Three boys took their positions on the makeshift field. The flagstone wall edging the upper lawn was the outfield fence. One foul line... more
This is our second time playing but he’s still constantly clarifying, correcting. The game, this one or the real one, has strict rules. You can’t fuck it up. You need to understand every instruction, every play, need to speak the language, know the abbreviations.
They sent me out here to get the final two outs of the eighth inning, to be the set-up man for The Closer, to set up his rightful dominion The Save, but now instead of setting up The Save I am going to blow The Save before The Closer even gets his shot at The Save.
As the blows against each other’s ribs and the glancing strikes on their now helmetless heads escalated, I moved to get out of the dugout and pull them apart, but their father, Coach Christen, blocked the exit with a Louisville Slugger
He visited the library later that night still in his baseball gear, his eye black dancing with tears. I'm sorry, I said, but three strikes is three strikes. His batting glove let me know he understood.
It soon became clear that he wasn't laughing at our tableau. Just at me. At my interpretation of a professional batter.
When I was nine my grandfather taped every episode of Ken Burns’s Baseball and mailed me the VHS tapes from Kansas City.... more
The veteran second baseman
is fiddling with his glasses in the twilight: The calculated
third baseman is scanning over the crowd for his family...
Usually when my parents went off to lead one of these weekend retreats, they’d leave all four of us kids to stay at the same place, usually with another retreat family, sometimes even people we already knew.
It felt like a belly flop
crammed into a calcified bounce house
At the end of the 90s, the MLB’s closest analogue was the WWF.
The helmet is slightly too big, and the interior foam padding is the texture of damp dough, thanks to Paula’s fat, sweaty head.
At first I thought he meant food, but he never asked what I wanted.
Eighty-five percent of the Earth’s surface is tarp
The catcher will rest a hand—bare or double-weighted in leather—on the hunch of your shoulder.
In Maine his whole life except the year there wasn’t work.
“How ‘bout it, Ronnie. Throw something Butch can hit. Try over the plate for once.”
I’ve been going to ballgames since I was a young kid, and when I was a tween I discovered this old t-shirt of my dad’s.
And by the third inning, it’s really, truly, shittily finished. “They gave us about twenty minutes of thinking we were in it,” Tim says. “Twenty minutes.”
Jenny Irish and I sat down to discuss her stunning debut, Common Ancestor, with Black Lawrence Press. Her... more
He blew smoke from a loaned cigarette back into my hair, bar rag still in his back pocket from the shift that ended two hours ago. He didn’t understand why I didn’t want him to come over. “Surrender to the stuff, baby.”
Even if it is addressed to you, this is a letter for me. If it were truly a letter for you,... more
(There they are, stealing the show from the rest of the body: Bette Davis's eyes, wide in perpetual surprise, in... more
The "UTOPIA STUDY" series is a form of experimental architectural photography that focuses on modern architecture in a number of American... more
