A woman stops at a market near Brooklyn’s McCarren Park. She buys mini-quiches and carrots on her way to visit her mother. They settle in front of the television to watch the game and grieve. A Yankees fan for 80 years, her father died last winter, so this is the first year that he won’t…
Walls are in the news, and walls are on my mind. Today, as I write this, or yesterday, as you read this, Edgar Martinez was elected to the baseball hall of fame. Edgar had many walls placed in front of him throughout his career, and one was named Jim Presley, who stood tall and solid…
If you’ve never seen a Hallmark Channel Original Movie, they more or less go like this: Young, single woman from a small town moves to the big city for her fast-paced creative job (ad executive seems to be a particular favorite), goes home for the holidays and in the process, meets and woos/is wooed by…
On June 22nd, 1914, just nine games into his career with the St. Louis Terriers, Armando Marsáns woke up to the news that he was no longer able to play professional baseball. He suffered from no illness or injury but rather something more sinister. Several days prior, August Herrmann, owner of the Cincinnati Reds and…
In my Catholic high school religion class they taught us the value of seeing perspective from different angles; specifically the teacher talked about looking “at the light” as opposed to “in the light.” This was meant to be interpreted as, don’t mock someone for their beliefs unless you can empathize from a perspective of believing…
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,…
A Boy And His Schwarb By: Matt Sussman Kyle Schwarber is on a “mission to transform his body” https://t.co/MLiyeu8XD5 — HardballTalk (@HardballTalk) November 28, 2017 The NES game A Boy And His Blob has fourteen different flavored jelly beans that transform the titular sidekick into various useful items to navigate an underground subway and later…
Why the Hall of Fame Doesn’t Matter By: Patrick Dubuque One of the hard things about getting old, as a writer, is having to share the same name as yourself. There are some vocations where growth and change are accepted as part of the aging curve: teaching, perhaps, or carpentry. But as a writer, once…
Time is a Serpent Eating Its Own Tail By: Emma Baccellieri Participating in baseball’s Hall of Fame season requires establishing a friendly relationship with baseball’s history—watching players from the past, putting them in context by reading about the past, calibrating standards by analyzing elections of the past. The whole thing is predicated on looking back….
Halladay, at his peak, was one of the best pitchers in history. His case for the Hall of Fame is a bit more nuanced.
Through 33 games, the Detroit Tigers stalwart is having his worst season since he broke in as a 20-year-old in 2003. He just turned 34, but have physical issues caught up the likely Hall of Fame slugger?
And it’s not just about save totals.
Limitless ballots could make for Hall of Fame overkill, but maybe there’s a simple solution.
Which career totals are most likely to get a “compiler” into the Hall of Fame?
This year’s J.G. Taylor Spink Award honoree talks about Earl Weaver’s pre-game post-game quotes, how young writers can get his attention, his many clubhouse confrontations and more.