April 24, 2017 | Nonfiction
He Felt the Crowd Beating in His Heart: Rajai Davis & Game 7 of the 2016 World Series
Jason Koo
It is a game of beautiful pauses, pauses that take up so much of the game’s duration that calling them “pauses” seems inaccurate; the moments of action, rather, are what interrupt the long stretches of inaction.
April 22, 2017 |
Run the Jewels
Sean West
And I had to wonder while I watched the mosh-pits if these kids were even listening.
April 21, 2017 | Nonfiction
Delayed Romance
Aaron Sinner
Ten years removed from my youth baseball experience, I find myself in a car with four baseball-obsessed college buddies, headed toward the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome to see the Minnesota Twins play a mid-September game against the Detroit Tigers. I have no idea why I’m here.
April 21, 2017 | Poetry
Off The Diamond
Zebulon Huset
He could say from experience
that Babe Ruth was an asshole,
but he never said it on the field.
Nineteen Eighty-Four: After Charles Simic
Kyle Bilinski
That was the year Dave Kingman’s pop fly never came down at the Metrodome
Nineteen players were ejected during the Padres/Braves brawl
Angel Mike Witt threw a perfect game against the
Baseball Game in a Small Southern Town
M. A. Istvan Jr.
Before the nasty glances, which I sense to be for me, I shake my downcast head, grin in disappointment, and mutter “Damn.”
Another evening down at the ballpark
Scott Ray
While waiting in my car outside your house I counted thirteen wrinkled ticket stubs I’d tucked inside the glovebox after games
to serve as some reminder of the season so far.
Playing Baseball Mediocrely but Playing Baseball with Pure Joy
Julia Dixon Evans
I wanted to focus on the real victims, unthinkable crimes against them, but I kept coming back to those batting cages, to that uniform in Coach B's house.
Baseball is a Reason
Thomas Locicero
Baseball is, if nothing else, a reason, and so it is everything:
"Wade Boggs"
Jeremy Rice
You look like you just walked out of a punt, pass and kick contest. We gotta make you look sick."
Randy Bass
Brian Robert Flynn
I’m thankful for the throwaways. Like the time the Bears lost in extra innings. Randy Bass, pre-Hanshin Tigers Randy Bass, had committed an error on a routine toss to the pitcher at first. It was
Two Poems Poorly Translated On Baseball During Wartime
Shane Kowalski
Then something funny happened / after months of imprisonment, / handled like/ animals, less than/ animals, / they started playing baseball.
Hateball
Bud Smith
I wanted to quit, and was too young to realize that I could just quit anything.
Self-Portrait as Home Run Ball
John McCarthy
But I see the look on his face, the lawn sprinklers waving back and forth like paper fans, the cicadas and their dim crescendoing dirge, and the panicgrass that the boy runs back through as he realizes what fetching me will cost him.
ROKUGATSU NO HEBI
Kris Hartrum
I wanted to see Akari and have a drink so we could get a little drunk and maybe take our clothes off.
Now the wren has gone to roost
Drew Knapp
The trees all richly clad, yet devoid of pride, fat with birds and the season, have called back days and years for the history they are giving me.
Interview with Meredith Alling
Gregory Lee Sullivan
What I like most about the story is that the grossness makes way for the sadness.
Shitstorm
Melissa Moorer
Now Dad would have to drive us to Mom’s in the shit-mobile, which probably wouldn’t start even if he could get the car doors open. Cows were standing pinned between the car and the wall and the doors had been frozen shut since the storm even without all the extra ice and frozen manure. Dad had tried pouring boiling water over the handles days ago, but the doors only worked while the handle was still too hot then froze solid again, worse than before.
Honey Mustard
Michael Fischer
He could kill me right now. I’m rail-thin, depression rotting the muscle off me since I got here. He’s big and strong and calls himself Faheem.
Interview with Lauren Grodstein
Rob Volansky
Grodstein is the author of four previous books, including the New York Times bestseller A Friend of the Family and the Washington Post Book of the Year The Explanation for Everything. She was kind enough to answer some of my questions regarding OUR SHORT HISTORY, out now from Algonquin Books.