter Training

by Holly M Wendt and James Fegan 1/29

My college students on the baseball and softball teams had their first official days of practice last week. Here in Pennsylvania, we’re a long way from the trappings of practice spring training promises—grass thick and lush even in the desert, the kind of sunlight that makes everyone squint. Instead, last week, this week, likely all...

Short Relief: A Glimpse at the Forbidden

by Patrick Dubuque, Mary Craig, and Trevor Strunk 1/26

I never got the card. Top left, second from the bottom: that was where another kid told another kid he’d gotten it. I was almost eleven, just peering over the edge of adolescence, and it felt like a perfect metaphor, the cardboard equivalent of a crack of the voice. None of my friends had gotten...

Short Relief: Everyone Smiles

by RJ McDaniel and Emma Baccellieri 1/25

(photo: © Kenny Karst-USA TODAY Sports) The job doesn’t sound bad. It sounds pretty good, even—certainly better than the ice cream parlor where he’d had to sing for tips, and probably better than the telemarketing gig. “Don’t tell anyone, but I actually think being the mascot’s assistant is more fun than being the mascot,” a...

Short Relief: A Knothole Darkly

by Jason Wojciechowski and Matt Ellis 1/24

Angela Carter died in 1992 without ever finishing the long-rumored sequel to her 1972 surrealist novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. Short Relief will be running weekly excerpts from the scraps of that sequel found in her papers after her death. The following is from the end of the book, as our hero,...

Short Relief: Party Favors for the Sophisticated Fan

by Kate Preusser and Adam Sobsey 1/23

In a bid to court a new, untapped fanbase, MLB has announced the following calendar of giveaways designed to appeal to lovers of modern art. “I mean, we’re about to lose out to soccer for the third-most popular sport in America, so we have to do…something?” said a visibly exhausted Tessa Stokes-Brinkley, who was brought...

Short Relief: Baseball, Fantasy and Sci-Fi

by James Fegan and Holly M Wendt 1/22

What is causing the stall in free agent signings? Is it ownership collusion to suppress player revenues? Is it an elaborate troll that Scott Boras is inflicting on you, personally? Are teams torn between filling holes in their roster with available, experienced free agent baseball players, or with an escaped, government-made, 17-foot-tall robotic assassin spider,...