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The Baseball Pastoral
There’s a scene in City Slickers where Billy Crystal, in the midst of the midlife crisis that has taken him out West, recalls with near-reverence his first visit to Yankee Stadium: his first glimpse of the field as he and his father emerge from the tunnel, the brilliant blue sky, the blinding white of the uniforms, the rich green grass.Issue 34
Spring Training Lights
It’s the bottom of the seventh inning, none on, no one out, and the Oakland Athletics’ Mark Ellis hits a broken-bat bloop into shallow left-center off Arizona Diamondbacks reliever Jorge Julio.Issue 34
Nostalgia: The 1950s and My Mitts
Going My Way, one of my favorite films, preserves an America when baseball mattered. That world of the 1940s was carried over, with all its views and values, into the ’50s and my childhood—a world for better and worse now long gone.Issue 34
Freddy the Fan
One-eyed Freddy the Fan seems to attend every game at Yankee Stadium. He’s certainly there every time I am. No matter the weather, Freddy wears his team cap and satin team jacket.Issue 34 / Anatomy of Baseball
Ya Gotta Believe
I have written about baseball for more than three decades now. At first I sat in the stands, looking down at the field and writing about what I saw. Then I began to wonder about what might really be going on, hidden from sight yet discernible from the game’s statistical residue.Issue 34
Pesäpallo: Playing at the Edge of the World
We’re leading by one, but with two outs, when I come up to bat. The staff-student baseball game is a yearly tradition at Päämajakoulu, and part of the tradition is that the game isn’t played for any set number of innings. Whoever is winning when the bell rings for the next lesson is that year’s champion, so the game’s normal rhythms are speeded up and slowed down, tense, the leading team moseying through the batting order and the trailing team fielding with a frenzy.Issue 34 / Anatomy of Baseball / True Stories, Well Told
The Bat
For perhaps ten years now the golden summer evenings I remember from growing up have been gone. Did they slip by and I didn’t notice? And is it innocence or the light I’m missing?Issue 34
The Southworths
There are a lot of stories about baseball during World War II, and the more they are told the more they almost succeed in making those years sound like a foolish time, when a man with one arm played outfield for the St. Louis Browns and a fifteen year-old pitched for the Reds.Issue 34 / Anatomy of Baseball
My Glove
My oldest personal possession is my baseball glove, which I bought for eight dollars at Woolworth’s in St. Cloud, Minnesota, in 1960, when I was almost thirteen.Issue 34
First Base of Last Resort
In the still-sweltering heat of an early July evening, before the sun went down and the hard brown June beetles started pelting the infield dust around my feet, I crouched into my position at first base as the pitcher made his move toward home plate.Issue 34 / Anatomy of Baseball