Writer: Mitch Nathanson
I just want to go to a hockey game. Provorov just wants to play in one. It shouldn’t be this hard for all of us to simply do it. So why don’t we all just do it.
I’m grateful that we as fans know so much about the players we root for nowadays. But sometimes I think I’d just prefer to believe that JT couldn’t make the Toronto trip because he had eaten too many hot dogs.
Focusing on the relatively worthless ball, itself, is beside the point. Rather, it’s bringing it home and proudly displaying it on our mantelpiece as a memory-triggering device that constitutes the value. It’s this process that transforms a valueless ball into a priceless artifact.
While I have no issue with any fan who wants to surrender their hard-won foul ball to a kid or anyone else, I find the social enforcement of this newfangled tradition unsettling, telling, and sad. And I want to explain – right now, so there will be no misunderstanding later – why I’m never giving your kid the ball I catch no matter what.
The Branch Rickey story is a narrative heist that once again leaves the Black men and those in the alternative press who did the hard work to right an entrenched wrong on the sidelines, spectators to their own history. As baseball celebrates yet another Jackie Robinson Day it might be worthwhile to ask: whose story is it really celebrating?
Yesterday, on what should have been the day after the Hall of Fame’s Golden Days era committee elected him for enshrinement, Dick Allen died at home in Wampum, PA. It was the final injustice in what for him had been a lifetime of them perpetrated by the baseball establishment.
Ho, Ho, Ho, says Phillies owner John Middleton, Merry Christmas! Why, it’s not even December and already Middleton and friends have blessed Delaware Valley baseball fans by giving them the gift they’ll put to good use for the next year at least – the gift of not caring about this travesty of a baseball team.
Celebrating yourself for ceasing to inflict a harm you never should have inflicted at all strikes a discordant note in the symphony MLB likes to play for itself
Embed from Getty Images By Mitch Nathanson, Historical Columnist We do it all the time, whenever we’re confronted with the bare facts of a reality we’d rather not confront. Did you see Uncle Phil? Wow, he looks terrible. He really let himself go. Man, he got old. What a shame. That’s what happens when you […]
If we’re looking for positives in this 2020 baseball season here’s a big one: the fever grip of stubborn intractability that has had a death grip on the game for over a century has loosened. Who knows what will happen once things return to normal. But maybe now baseball has been freed to fix itself at last.
