I wanted this essay to be about love. I wanted it to also be about my grandfather and Arkansas and my copy of Ain’t Doing Too B-A-D, Bad, a live jazz record by The Bobby Bryant Sextet. 

When I lived in Michigan, I ruined baseball. I recorded every Detroit Tigers game only to fast-forward between pitches, so I could get back to stacks of paper grading, so I could be as productive

When a strawberry’s
sore, it leaks

I’m just gonna say it. Invisalign is bullshit.

Midway through the school year one of the kids in one of the other sixth grade classes hung himself, so we couldn’t call the game we played in the mornings ‘suicide’ after that. 

New ballparks keep sprouting up,
like summer sweet corn. 

Come closer reader, please,
I didn’t mean to insult you. 
I’ll let you punch me
right in my asking face.

Parker’s mental damn busts open the second he sinks a cleat into the batter’s box.  

The full moon may strike you
dumb and limp and lost
when bat readies to encounter ball
and you hit it high as the moon--
still the ump declares, You’re out!
before you’ve moved a step from home. 

I was wearing my home-made Giants uniform, as I did every day that week, laboriously sewed by mom who was not enamored of sewing. 

There’s no TV or radio here, so it’s only later we hear that our guys lost big
at home on Blake Street

I would go back now, though, live in the nervous fidget
before I said I like you & kissed her braces
with my upper lip & bled all over her teeth.

There is something about listening
To a baseball game on the radio

It was the summer of Monica Lewinsky and Mark McGwire and Armageddon. I was on a short business trip to Philadelphia—a handholding, as it is known in the office. I was sent, via Amtrak, to coddle

When I first met Dawn, I didn’t know what a lexicographer was. I had to look it up. Later I admitted I hadn’t even realized that people still made dictionaries.

“Of course they do,” Dawn

Much has been said about that smile. I'm not in the business of describing smiles.

Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity, the Sequel, or Part Zilch of Ten Billion, My Entire Oeuvre is this Film, a Mental Disturbance of a Review, 666 Words in Length

Must we insist on doling out movies by the stratagem?

It is 5:30 in the morning. I am standing in the lobby of a midtown Manhattan hotel, judging the distance between me and a planter because I am pretty sure I am going to throw up.  My stomach is in

each pitch lost in the peripheral blink of an eye

I have been to many games at Shea Stadium and I know that this facility’s bar for unacceptable behavior is extremely low.

Let’s start this account of fuckfaces on October 18, 2006. I was 30 years old, recently engaged, in my third year of residency training at Chapel Hill, and depressed about the New York Mets. 

Dear Dicky,
You probably figured it out by now, but I’m sorry I stole the softball.

FUCKING HELP ME

Pauline wanted to correct him. He should have said catcher. That's the one who squats. 

Otherwise you'll end up with a mouthful of husk shards.