Is the Reds’ lengthy rebuild any closer to paying off before Joey Votto is done being amazing?
You wake up one morning and everything is fine. Your room looks the same as it did when you went to sleep. Nothing has been disturbed or altered. You didn’t have the nightmares last night. There are no demons in this room. You feel okay. You get out of bed and open the curtain. It…
This past weekend I found myself at a Goodwill, as one does when one has children who somehow go through pajamas faster than they go through meals. While sustaining the basic needs of said offspring, I discovered one of my favorite things: a monster box of baseball cards for seven dollars, filled with the usual…
Most of the spring training stadiums have the same package of songs they cycle through every single day. Day 1 of Hearing “Boys are Back in Town” at spring training Hey, baseball is back. Major league baseball as currently constructed is played only by individuals publicly identifying as boys. And they’re back. I get it….
Baseball is clumsily seeking to add to its rulebook.
The smell of the grass, the crack of the bat, the snap of the glove. In the world of spring training sensations and signs of renewal, these are all trash leftovers for the losers in life. This entire country is obsessed with lawns. You can whack things with a bat with near impunity. The glove…
(photo credit: © Butch Dill-USA TODAY Sports) four months old He doesn’t remember this part, of course, but looking back through the worn baby book that his mother keeps on a shelf near the television—he wonders if this shape, the first shape, was maybe the best one. Really, it wasn’t a shape at all. He’d…
On Friday night, the staggeringly popular George Saunders gave a reading and a brief talk about writing in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The event was part of Saunders’ tour for his Man Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo. The story is one that encourages a reader to get caught up in the craft, to figure it…
The acknowledgement of the relationship between Aristotle and baseball first occurred in the 1912 Broadway play “Elevating a Husband,” wherein one character asks another, “what do you know of Aristotle?” Surmising this to be a test of his baseball knowledge, the second character responds in kind, “who was the first fellow to lay down a…
The color green helped hook me on philosophy. When I was a boy the street lights on Ambaum Avenue were aligned sideways, a rather charming little touch for a part of town and a childhood that desperately wished to be charmed. One day the lights were rotated ninety degrees, the boring old top-to-bottom way, and…
Zack Godley isn’t a power pitcher, and he isn’t a command pitcher. So exactly what kind of pitcher is he?
The nineteenth-century ballplayer: mustachioed, musky, Irish or perhaps aggressively not Irish, brawny, inclined to swearing and drinking, did I mention mustachioed?; an image, conjured rather easily due to the proliferation of photographs of late-nineteenth-century male baseball players; the kind who fizzle and pop into the half-lucid late-night dreams that are Ken Burns’ Baseball reruns at…
Traducido por Martin Alonso Nunca conseguí la carta. Arriba a la izquierda, segundo desde abajo: ahí es donde un chico le había dicho a otro chico que la había conseguido. Tenía casi once años, justo al borde de la adolescencia, y parecía una metáfora perfecta, un cartón casi equivalente a la voz chillona del crecimiento….
I never got the card. Top left, second from the bottom: that was where another kid told another kid he’d gotten it. I was almost eleven, just peering over the edge of adolescence, and it felt like a perfect metaphor, the cardboard equivalent of a crack of the voice. None of my friends had gotten…
El juego no es realmente nuestro ahora mismo, pero tenemos el poder de cambiar eso.