At some point, I stopped locking the front door. Death is not the only disease. It’s the obvious one, though, especially at times like Tuesday night. Felix Hernandez threw the change-up, Robinson Chirinos reached out his wrist to meet it, and then both men winced in pain. One man healed. The metaphor is unavoidable, as…
Get to know the Blue Jays’ new manager, from someone who covered (and learned from) him in the minors.
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…
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…
(after Updike, and Camus) “Word is the actual attendance at Monday’s #Rays-#White Sox game—people who used tickets to come in—was 974.” –Marc Topkin, Twitter, April 10. We’d had snow, and when the night game was rescheduled for 1:10 due to cold, that cinched it. My parents made me get this job—value of hard work and…
It’s the 9th inning; your team is clinging to a one-run lead on the road with two outs. As first baseman, it’s your job to pretty much just play catch with your teammates and not screw anything up, but there’s a problem. The left fielder and former teammate you despise has stepped into the batter’s…
Taylor, a marketing manager, and Lindsey, who designs high-end clothing for dogs, are on the hunt for their first MLB player. Taylor likes the classics: clean lines, stirrup socks, and OBP for days. Lindsey, who has a taste for luxury, wants something modern, with a high launch angle the couple can have their friends over…
Whenever I hear the phrase “compact swing,” I think immediately of Bill Madlock. He somehow became identified with that particular piece of scout-speak—“his swing so compact it wouldn’t disturb the cobwebs in a ghost-town phone booth,” one journalist wrote—and in turn I began to identify with him. Not because I had a compact swing myself—I…
The Mariners claimed a pitcher. His name is Ashton, or Austin, or Chase, or Chasen. His minor-league FIP is in the mid-3s, or the low-4s. He wears his socks high, or he doesn’t. He has no real social media presence, maybe a locked Instagram account with a handful of pictures–an off-season fishing trip, his first…
What, exactly, are the Rays doing? And does anyone, except PECOTA, believe they have a chance in 2018?
Minor league baseball cards look different than their major league counterparts. Perhaps it’s the youth of the talent, or the inexperience of the photographers; maybe it’s just baseball lacking that last coat of the varnish of seriousness. Minor leaguers make more faces, contort themselves into unnatural positions never seen during play. Often times they are…
In the spring of 1896, a fifteen-year-old pitching phenom named Johnny Noonan was set to make his professional debut for the Brooklyn Flying Dutchmen. His manager hoped he would not only improve the team but, in doing so, help legitimize the fledgling, and faltering, Continental League. But during his first exhibition game, Noonan took a…
All the score sheets from the Durham Bulls games I covered in my five years as a beat writer are sheaved in file folders except one: game three of the 2013 International League Championship series between the Bulls and the Pawtucket Red Sox. It was the second-most exciting game I ever saw. (This was the…
Recently, as part of their Fan Fest activities, several members of the San Francisco Giants engaged in an imitation game, emulating their own teammates’ batting stances and pitcher’s mound presences. As the introductory music reels out, Brandon Crawford trundles to the plate, head down and hangdog. In a little while, his act will be identified:…
In Medieval times, your church was just a drafty hunk of stone without some good compelling holy relics. Bigger, better churches had bigger, better reliquaries. These objects were prized relative to their imagined power: Pieces of the True Cross or Jesus’s baby teeth, for example, would have significantly higher desirability than, say, a bone fragment…
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…