From a fragment discovered in the dust of the Vatican library: Hostilities ceased annually for four days. One of those days was set aside for celebration and spectacle, when combatants gathered for friendly competition to the cheers of the common people. Lancers rode out onto a bright green field, gaily garbed in white and grey…
TAMPA, Fla. — The Tampa Bay Rays opened their new stadium on Friday, with Senior Vice President of Baseball Operations/General Manager Erik Neander joining team president Matthew Silverman and Tampa mayor Bob Buckhorn to unveil the ballpark that now anchors the historic Ybor City neighborhood. With 30,842 seats, the ballpark is the smallest in MLB…
I could have chosen to disappear. I chose to go watch the Blue Jays instead.
Max Scherzer vs. Marco Estrada, a first trip to Rogers Centre, and the nature of displaced fandom.
I became a Blue Jays fan because I had emerged from darkness and found them there waiting for me, just like they’d always been.
I hit the road on a Friday evening in the middle of an anxiety attack. This was not the hands-shaking, skin-crawling, thoughts-racing brand of high anxiety. That was an hour ago. Now I was into freeze mode, my thinking-brain displaced by sensory hyper-awareness. It was not the best time to drive, but I had to…
I am the most heat-averse person I know. I have lived in the Pacific Northwest, the ideal climate for someone who hates extremes of temperature, for my entire life, and yet every summer I find myself bewailing how hot it is, hiding indoors during the daylight hours, and wearing a lot of silk robes. The…
Steppenwolf is one of the most famous and most misunderstood of the novels of Nobel Prize winning-author Herman Hesse. I’m having trouble understanding it myself, fifty pages in; I’d nearly given up, only to see Hardball Times editor Jason Linden give it his highest praise. Written from the perspective of Germany between the wars, the…
Todas las posibilidades están abiertas para ti, pero no puedes hacer nada.
Every possibility is open to you, and you can do nothing.
One Saturday in June, a little girl opened the door to the hall closet and a stack of newspapers slid out. She squatted on the floor to look at them. The paper on the top had a photo of a man lying on the floor in a halo of light, surrounded by worried people. The…
Feeling an odd twinge of guilt about how quickly Jose Bautista’s presence had faded from memory
I am trying to go to more than one major league baseball game this summer. It’s the first time in my life that I’ve had the financial means and the time available to do so, and I have to go now, because who knows what might happen in the future? Things have changed so much…
(Must be Posted in a Conspicuous Place In Every Eligible Place of Employment) In American higher education, only one-third of professors are tenure track, down from two-thirds forty years ago. The majority of courses are now taught by adjunct faculty with little job security and low compensation. Major League Baseball (MLB) has determined that this…
In the final hours before his death, to the surprise and dismay of his closest friends, Socrates refused to flee into exile and instead imparted his beliefs concerning the importance of technology in baseball. His ideas on the subject were immortalized in one of Plato’s best-known dialogues, Phaedo (from which we get the dog’s name…
The summer that I was 20, I worked in the D.C. bureau of a newspaper chain. It was a pretty good gig, so far as these internships go: I got to do some real reporting and make a stupid face in the background of a White House press briefing on C-SPAN2, and it paid above…