Short Relief: For Love and Also the Game
11/28Moving, and Moving On By: Emma Baccellieri My parents, like many couples, made some life changes as their youngest child prepared to leave for college. They’d been talking about downsizing for a while, but they ultimately figured that they weren’t interested in half-measures here; rather than simply picking a smaller house, my father decided to...
Short Relief: The Large Adult Son Also Rises
11/27Summer Not Summer By: Holly M. Wendt Thanksgiving week took me to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. A relative was getting married there, an excellent reason to escape the chill creeping up the spine of the northeast. I’ve been in Florida before—marching band trips and Walt Disney World and one lovely coincidental conference that allowed me to...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: Why the Hall of Fame Doesn’t Matter
11/24Why the Hall of Fame Doesn’t Matter By: Patrick Dubuque One of the hard things about getting old, as a writer, is having to share the same name as yourself. There are some vocations where growth and change are accepted as part of the aging curve: teaching, perhaps, or carpentry. But as a writer, once...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: A House Made of Symbols
11/22Three Metaphors Outside Orlando, Florida By: Jason Wojciechowski By Monday at 8pm Eastern time, any player not on a 40-man roster would be available in the Rule 5 draft that will take place in a few weeks at the Winter Meetings. It was, therefore, a fast-and-furious day of additions and subtractions; you probably know intimately...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: Where Did We Leave Off
11/21Time is a Serpent Eating Its Own Tail By: Emma Baccellieri Participating in baseball’s Hall of Fame season requires establishing a friendly relationship with baseball’s history—watching players from the past, putting them in context by reading about the past, calibrating standards by analyzing elections of the past. The whole thing is predicated on looking back....
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: Choices We Make, and Choices Made For Us
11/20The Speculative Farewell By: James Fegan The end of baseball season exposed us to a phenomenon that seems rooted in the concept of “let people smell the roses while they still can,” which I have only been able to term “The Speculative Farewell.” The Wrigley Field faithful gave Jake Arrieta a rousing ovation when he...
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11/17A Doerr Closes By: Mary Craig Bobby Doerr died this week at the age of 99, having spent almost four decades of his life working in Major League Baseball in some capacity. He was a remarkable player and person, whose life, like so many others, cannot easily be summarized by one highlight or anecdote. But...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: I Stare Out the Window and Play Pokemon
11/16A 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...
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11/15Notes Toward Mediation: A New Short Relief Series By: Matt Ellis I’ve long thought about the way sports are mediated to us. A few years ago I cobbled together a series about baseball and cinema over at Lookout Landing, and it was an absolute blast but also there was somewhat of a problem: anything I...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: The Young and the Indefatigable
11/14Yannigan of the Year By: Emma Baccellieri The term “rookie” is said to have come from “recruit,” with the sounds chopped up and tossed around more than a century ago to form a more casual word. It’s not limited to baseball, of course; it supposedly started in the military and spread then to baseball and...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: Blades, Bourbon, and Backward Glances
11/13The Once and Future Series By Holly M. Wendt Unlike the wizard Merlin of Arthurian legend, I was not gifted with the ability foresee the future, nor, as in the iteration of the story reimagined by T. H. White in The Sword in the Stone, with the dubious gift of living backwards through time. White’s...
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11/10The How-To Guide for Spontaneous Affection By: Meg Rowley I’ve never understood how anyone gets out of a romantic comedy without a chipped tooth. Romantic comedies are predicated on keeping people who are obviously well-suited for one another apart for artificial reasons. The third act often features a scene when the two leads will fight...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: For Those Suffering from Fatigue
11/09The Treaty of Parrish By: Matt Sussman Lance Parrish was recently named the manager of the Low-A West Michigan Whitecaps. He is not to be confused with Larry Parrish, who coached the same team in 2013, as well as its parent Detroit Tigers for two seasons in the late 90s. Additionally, Larry is not to...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: More Memories of Halladay
11/08photo: Keith Allison Control Rachael McDaniel When I was born, Roy Halladay was 20. Now I am 20, and Roy Halladay is dead. *** I wrote a lot as a little kid. I was overly energetic, frequently bored, always bouncing around, and writing was one of the ways I could expend that energy without hurting...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightShort Relief: Pigments and Charcoals
11/07Hunter Pence and the Good Death By: Kate Preusser © D. Ross Cameron-USA TODAY Sports I learned a lot from reading Caitlyn Doughty’s Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, but my primary takeaway was this: Americans are bad at death. In her book, Doughty details various cultural practices and rituals around earthly departure, and continually circles...
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightLong Relief: How to Invent a Sport
11/06The rules and customs of a sport are what give it color, what make it into a bizarre pantomime mockery of real life, with its colorful pajamas and fireworks and artificial, hypnotic drama.
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