Short Relief: Lurking in the Shadows
3/06Photo Credit: John Trupin He’s known subsistence-level baseball. Two years of junior college, riding buses over rutted roads that are in only slightly better repair than the fields they’d buried afternoons in, where the best outcome is to not twist an ankle in a patch of marshy outfield; crowds in the double digits, indifferent umpires,...
Long Relief: The Story of Baseball of the Future of the Past
3/05In the spring of 1896, a fifteen-year-old pitching phenom named Johnny Noonan was set to make his professional debut for the Brooklyn Flying Dutchmen. His manager hoped he would not only improve the team but, in doing so, help legitimize the fledgling, and faltering, Continental League. But during his first exhibition game, Noonan took a...
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3/02Maybe this is crazy. Maybe it isn't. The Phillies have seen the future. Are we ready? https://t.co/mDMjUPncIw pic.twitter.com/t6OLLCq06o — Matt Gelb (@MattGelb) February 28, 2018 Excerpt From Game Report 05/10/18: Rhys Hoskins, who went 0-for-3 with a walk in the loss to the Giants, gave an emphatic response to one reporter’s question about the play...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: No Satisfying Answers
3/01This 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...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: Adjustments and Accessories
2/28There’s a good reason so many dads across this nation love baseball: tinkering. Yes, friends, tinkering — that old-fashioned pastime that your father and his father’s father, and his father’s father have enjoyed. You can find the dad of today in the garage, fiddling with a part that isn’t quite right for a project in...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: Any Descriptions of This Game
2/27All the score sheets from the Durham Bulls games I covered in my five years as a beat writer are sheaved in file folders except one: game three of the 2013 International League Championship series between the Bulls and the Pawtucket Red Sox. It was the second-most exciting game I ever saw. (This was the...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: On The Boys, and the Urban Locales They are Visiting
2/26Most 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....
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: Who’s Been Traded for Cash Considerations
2/23ABBOTT: Costello, I’m happy to announce that I’m going to work with the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team as a coach. We’re very excited about the season. COSTELLO: Tampa, you say? I bet you know all the ballplayer names. ABBOTT: [brief panicked pause] Of course I do. A good coach knows all his players’ names....
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: Wilting Under the Spring Sun
2/22You 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,...
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2/21It wasn’t fair. Johnny Bench hit 40, and Pete Rose was at .300 the entire year. She knew this, she knew this in part because it’s what the newspapers said, but it’s also what was on the back of the card she got from Clark’s, when her mom let her pick out one item under...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: The Path of the Ball in Mid-Flight
2/20The 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...
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2/19Recently, as part of their Fan Fest activities, several members of the San Francisco Giants engaged in an imitation game, emulating their own teammates’ batting stances and pitcher’s mound presences. As the introductory music reels out, Brandon Crawford trundles to the plate, head down and hangdog. In a little while, his act will be identified:...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: Those Who Stay Afloat
2/16By the end, it was difficult to tell whether it had merely become routine or if there was a part of him in which hope still resided. Many argued the former, positing his demand for bus fare in the latter years meant he had gone soft and treated these several weeks in April as a...
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2/15Three pieces reflecting on the 1985 World Series, 2018 spring training, and the long road from there to here.
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: The Best Shape
2/14(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...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: A Piece of the Action
2/13In Medieval times, your church was just a drafty hunk of stone without some good compelling holy relics. Bigger, better churches had bigger, better reliquaries. These objects were prized relative to their imagined power: Pieces of the True Cross or Jesus’s baby teeth, for example, would have significantly higher desirability than, say, a bone fragment...
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