Posts Tagged: baseball
The Single Most Important Thing: Talking Sports and Writing with Sridhar Pappu
Sridhar Pappu discusses his first book, The Year of the Pitcher, writing it over six years, and the roots of his baseball fandom.
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Your Patriotism Isn’t Love, It’s Blindness
Love of country, some argue. With their boots firmly planted in my chest as I struggle to protest. No, that is not love, but blindness.
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Dispatches from the Swamp: The Absolute Necessity of Softball
And then one guy on his team yells, “You have to touch the bases, buddy! This is still America!” That is all it takes. For one guy on the other side to put country over party.
...moreNext Letter for Kids: Rachele Alpine
We’re sending our next Letter for Kids from Rachele Alpine! Rachele writes to us about her love of baseball, books, and especially hockey! And the importance of being yourself because there’s only one YOU! To make sure this letter reaches your favorite young reader, subscribe by June 1! And through May 25, purchase a yearly Letters for Kids subscription and […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Jefferson St. Apartments
Our perspectives bend and embellish, the run-down domicile is one year shitty and shameful, the next a sacred heaven.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Pet the Dog
It would be simple to say that she is missing the internal formulation that makes one enthusiastic about dogs. And that would be true, partially. Was she, as their mother once said, a cold fish?
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The Body and the Blood
The world around me looked suddenly sharper, more sinister, the female body where I lived appearing so much more penetrable, exposed, and impossible to hide.
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This October Sunday
Here we are again, another one-run game, another last chance.
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The Healing Magic of Baseball
In that favorite summer of my memory, Mom is perched on the edge of the rickety folding chair in box seats that the team manager reserved for us.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Suit
It was as if he understood that the authentic must begin in the voice. And through the texture of the voice—its moral and psychological claims—sensory details emerge with absolute authority.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Not That Town
Times like those lead you to believe that writing is, before it’s anything else, about simply getting it straight.
...moreIf Writers Were Baseball Players
With giddiness over the National League Championship, Lit Hub imagines the amusing fantasy lineup of players if the baseball teams were made up entirely of writers. Pitting Jennifer Egan and George Saunders against Malcolm Gladwell and Alice Munro, the list is an entertaining interpretation of writers’ styles translating into athletic skill.
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Paper Trumpets #26: Famous Myths of the Golden Age
This is part of the mystery and sometimes frustration of doing collage—trying to remember where things came from.
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The Rumpus Interview with Brian Shawver
Author Brian Shawver talks about his new book, Danger on the Page, his novel Aftermath, MFA programs, and why it’s a good thing that writing never stops being hard work.
...moreMurakami’s Starting Pitch
The satisfying crack when the bat met the ball resounded throughout Jingu Stadium. Scattered applause rose around me. In that instant, for no reason and on no grounds whatsoever, the thought suddenly struck me: I think I can write a novel. At Lit Hub, Murakami shares the introduction to Wind/Pinball: Two Novels, due out in August, […]
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Leaving Early
I wasn’t looking at them, but I felt I should have been. It’s an act of bravery, to see and be seen, isn’t it? A way to connect? And wasn’t I, just then, needing to feel something like brave?
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The Rumpus Late Nite Poetry Show: Daniel Anderson
In Episode 5 of The Rumpus Late Nite Poetry Show, Dave Roderick sits down with poet Daniel Anderson to chat about his latest collection, The Night Guard at the Wilberforce Hotel, finding the rhythm in lines of poetry, and baseball.
...moreRoger Angell Nation
When you read Roger Angell, you can (it’s cheesy, but true!) smell clover and hear the crack of a baseball against a baseball bat. Angell is synonymous with baseball writing, and this week, he’s being inducted into the Hall of Fame. To celebrate, the New Yorker has a post up, featuring a video interview with Angell and […]
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Baseball with Mister Way
When summer arrived, the butler for the newcomer the villagers called “Mister Way”—they couldn’t pronounce Hemingway—came into town to fetch the boys. He left the house and followed the long drive to the gate, turned into the village, gathered the boys from their homes and led them back to the Finca, where they found a baseball diamond marked out in the grass.
...moreJason Novak in the New Yorker, Y’all!
Our beloved illustrator Jason Novak collaborated with Mike Duncan for a New Yorker piece about performance enhancement in baseball. You see, if we ban steroids because they’re unnatural, it only makes sense to “cleanse America’s pastime of all artificial enhancements.” Novak’s drawings bring these “artificial enhancements” to life, from open-reduction internal-fixation surgery to Phiten necklaces (“just kidding, […]
...moreWhy Baseball Movies Usually Strike Out
From Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat” to Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, there’s something about baseball stories that captures our imaginations. Have baseball movies done the same? Maybe, but with much less artistic integrity, argues Kevin Courrier in a Critics at Large post about baseball movies in general and this year’s 42 in particular. A […]
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Hart Seely
Tom Barbash talks with author and reporter Hart Seely about winning ballgames from your couch, Donald Rumsfeld, faking sanity, and the fate of quality journalism in the online era of click chasing.
...more‘The The Angels Angels’ & Other Astrophysicist Baseball Observations
Neil deGrasse Tyson (Astrophysicist, American Museum of Natural History. Author: Space Chronicle, The Pluto Files. Host: StarTalk Radio) on Baseball: > Tonight’s @AllStarGame compells me to Tweet what Baseball looks like through the lens of an astrophysicist… > In the 1960s, when we still dreamed, we named a dome, a baseball team, and even the artificial turf they […]
...moreA FAN’S NOTES, The Rumpus Sports Column #42: The Miracle
A few weeks ago, I stayed in on a Friday night reading Hannah Arendt’s essay “What is Freedom?”
...moreThe Art of Being an Undergraduate
Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding is not actually a baseball novel; it’s a college novel, a great college novel.
...moreLiterary Knuckleballer
Baseball’s spring training—really winter training—seems pretty superfluous these days. Most players employ personal training staffs, stay in top shape year-round, and hone their skills relentlessly with the aid of the most advanced technologies available. Yet still they arrive at camp for a month and a half of training and exhibition games each February, all of […]
...moreFrom Old Notebooks
“As the writer wrestles with his book and his family, we reexamine our thoughts about the writer. It’s a performance in which writer and reader have equal billing.”
...moreWe Are Never as Beautiful as We Are Now
“I think that the greatest analogy between baseball and writing, or even life, is that the game is designed for its players to fail.”
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