Bill Buckner and forgiveness; it’s a long season, and so is recovery; they flatten the building where you watched baseball; insisting to your casual baseball fan friend Tauchman isn’t this good; Gleyber Torres: average Gen Zer; some players don’t have to be told by Ken Griffey Jr. to keep fighting
Some players don’t have to be told by Ken Griffey Jr. to keep fighting; the Minnesota Twins are Emma Stone in “The Favourite”; ever see an ejected manager leave the field through the center field fence?
This weekend, I threatened to quit my job. Not my baseball-related job, mind you, but a different one. Without getting too specific, I had an experience with the owner of the company that was unsatisfactory and his behavior left me with a bad taste in my mouth. We have since talked and patched things up,…
Search for “Cody Bellinger” “batting stance” and you’ll find some quotes about offseason adjustments. His legs were too straight. He stood too tall. That sort of thing. And it’s true. He stood tall with his legs straight: feet even but torso rotated slightly toward the catcher, so he had to peek over his shoulder at…
It is the top of the first inning, and Mike Leake is pitching for the Mariners. That’s a boring sentence. Mike Leake is a boring pitcher. Still, not long ago I would have been watching anyway. Instead, as Leake begins throwing his average stuff with average command against an average Angels team on a statistically…
I’m not good enough. I’m incomplete and insufficient. My body isn’t good enough, my voice isn’t good enough, and, even if I could perfect them, my femaleness would still remain my fundamental flaw. Every woman and girl has to live with these messages. All my life I have fought back, all the while resisting this…
I – You’re left wondering how long he thought about doing it. He takes off without hesitation the moment Alcantara drops his head. Was it observing some pattern pre-game? Some trend an eagle-eyed staffer identified through hours of watching isolated footage? A simple wager between teammates? Did he think about it all year? Did he…
German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is often credited for developing one of our society’s most important modern philosophical concepts, that of the dialectic. Hegel’s dialectic builds off and extends classical philosophy’s Greek concept of a dialectical exchange, in which two opposing sides of an argument–a thesis and its antithesis–stake out a kind of territory…
Last week, I was driving down a wide city street lined with box stores, chain restaurants, and strip malls. I could have pulled off into Discount Shoe Warehouse, or Best Buy, or Wendy’s. I could have grabbed a taco while getting my oil changed. I was provided the opportunity to pick up my dry cleaning,…
On Easter Sunday, I got a call from my uncle that my dad needed to go to the emergency room. I was at brunch with friends before a Cubs game when the call came through. I didn’t want to panic because after years of living 11 hours away by car, I’ve learned there isn’t much…
(Recently the author made his first visit to Fenway Park, and offers some thoughts) Fenway the Museum: It’s a time capsule, which is very specifically different than traveling back in time. Seeing Fenway in 1920, or 1932, or some other year from the Williams/Yastrzemski/Fisk eras would mean seeing it with all the baggage of the…
The Cincinnati Reds game was delayed by bees the other day, a swarm of them that had congregated on one of the seats. Derek Dietrich did exactly what you’re not supposed to do in that situation, pretending to spray them rather than just calling a local apiarist. If you see a bee swarm, don’t worry…
In what can only be described as extreme algorithm malfunction, for the past week I have gotten a relentless stream of promoted tweets for Chanel’s new Camélia line every time I open Twitter. The copy, which can charitably be called sense-adjacent, is written in that bizarre tone that must function as Galton’s whistle for the…
The last perfect game in Major League Baseball was thrown by Félix Hernández, on August 15th, 2012. Barack Obama was the president of the United States, and Mitt Romney was vying to become the next one. The top grossing film was The Avengers, but the first one, not the second or third or fourth or…
Hi. I’m a philosophy professor and department chair, and I have an SOS for you. Things aren’t going well. There are far too many students who don’t understand the art of written communication. I get emails that are so garbled, I can’t work out what they say. I recently read an essay that failed to…
We’re more than a week into the 2019 baseball season and Trevor Rosenthal has yet to record an out, leaving him with an ERA of literal infinity. His job has an astonishingly simple description – get outs – though like most things that can be described simply, it’s of course infinitely more complex than that….