Short Relief: Robots, Mustaches, and Poetry
1/194. Tank, Cyborg, Flybot, and Motorcycle, all tied for fourth. Scabs, the lot of them. 3. (null set) 2. (null set) 1. The human players you can’t play with The 1991 release Cyber Stadium Series: Base Wars is one of several games that assumes in the future some or all (in this case all) human...
Short Relief: When History Fails to Repeat Itself
1/18You 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...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: Frozen in Time
1/17Derek Jeter does not like the donger machine. I have a suggestion for Derek Jeter. Derek Jeter can eat a six-foot bucket of—no? I’m being told no. Here’s what you do, since you want to be rid of it so bad. You put the thing on the bed of a large truck. Military-size truck, probably,...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: The Stadium Upon a Hill
1/16photo © Dale Zanine-USA TODAY Sports HARTFORD, CT — Aidan Jackson, first baseman for the Hartford Yard Goats, got on base at a prodigious clip in 2017–and that’s been a problem. The 25-year-old, drafted out of Georgetown in the ninth round of the 2014 draft, was considered by experts as a token senior sign, but...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightLong Relief: The Top Ten 35-And-Over Minor League Free Agents
1/15Photo credit: © Kevin Sousa-USA TODAY Sports January is a month for looking ahead: signing up for gym memberships, counting down the days until men play catch in uniforms, and combing the prospect lists, imagining the best possible tomorrow. And as the game develops and refines its approach to building baseball teams, observers have made their...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: The Notes You Don’t Play
1/12Jazz is probably the music best matched to baseball, for obvious reasons: both American inventions; both solo players collaborating on a team effort, finding variations and improvisations within rigorous structures, and so on. But who is baseball’s suited composer? It might be Charles Ives (1874-1954), who recognized early that his dissonant, dissident music would never...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: The Pit
1/11“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...
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1/10It’s very easy to create a national holiday. Not a federal bank holiday—that’s very hard—but an entry on the National Day Calendar. Here’s what you have to do: be a company, fill out an application explaining why your brand needs a national day, get approved by the selection committee, reap the glory of a media...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: The Colors of Baseball
1/09Over the holidays, I acquired a nail polish with the tongue-in-cheek moniker of “Sparkling Garbage,” the mossy green of Oscar the Grouch studded with glitter equal in iridescence to a fish belly bobbing atop the East River. The color perfectly matches the name, which in turn perfectly matches my overall 2017 ethos. Inspired, I turned...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: Time Delay
1/08Three-thirteen. Four-twenty-five. Six-fifty-nine. I’ve repeated those three numbers to myself like a mantra. Years go by, and still I remember them, in sequence, whenever prompted. Alone, they stand impressive, but together, they stand immortal. Funnily enough, that’s what makes them so tragic. I didn’t fully comprehend what I was seeing in 2006 when I watched...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: The Great White
1/05Snow Baseball By: Matt Ellis The colossal winter storm dubbed “Grayson” has been pummeling the East Coast for the past 24 hours or so. Yesterday I opened my door once to let my dogs out to do their thing, and both went right smack dab on the front porch like a couple of stupid animals....
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: Tightly Wound
1/04Twilight 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...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: Just Beyond the Edge of Sight
1/03The Man Who Could Walk Out of the Sea By: Kate Preusser When the sun came up on Puerto Rico on New Year’s Day, 1972, it rose on the citizens of the island already awake, lining the island beaches. They carried transistor radios and lights and babies, and they carried something much heavier, heavy the...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: The Best Laid Plans
1/02It’s On the Syllabus By: Holly M. Wendt It’s the first of the year, and I’m planning for the spring semester, charting out assignments and due dates for a brand new baseball literature course I’m teaching, its roster full of students who aren’t English majors. A syllabus is a series of hopeful resolutions, a declaration...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: Taking the Time You Need
12/22Use Your Toolbox By: Meg Rowley It takes a lifetime to really know yourself. It’s a funny trick that being human plays. We’re constantly changing, growing, getting stuck. We aren’t ever entirely the same for very long, and yet our happiness often depends on us knowing something of ourselves. I guess we get glimpses. We...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: Eyes on the Prize
12/21My 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...
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