Short Relief: My Dinner with Derek
12/20The Other Greatest American Hero By: Patrick Dubuque As someone who stumbled into adolescence in the year 1990, I can assure you: it was a frantic time. The Cold War was over, and two generations of Americans confident in their place in a two-superpower world found themselves untethered. Instead we had a thousand points of...
Short Relief: Like Clouds on a Cloudy Day
12/19The Victorian Lady’s Guide to Baseball Players By: Kate Preusser Back before ladies could use the internet to quickly google remedies for earaches or how to whiten yellowed piano keys or where to procure Icelandic moss for a blancmange, slim volumes like Things a Woman Wants to Know (1901) or Good Things Made, Said, and...
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12/18The Mystery of The Greatest Baseball Mystery By: Mary Craig Throughout July and August of 1913, the Des Moines Evening Tribune published a serial novella by A.H.C. Mitchell titled “The Triple Tie.” The novel, Mitchell’s second and second-to-last publication, was advertised by the newspaper as the “greatest baseball mystery” ever that would appeal to those...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: Now You’re Playing with Power
12/15Baseball Pros, Counterculture Baseball Game By: Matt Sussman There are two categories of NES baseball games: ones who have heard of MLB and ones who haven’t. Perhaps the oddest one I’ve come across is Quattro Sports, which is actually four games, but one of them is titled “Baseball Pros.” This was released in 1990 by...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: The Wasteland Survival Guide
12/14The 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...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: Slapping a Label On It
12/131930s Tabletop Coin Games By: Matt Ellis It’s a banality by now that one could point to any number of consumer goods that mimicked the game of baseball throughout the twentieth century. Sure, there are any number of iterations of The Show over the past couple of years, and yes, sure, pinball and tabletop games...
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12/12Power Outages and Midnight Suns By: Kate Preusser I recently lost power, and due to the prelapsarian nature of the underground power lines in my neighborhood–a chain of failure difficult to detect by city engineers–the outage stretched from 12 hours to 24 to 36 to 48, consuming first my weekend, then biting into my week....
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: Christmas Left Early
12/11Christmas Time is Here By: Meg Rowley I asked my mom the other day, and she told me that as a kid, I never pitched a fit when I didn’t get what I wanted for Christmas. We were watching A Charlie Brown Christmas, as we do this time of year. There is a scene when...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: The Best Shapes of Our Lives
12/08A Boy And His Schwarb By: Matt Sussman Kyle Schwarber is on a “mission to transform his body” https://t.co/MLiyeu8XD5 — HardballTalk (@HardballTalk) November 28, 2017 The NES game A Boy And His Blob has fourteen different flavored jelly beans that transform the titular sidekick into various useful items to navigate an underground subway and later...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: Rain Delays and Bobblehead Daze
12/07Right now, the world could use some of Charlie Brown's optimism.
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: Silver Screens and Yellowed Pages
12/06Major League Baseball Idealized in Cake By: Mary Craig Baseball is great, but baseball is also very bad. And it’s this contradiction that draws us to the sport and drives us to madness with its presence in the summer and absence in the winter. Sometimes it’s so bad in the summer that we consider finally...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: Contracts Written and Social
12/05I Just Want to Sit Down By: Meg Rowley I’m all for exercise, but it’s important to be able to sit down. The world wears us out, and we ought to be able to take a rest. Not being able to sit is why I got tired of living in New York. You’re constantly battling...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: Baseball Will Be Back after a Few Messages
12/04Offseason Athlete Social Media Posts, Ranked By: James Fegan 5. Seemingly endless Instagram live video of their workout routine Most would rank this near the very top because it is literally the only thing an athlete can do to avoid a wave of “Shouldn’t you be working out?” in the comments. Even the workout video...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightLong Relief: Ranking the 1990 Baseball Card Designs
12/01Patrick: The time has come for us, the arbiters of taste, to establish for history the relative merit of the design of 1990 baseball cards. I’ve selected the major card companies and a few oddballs and mandated that the Short Relief crew gaze upon them, welcome each individually into their hearts, and pass judgment. (Please...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: Through the Desert
11/30No 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...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: Reflections of Reflections
11/29Away Flies The Boy By: Matt Ellis Popular discourse has a tendency, I think, to conceive of “media” as a particularly contemporary phenomenon. Sure, one could point to nineteenth-century newspapers and the emergence of photography, but when you hear the word what you think of is usually, like, some brain-dead millennial staring at his his...
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