Last weekend, as I cleaned out my parents’ basement, I discovered a notebook not much bigger than a baseball card, the leather aged into plastic. Slipped into the front pocket is a little card, bearing a signature beneath the words, “The Museum of Modern Art, West Fifty-Third Street, New York 19, N.Y., Vern Mittlestadt, Date…
The 1930 Vaudeville comedy “They Learned About Women” tells the story of Jack and Jerry, two professional baseball players who tour the Vaudeville stage during the offseason. Both Jack and Jerry fall in love with the young, ‘innocent’ team secretary, Mary. Jack initially wins Mary’s affection, but soon after abandons both her and Jerry in…
It’s a widely held belief that the best way to enjoy baseball is by listening to it on the radio. It best captures the timeless nature of the sport, narrating present day events while imparting the feeling of a lazy summer day spent sitting by the dock at your grandparents’ cottage. It provides the perfect…
One of my favorite things about baseball is that just when you think things are starting to get even a tiny bit mundane, something will happen during a game that will remind you of just how much fun this game can get when things enter into the arena of absurdity. We ended up getting two…
The noises can only echo so long, Johnnie LeMaster. Each groan and sigh ricochets off the concrete And is absorbed by it, eaten by the grass. The lone and level sands erased The works of Ozymandias, and yet Still more despair: it also wore away The empty evenings, the lonely children Mistakes, misfortune, misdeeds. The…
Twenty years ago Jay Bell had a career year for the Diamondbacks: a 131 DRC+ highlighted by a career-best (and team-best) 38 home runs. He helped Arizona reach the playoffs in their second year of existence, but one home run changed everything for a family. You may not remember the Diamondbacks, as in those Diamondbacks….
The Braves got battered by the Phillies this past Sunday night. The game capped off a series sweep for Philadelphia where everything that could possibly go right for them, did. It was also a series that confirmed all of the concerns that Braves fans had for their team throughout the entire offseason. Atlanta’s pitching staff…
I was born in 1988, so I completely missed out on the 1980s era of baseball, only reliving it through traditional media like books and retrospective videos. Even though this was a terrible decade to be a Braves fan, I’d say that this is still one of my favorite decades. You lucky people got to…
PORT CHARLOTTE (FL) — The pink slips came early this year at Charlotte Sports Park, as the Tampa Bay Rays made a significant shuffle to their roster. In total, 17 players were reassigned to minor league camp. Included in the cuts were some surprise names: Willy Adames, Ji-Man Choi, Ryne Stanek, Austin Meadows, Christian Arroyo,…
No one goes into a projection system saying, “Let’s see how much they got right.”
On January 29, 2019, Freddy Galvis became a Blue Jay. The blue jay is a member of the family Corvidae, to which crows also belong. Though tool use is not especially noted in blue jays, they can use their feet and beaks dexterously to open seeds, and their crow cousins are highly adept at using…
Through the generosity of a good friend I recently came into possession of one (1) Official Scorebook for the 1969 Seattle Pilots. The year is both vital for establishing cultural context, and completely unnecessary, as the 1969 Seattle Pilots were the only Seattle Pilots. The next season they left for Milwaukee, and Seattle has only…
When I was ten years old, during the decade when all the kids collected baseball cards for three months, I had an idea. I had a couple of friends who lived up the hill from me. One lived in a giant house, the son of a doctor and a lawyer; I spent countless days losing…