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…
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…
What, exactly, are the Rays doing? And does anyone, except PECOTA, believe they have a chance in 2018?
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…
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…
Jazz is probably the music best matched to baseball, for obvious reasons: both American inventions; both solo players collaborating on a team effort, finding variations and improvisations within rigorous structures, and so on. But who is baseball’s suited composer? It might be Charles Ives (1874-1954), who recognized early that his dissonant, dissident music would never…
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