“Cash, it’s Girsch. I know Voit isn’t available. I know I blew that, haha. I’m calling about Bird. Really.” Same phone call for months now, different locale. Arizona in the spring used to be about promise. Girsch found a possibly friendly ear attached to a man in sunglasses and a blonde wig at the local…
The Simpsons. I know you have heard of this television program. FXX runs the show five days a week. Half the time the four-hour blocks are connected by some tenuous, begrudgingly appreciated theme (tonight’s theme: Moe). Tuesdays are weird. I’m not going to bother explaining what they do on Tuesdays. Mondays and Fridays are six-hour…
*Purple Rain record scratch* *freeze frame* I know my line, but I need a minute. Okay. How did I get here? I’m sure you think you know. But it’s worse than that. “Rocktober” was created by Jimmy Page in 1969, then commercialized by radio station managers in 1971. Listeners were told to get the Led…
“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…
Once in Greece, I asked for a “Wednesday” (τέταρτη) kilo of feta instead of a “quarter” (τέταρτο). The lady behind the cheese counter in a grocery store in suburban Athens looked at me for a minute, told me my Greek wasn’t very good, and then asked me to repeat what I wanted. I’ve told that…
It happens all the time now. I’m sitting on my park bench feeding the ducks most definitely named Dewey and Louie, and a text message like this comes in: Phillies signed McCutchen. Three years. “Three years?” Time stops momentarily, ironically enough. “Three years?” I said out loud before putting my right hand up against my…
Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky were so influential that “Moneyball” Michael Lewis wrote an entire book about them. Maybe the 23rd most interesting tidbit from the book about how our limited brains are out to destroy us is this: we greatly inflate the number of times in our lives we truly predicted a surprising…
Adrían Beltré did not like having his head touched. Retirement probably does not change that.
It’s fun to ask people why they like baseball. I ask all the time and I bet you already know the top five answers: “It’s something I used to do with my dad.” “I played it a lot when I was a kid.” “It’s beautiful.” “My friends are really into it. We go to the…
Last season, the Dodgers lost the World Series in the early days of November. They lost after drawing the series out to its full seven games, wringing every ounce of drama and emotion they could out of it — so much so that the defining seventh game was itself anemic, drained of any real conflict….
Mookie Betts stole second base in Game 1 of the 2018 World Series. He was anointed a hero for this. He was deemed the individual responsible for giving us all one free taco next week if we so desire one, because he was the first to steal a base in the best-of-seven contest. Mookie Betts…
We do not each have our own true purpose, Albert Camus theorized in his The Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was happy because he had a specific purpose and fulfilled it, and that’s the end of the list of folks who can find pleasure down that avenue. But that is okay! Now you know. Folks are…
Before composing Canto 34 to conclude his epic poem Inferno, Dante Alighieri was witness to the elimination of all four of his favorite teams in the 1318 National League and American League Division Series. Experts believe that in response, Dante composed a short poem titled, simply, Canto DS, in order to comfort fellow fans in…