Short Relief

Short Relief: Anachronisms Unearthed

Believe It Or Not, We’re Batting Around By: Matt Sussman For those who remember the internet before it became a tentacle hellscape with occasional food opinions, we refreshed our browsers every Monday hoping for a new episode of Homestar Runner, a weird but lovely Flash cartoon made by two guys in Atlanta. I’m still not...

Short Relief: Fleeting Yet Indelible

by RJ McDaniel and Patrick Dubuque 11/02

Stitches of Permanence By: Rachael McDaniel I live the blessed and fortunate lifestyle of a person who has both severe anxiety and severe ADHD. Which, I guess, is why baseball is my preferred sport. As opposed to something like hockey, where it seems you have to be in horror on the edge of your seat...

Short Relief: Fear & Loathing

by Jason Wojciechowski and Emma Baccellieri 11/01

Gotta Know, Gotta Know! By: Emma Baccellieri I recently finished reading a Chinese science-fiction trilogy called Remembrance of Earth’s Past, which features an alien species with no need for any sort of spoken or written communication: The contents of their minds are simply there for everyone around them, able to be processed and understood. The...

Short Relief: Helping, and Anger, and a Complete Lack of Arms

by Kate Preusser, James Fegan, and Patrick Dubuque 10/31

On Being a Team Player By: Kate Preusser Sometimes at work we are asked to assume duties that are not part of our jobs, but need to be performed due to emergency or incompetence or being swept up in a coup attempt in a tiny island nation. And so we, the loyal workers, smile and...

Short Relief: Everything Ancient is New Again

by Zack Moser and Holly Wendt 10/30

Short Relief Investigates: Silicon Valley’s Baseball Innovations By: Zack Moser Major League Baseball, looking to appeal to younger audiences, has consulted with top Silicon Valley executives to come up with some ideas to inject new life into the National Pastime. Short Relief’s investigative team has uncovered a partial list of these recent and prospective innovations,...

Short Relief: Fowl!

by Patrick Dubuque, Mary Craig, and Matt Sussman 10/27

The BOTTALICO Communication Program Presented By: Patrick Dubuque Thanks for reading Short Relief! We’d like to take a moment to share a word from our sponsors. Managing a business is hard. Employees are lazy, amoral people who do things like eat non-liquid food and read non-work material like baseball articles on company time. We know...

Short Relief: Feelings and Memories

by David Temple, RJ McDaniel, and Zack Moser 10/26

Image credit: AlmightyWorm, Flickr

On Cats, Anxiety, and the Houston Astros By: David Temple Verne is not a terribly… good cat. She’s not even all that cute. She doesn’t do much beyond sleep, yell at nothing in particular (she’s deaf as a stone), and occasionally pee on my bed when I’m at work. Oh, and she drools―all the time....

Short Relief: Utopian Playoffs

by Jason Wojciechowski, Matt Ellis, and Emma Baccellieri 10/25

Image credit: Center on Policy Initiatives, Flickr

The Fairness Doctrine By: Emma Baccellieri There is this idea that sports are like life. This is tossed around most often, it seems, when it comes to conversation around the relative merits of kids playing sports: They’ll learn life lessons. Because sports are like life! Justice and honesty and responsibility and respect and winning and...

Short Relief: On Fandom

by Kate Preusser and Trevor Strunk 10/24

Image credit: Charles Willgren, Flickr

No Kidding By: Kate Preusser It started out as a joke, but she was going to hold him to it. She’d won the room, after all, and that had to mean something. They’d made the rule early on, shortly after moving into the house on Fairfield Drive―such a genteel, generic-sounding address, so unlike the street...

Short Relief: Sexy Puns are Natural

by James Fegan, Meg Rowley, and Holly Wendt 10/23

A Man and His Bat By: James Fegan Going viral on Twitter is like the full arc of becoming popular in high school, boiled down to an 18-hour experience. The first hour is the rush of a new level of attention and the next 17 hours are revulsion at the wave of unwanted input from...

Short Relief: Baseball Is For Everybody

by Mary Craig and Matt Sussman 10/20

The Cost of a Shirsey By: Mary Craig The first piece of baseball clothing I can recall owning was a Manny Ramirez shirsey. He was my favorite player because he was all the things I was not: carefree, lackadaisical, and effortlessly brilliant at baseball. But the shirsey was more than just a physical manifestation of...

Short Relief: Technology

by RJ McDaniel, Matt Ellis, and Emma Baccellieri 10/19

All Your Perfect Imperfections By: Emma Baccellieri It has now been exactly one week, give or take a few hours, since this play: Jose Lobaton beat the tag. He was safe. And then, upon further examination, he was discovered to have beat the tag but to have lifted his foot up off the base ever...

Short Relief: Mind Over Matter

by Jason Wojciechowski and Patrick Dubuque 10/18

Image credit: Jason Howie, Flickr

An Unflattering Glimpse into the Mind of a Baseball Writer By: Patrick Dubuque LEFT BRAIN: Okay, that’s annual comment no. 23. A third of the way done, and a full two days before the deadline. Good job, right brain. RIGHT BRAIN: Whatever, all we wrote about were prospects. I didn’t even get to make fun...

Short Relief: The Ball, the Wall, the Short, the Tall

by Patrick Dubuque and Kate Preusser 10/17

George Springer Breaks By: Patrick Dubuque Saturday night, during Game 2 of the ALCS, Todd Frazier drove in the penultimate run on a batted ball that refused to come back to earth. It’s a good hit, off a good pitch: a breaking ball that Verlander has buried at the knees, off the outside corner, the...

Short Relief: Baseball Does Not Respect Us

by Holly Wendt and James Fegan 10/16

Disrespect By: James Fegan A crime has to have a victim. Otherwise, it is probably just hating. Are you a hater? Let’s not consider it. Yasiel Puig’s bat-flips have become a topic of debate because 1) we have to try force conversation about the paltry one or two games we can watch all day and...

Short Relief: Of Husbands and Fathers

by Matt Sussman and Emma Baccellieri 10/13

Sentiments regarding bonds both paternal and matrimonial.