You are 10 years old, and it’s Tuesday, and your little league tryouts are on Thursday, and you are sick. It’s the middle of February. One holiday Monday off school was enough for your body’s defenses to relax themselves a bit too much: You woke up with your stomach twisting in knots, your head throbbing,…
Three pieces reflecting on the 1985 World Series, 2018 spring training, and the long road from there to here.
(photo credit: © Steve Mitchell-USA TODAY Sports) In the midst of their already-historic fire sale, the Miami Marlins recently announced that yet another head was rolling: The man who had, to that point, worn the suit known as Billy Marlin had been terminated from his position. While it was already sad and disturbing to see…
A year earlier DeGaulle fled Paris, resigning rule to the feuding students and labor leaders that took the streets as their own. Across the United States there were bombings and marches, and a year later four American college students would be shot dead on a campus by armed guardsmen, protesting the Vietnam war. But instead…
How one Toronto Blue Jays minor-league team made history.
(photo: © Kenny Karst-USA TODAY Sports) The job doesn’t sound bad. It sounds pretty good, even—certainly better than the ice cream parlor where he’d had to sing for tips, and probably better than the telemarketing gig. “Don’t tell anyone, but I actually think being the mascot’s assistant is more fun than being the mascot,” a…
You are hiking through the forest on a foggy morning in late winter. The path you are on is a steep, winding uphill, and you don’t exercise much, and you can feel the fog filling your lungs with each labored breath. Up ahead you can see a steep stairway beginning to take shape in the…
Doug Ault’s life was not a tragedy. It was not a rise and fall. It was a life in which joy triumphed, day after day after day, until the one day that it didn’t.
“Is this it?” Your friend walks up and stands beside you. “Yup.” You look, aghast, at the immense pit of mud and fencing in front of you. Though the fencing separates you and the pit, as you continue to stare at it, you feel like it’s expanding, like it might swallow you up at any…
Twilight Struggle By: Zack Moser The opening section of Don DeLillo’s magnum opus, Underworld, is actually the whole of a short story he published five years earlier, with a few minor changes. That story, “Pafko at the Wall,” is a brilliant flash of mid-century American anxieties and hopes, dashing the famous Dodgers-Giants playoff game featuring…
Mapping Cy Young By: Patrick Dubuque There is something grotesque about Cy Young’s statistics. I do not like to look at them. 453 innings pitched in 1892, a 35-10 record in 1895, a 0% home run rate in his age-43 season with the Naps in 1910. They’re reminders that baseball wasn’t really baseball, or it…
My Troy Tulowitzki Jersey By: Rachael McDaniel I own one baseball jersey. It’s a Troy Tulowitzki jersey in the Jays’ alternate blues. I don’t wear it often—I don’t want it to get worn down. But I don’t want to hide it away or frame it either. So it hangs on my chair, the name and…
The Blue Jays are Interested in Jay Bruce By: Rachael McDaniel You sit in the ruined vestiges of what was once your home. You are shivering, your clothes long ago tattered beyond recognition; when you look at your hands, the skin is the same shade of grey as the suffocating cloud that hangs fixed in…
Right now, the world could use some of Charlie Brown’s optimism.
No One Knows Such Things By: Jason Wojciechowski John Fante’s Ask the Dust is a semi-autobiographical novel about a Depression-era Los Angeles-via-Colorado novelist named Arturo Bandini. He lives in an odd Bunker Hill apartment building, makes horrifying racist comments to a Latina waitress with whom he is infatuated (verbal pigtail-tugging), seems never to write but…
A Brief Ode to Two Men Stuck in the Beastie Boys’ Baseball Brains By: Zack Moser I got more hits than Sadaharu Oh. — Beastie Boys, “Hey Ladies” I got mad hits like I was Rod Carew. — Beastie Boys, “Sure Shot” In two songs released five years apart, the Beastie Boys compared themselves to…