… Some days, it rains.
The most interesting pitcher in baseball is 4-6 on the season with a 4.67 ERA. The beauty of statistics lies in their confusion, and this man proves it. Numbers that scream mediocrity actually reflect beguiling inconsistency — alternating greatness and incompetence, in this case. On Sunday afternoon, Francisco Liriano treated the world — or at [...]
There’s more than one way to bake a cake. But ask any pastry chef and you’ll hear there’s only one right way to bake a cake. That way, of course, is vastly different from chef to chef. Today, there is anguish on NoPepper.net. Clearly, I have a favorite baseball team. What kind of person would [...]
And then Mike Lupica came on and I vividly remember getting up on a stool and shouting, “Give us Barabbas!” – Charles Pierce on the farewell party for The National
Dad was a 3M engineer. He did a bunch of things and refused multiple promotions because he didn’t want the stress that comes from being in management. For a while, he was a teacher in their classroom facility, a building straight out of the 1960s, complete with windows that were 6-inch slats. It sat next [...]
Well, we finally got a look inside the briefcase. The new sportswriting website grantland.com made its debut yesterday, to no limited amount of fanfare, both self-generated (a countdown clock? really?) and organic. And the opening three-course menu set off no small amount of text messages, emails and discussion threads in the writing community. Initial reactions [...]
Here’s what it’s like to be a fan of an utterly awful team. You find yourself pondering the mathematical possibilities of your team actually getting back into a pennant race. Winning baseball is all pastoral pondering and poetry — the math doesn’t come until the end, and even then it’s a “magic” number. But losing [...]
I don’t like things I am supposed to like. Also, I am cheap. I’m the Andy Rooney of baseball fans. So the odds of me enjoying an afternoon in the box seats at our local minor league park — provided gratis by my employer — were pretty low. But I had hopes of free beer, [...]
I love Time-Zone-Inappropriate baseball. Allow me to explain. My evening doesn’t begin until your morning newspaper (heh) is running on the press. Thus, my options for an afterwork ballgame are something that’s already finished (and something about which I already know the ending) or the ass-end of a West Coast ballgame, if I am lucky. [...]
He never played a game whole year in the minor leagues. Harmon Killebrew is entering hospice care, and nearing the end of his fight with cancer. Writing news obituaries follows a pretty standard format, and the defining characteristic is the obit appositive. Essentially, they go like this: “Insert Name, insert defining appositive phrase here, died [...]
After the information was relayed to Obama, he turned to his advisers and said: “We donated a $60 million helicopter to this operation. Could we not afford to buy a tape measure?” – Bob Woodward in the WaPo