Posts by author
Brian Schwartz
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A FAN’S NOTES #10, The Rumpus Sports Column: Reasons to Attend the Ballgame with Your Rabbi
REASON ONE Rabbis get great seats. Or at least my brother does: for the last ten years or so, my older brother Steve has had a pulpit job at a large suburban temple in the Baltimore area. Many members of…
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A FAN’S NOTES, The Rumpus Sports Column: Is Pau Gasol Big Bird?
Pau Gasol reminds me of Big Bird. Maybe if the Lakers didn’t have bright yellow in their uniforms I wouldn’t make this connection, but with the yellow, the Sesame Street association is unavoidable. Gasol is gangly, tall, with feathery hair…
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All that Glitters
What was it like to be Jewish, and accused of patricide, in Holocaust-era Austria?
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A FAN’S NOTES: The Fantasy League
Did you hear about Jack Kerouac’s fantasy baseball habit? Even if you don’t care much for the Beats, it’s still pretty amazing to read about how Kerouac invented his own fantasy baseball league, illustrated his own made-up rosters, and actually…
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The Rumpus Sports Column: Mother’s Day Bash
I turned on the Mets game yesterday—Mother’s Day—and for a moment, when the picture came in, I thought something was wrong with my TV. The umpire, I noticed, was wearing a pink terrycloth armband.
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Rumpus Sports—The Lead-Footed Cowboy
This past week, I should have been haunting Brooklyn’s British ex-pat soccer bars, nestling myself into a corner with an afternoon pint or two, watching as the Champions League semi-finals began. I should have devoted myself to top-flight, high-stakes international…
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A FAN’S NOTES: Play Ball
Baseball is back, and New York City, that modest little sports market, has just unveiled two new major league stadiums. This season, the Yankees will play at the shiny limestone rebirth of Yankee Stadium; the Mets will try their luck…
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A FAN’S NOTES: Beautiful Losers
My home town’s minor league hockey team went through several transformations when I was growing up. First they were called the Dusters, a name that evoked dirt roads, not slick ice. The team’s logo back then—a cartoon caveman holding a…
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A FAN’S NOTES, The Rumpus Sports Blog: Battling Against Castro
“In 1951 you couldn’t get us to talk politics. Ball players then would just as soon talk bed-wetting as talk politics.” These are the opening lines of Jim Shepard’s 1994 short story “Batting Against Castro,” in which a few feckless…
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A FAN’S NOTES— The New Rumpus Literary Sports Blog
Is there an American sportswriter alive right now who’s better than Michael Lewis? Although his long Sunday Times Magazine piece on Houston Rockets forward Shane Battier feels mildly formulaic in its conception—another homespun story about an athlete whose lack of…
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A Fan’s Notes: Literary Sports Links
Last night, Super Bowl XLIII was interrupted by a twelve-minute segment devoted exclusively to the work of an important American poet. After taking the stage at halftime in front of thousands of screaming football fans and billions of television viewers,…