When I was ten years old, during the decade when all the kids collected baseball cards for three months, I had an idea. I had a couple of friends who lived up the hill from me. One lived in a giant house, the son of a doctor and a lawyer; I spent countless days losing…
He was always in the cage or in batting practice, taking a few more cuts to get his reps in. Until one day, it hit him: Why take more swings, when he could just swing more bats? “Old Three-Bat Thomas,” called him. “That’s not going to help,” his teammates would shout from the dugout. “If…
Baseball is over now, and I am in denial. It always takes a few days for it to really settle in that this isn’t just an off-day, it’s not the All-Star Break, I can’t turn on a game in a few days and have baseball keep me company again. There’s always a feeling of loneliness…
Patrick: Comrades, I assemble you once again to fulfill your divine mandate: to assess and rank the aesthetic value of various early nineties baseball cards. Last year, as you may recall, we explored the year 1990, an era of reckless youth and posturing. Moving forward three years, things have changed. Still riding the hobby’s bubble,…
By Wednesday, the arugula had drowned. One of the pepper plants sank in its pot, and the basil, larger, more robust, was covered in slugs—the small invertebrate crew of some verdant, sinking Pequod, clinging to their own green mast. The plants themselves had conditions of their own: every leaf riddled with holes, symptoms, surely, of…
This 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…
On Friday night, the staggeringly popular George Saunders gave a reading and a brief talk about writing in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The event was part of Saunders’ tour for his Man Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo. The story is one that encourages a reader to get caught up in the craft, to figure it…
With Spring Training less than two weeks away and dozens of notable free agents still unsigned, the discussion of the frigid market has become much more public. Player agents and even general managers are beginning to speak openly about the factors at work, and what it means for the future of the game. Now, finally,…
I never got the card. Top left, second from the bottom: that was where another kid told another kid he’d gotten it. I was almost eleven, just peering over the edge of adolescence, and it felt like a perfect metaphor, the cardboard equivalent of a crack of the voice. None of my friends had gotten…
Derek 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,…
It’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…
Use 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…
Patrick: 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…