So with visions of .500 baseball, and maybe a run of good luck at the blackjack table, I planned a trip to see Amed Rosario play. At the time, it felt like he could be the missing piece to salvage the Mets’ injury-plagued season.
Through dry, desert-stung eyes and ears, a few details broke through: the third-base umpire with a black cast on his right arm; the young boys in the stands pummeling an inflatable green alien; the vendor’s regular bark of “beer, water, NUTS.”
It’s coming your way, it’s coming your way, it’s coming your way! Oh, but it lands just short, a few rows down and five or six seats across. The supporter who catches it does so perfectly and casts it pitchwards with a meaty, assured throw. Those around him pat his back and cheer.
For six months, the banality of being a not-playing soccer player on a lower-division club ate away at Manny. He could go out with his roommates to bars and say he was a Gales player, but no pictures of him in a Gales uniform appeared on TV or the newspaper. The local press simply didn’t care. Nobody was a fan.
I never expected to get my baseball fill from a board game until I picked up a copy of W. M. Akers’s Deadball: Baseball with Dice. Funded in under four hours on Kickstarter, the baseball simulation uses simple player statistics, dice, and traditional baseball scorekeeping to a surprisingly realistic effect. A few weeks ago, after playing a few rounds with the early, unfinished rulebook, I reached out to Akers to talk about the origins of the game.
Today we get the answers from Jessica Luther, the author of Unsportsmanlike Conduct: College Football and the Politics of Rape.
The question is: Must we oust dear old Dad in order to come into our own in a changing football landscape? Or do we respect the ultimate authority of the pater familias, who, after all, has carried us through decades of relative glory?
As the iridescent fog settled into Chavez Ravine during the 7th inning of the World Baseball Classic’s second semi-final, the tension in Dodger Stadium simmered low. The crowd was sparse, yet dedicated, having shown up during the height of the day’s rain shower and persevered throughout under umbrellas, rain jackets, and ponchos.
His new book, Party in the Back, collects over 300 photos Tino took while documenting his exploits finding, cleaning, and skateboarding the abandoned, or simply unfilled, pools of Southern California with his friends Rick and Buddy—all while inevitably waiting for the cops to show and break up the party.
With the team starting to win not only games but the respect and admiration of their peers, the beauty of Hinkie’s plan continues to unfold from beyond his (basketball) grave. Suddenly, with Ben Simmons’s debut still to come, we can root for the Process and root for success at the same time.
But Fin the Whale, a Vancouver Canuck and officially an orca, had better things to gnaw on, like the scalps of fans posing for personalized trading card photographs.
For 26 years, I played in the same Sunday afternoon, full-court basketball game with the same guys. Then my Medicare card arrived in the mail and I switched to doubles tennis. Occasionally, at the gym some 20-somethings will see me shooting and ask me to join them. I figure since I have to die one day, might as well be while trying to hit the open man.
On the tables closest to the stage, each club’s scarves are carefully laid out around bouquets of flowers and team signage, where management and representatives from the 10 organizations will conduct their draft. The players hoping to be drafted are not far behind them in the audience. With family, friends, and even some youth club coaches in attendance, the event is open to the public, and I can’t imagine anyone here, regardless of what brought us, has only a casual interest in The Beautiful Game.
All of these women’s names and all of their stories are stuck in dusty old books and magazines that no one ever looks at anymore because they’re in libraries. They’re not on the Internet. So, I decided to create an Instagram account specifically for these stories and get them pushed onto a popular culture media platform.
We chose some of our favorite, most Eephus-y stories of 2016. We hope you’ll enjoy any you’ve missed, and stick around for what’s to come in the new year.
The Quintero Golf Club, outside Peoria, Arizona, is challenging for the scratch golfer, the municipal hacker, and the novice alike, which is exactly the trio I arranged to play this highly-regarded public course.
—At the first tee, pay no attention to the entire course staring you down like a rabid donkey.
—Count the number of slopes in the fairway and keep your cart clean.
Hopkins indeed might be the most peculiarly American fighter of his era: corny in his creativity, self-assured in his own exceptionality, businesslike to the nth degree, ethnocentrically skeptical.
I was on the floor during Game 7 of the World Series mumbling to myself, tears running down my face pretty much from the 6th inning when David Ross hit that homer and onward until about three in the morning before finally passing out. As a lifelong Cubs fan, that was easily one of the most intense, insane, and ultimately wonderful experiences I’ve ever gone through.
One must have a mind of winter, to see a baseball in the snow.
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There are a bunch of ghosts, bowling on a frozen sea.
Guy Yedwab joins the podcast to discuss the 2016 MLS Cup final, tactically sound but boring soccer, and a little banter about the future expansion of MLS.
Looking for some sports books to pick up for your friends or family (or yourself) this holiday season? Here are some of our favorites, from 2016 and earlier, for the fan in your life. Happy reading.
I take back everything I said about FPL last week. It’s the greatest. My methods are finally paying off. I love guessing at sports!
My first real memory of the waterworks was watching the Rams lose to the Steelers in the Super Bowl. I can remember exactly where I was sitting and Vince Ferragamo’s interception sent me over the edge.
Feel how different it was from games in any other city, like Pittsburgh or Chicago. This was Los Angeles in 1953. Maybe Los Angeles wasn’t so special to merit Major League Baseball, but the Rams were still the best pro game in town—Hollywood’s team and worthy of a five-star premiere.
The mayor’s ten-speed bicycle, reported missing last spring, has been fished out of the river by a retired doctor.
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In a basement restroom of the basketball arena, an unidentified person smashed the mirrors and clogged the drains.
The podcast returns for ESPN’s Wednesday night NBA doubleheader, featuring the Cavs win over the Knicks, and the Warriors near-blowout of the Clippers in LA.
FPL used to feel like playing chess while needing to refer to the rulebook after each turn, but now it feels like sitting in a seedy Vegas sportsbook, watching the odds fluctuate for reasons beyond my imagining.
Will it make me seem lazy—or too much like a casual fan—if I admit I can’t remember a single pilgrimage of any memorable length? And since I rarely leave home (I’m a writer, after all; a sanctioned hermit), the game is always on.
Do Rams fans really have to spend the days leading up to a row of three killingly-tough matchups thinking about what has already been dubbed DickersonGate?
And then nothing — no one on the field.
*
In this darkness, there’s no way to see the puck.
With :43 left in the seventh, the unranked Trevor Berbick stopped raining punches on Muhammad Ali as he slumped against the ropes, looked at ref Zach Clayton, and screamed “He’s hurt!” Did they stop the fight? They did not.
In the winter of 1993, a young man moved to Prague with the idea of finding a pro or semi-pro basketball team and convincing them to let him join. It was a dumb idea, partly because the young man didn’t know if they even had pro or semi-pro basketball teams in Prague, partly because he didn’t speak any Czech and partly because he was, in the grand scheme of things, just okay at basketball.
Maybe next year will be our year, maybe it won’t. Maybe next year I’ll find myself making another pilgrimage to Cleveland to watch the team I’ve loved all my life celebrate their first World Series victory in my lifetime.
We used to jump rope in our Florsheims. We used to play football in our Oxfords.
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Shoes with spikes, shoes of canvas. Underwater shoes and shoes for dancing.
Who’s setting all these fake salaries, anyway? Do you think the actual players ever look at them and get annoyed? Do you think they get used by agents when negotiating new contracts?
Today we get the answers from Mark Chiusano, columnist and editorial writer for Newsday and amNewYork, and author of the short story collection Marine Park.
In Las Vegas, dog-walking along the fence of McCarran Airport is popular sport.
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Who holds the world record for most consecutive rides on the High Roller observation wheel?
It’s so easy to be rude to a little phone screen filled with tiny shirts. The cab lurches up McGuinness Boulevard and I set my team without another thought. Only thirty joyful weeks to go.
Last week, after just three uneventful seasons, Gene Simmons’ and Paul Stanley’s pyrotechnic gridiron experiment came to an abrupt and unheralded end.
Today we get the answers from Tobias Carroll, author of the short story collection Transitory, and the novel Reel.
Had I really moved on from my shame? It seemed that time had merely softened the bumps of my past, not erased them. I returned to campus for the 2016 alumni game determined to understand.
Today we get the answers from Jonathan Lethem, the New York Times bestselling author of ten novels, including Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, and most recently A Gambler’s Anatomy.
Southampton is a team that I have never understood. Are they good? I never know. They are striped. That’s all.
Playoff baseball will take the blood straight out of your head.
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Maybe if we don’t move, we’ll win. What do you think?
Baseball can wear you out, mentally I mean, and San Francisco was always there to help you change the channel and just chill out.
In July, ESPN premiered a Judd Apatow-directed 30 for 30, “Doc & Darryl.” The documentary pairs Gooden and Strawberry once more and traces the ascent of the ’86 Mets and the drug-fueled downfall of the two players. It is poignant to see the two reunited. Strawberry is enjoying a new life, and things even seem to be looking up for Gooden.
On the first timeline I am 40 years old, husband, father of three children, builder of things, writer of things, breaker and fixer of things. On the second timeline I am watching baseball, and it has all just happened, is happening, will happen in a moment. Time does not elapse.
On Saturday, the New York Mets clinched a postseason berth. Their reward? Madison Bumgarner and his even-year specialists, the San Francisco Giants, in the single-game elimination NL Wildcard. The winner of which also earns the right…
My approach to FPL could be an intro course to behavioral economics. Step right up, undergrads! Every week, a real-life demonstration on sunk cost fallacy and a reminder that markets are not rational, because people are not rational.
Today we get the answers from Dave Fromm, author of the memoir, Expatriate Games: My Season of Misadventures in Czech Semi-Pro Basketball.
That there is a winning chess opening my friends.
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Winning is productive and physical. It is very nutritional.
Some people are good at Fantasy Premier League: they listen to podcasts, read analysis, remember to trade people right away when they get suspended before they lose value, and understand how bonus points are awarded. Me,…
Today, we get the answers from Sam Miller, editor in chief of Baseball Prospectus and a contributing writer at ESPN The Magazine.
From the moment the long trucks first unloaded the blocking sleds and robotic tackling dummies and bushels of athletic tape hauled away from St. Louis, optimism reigned.
Some people are good at Fantasy Premier League: they listen to podcasts, read analysis, and understand how bonus points are awarded. Me, I set my team on Friday night—exhausted from work, often slightly drunk, informed by twenty minutes of wild research, fueled by irrational notions.
Are we losing yet?
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We love a good loss, and the best would be a shutout.
Today, we get the answers from Jonathan Wilson, author of the recently published Angels with Dirty Faces: How Argentinian Soccer Defined a Nation and Changed the Game Forever.
Do the Galaxy need Landon Donovan on the pitch? Perhaps his return is a kind of reclamation of the team’s recent history, and the mindset that got them there.
During the 2011 Copa America, the field-side announcer read out the teams before the game, announcing “in the 10, the best in the word, Lionel Messi.” There was polite applause. “And in the 11, the player of the people, Carlos Tevez.” There was a mighty roar.
You grow up around here, or why are you a fan?
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Listen to all the fans yelling through their long glass tubes.
There’s a transformative moment, early on in training, when you start to recognize that what you’re feeling during a given moment is shared, physically, by those around you.
The Big Game podcast is back, just in time to cover the first college football games of the season. Our resident SEC fan and LSU alum Guy Anglade (@musetteanddrums) returns to the podcast to talk about the…
I have found that Modelo Especial goes best with my tears. You see, I am a UCLA Bruin (an actual Bruin that is, with the degree and debt to prove it), but that comes with a certain inevitability—we are going to choke.
The Pirates sound like a lucky bet. Unless it’s a Tuesday in May.
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Some folks say the Nassau Coliseum is an unlucky room.
“The 7 Questions” is a new sports questionnaire — the Eephus way of catching a snapshot of the fan’s life. From writers to artists and beyond, we bring you answers every Monday morning (and sometimes Wednesdays…
Black Gods of the Asphalt depicts the passionate joys of street basketball in tournaments that commemorate the dead; where play may be both ecstatic and an act of mourning.
Today, we get the answers from Steve Kettmann, author of nine books on subjects ranging from sports to politics. His most recent is Baseball Maverick: How Sandy Alderson Revolutionized Baseball and Revived the Mets.
What happens when you ask seven experts for the predictions for the 2016-2017 English Premier League season? Massive disagreements, arguments, contradictions, absurdities and outrageousness. You know, football.
In the bullpen — there’s got to be a jar of instant coffee in here somewhere.
*
The team doctor prescribed the swimmers two cups of decaf before bedtime.
Keeping score takes an extra half-beat in order to allow the brain to translate. A left fielder is avoltigeur de gauche. A pitcher is a lanceur. A shortstop is an arrêt–court . At the end of each half-frame we tally up points, coups surs, erreurs, and runners laisses sur les buts. All 3842 of us await a coup de circuit, though no one manages to clear the ad-plastered wall.
In 1984, the summer Olympic Games came back to Los Angeles. David Davis has curated 150 of the most remarkable photos from that tournament in One Golden Moment.
Today, we get the answers from Ben Lindbergh, co-author of The Only Rule Is It Has to Work, an excellent book about running an independent league baseball team. He is also a staff writer for The Ringer and, with Sam Miller, the cohost of Effectively Wild, the daily Baseball Prospectus podcast.
In fact, Los Angeles was, in conception and execution, the Olympic Games most directly shaped by the forces of commerce and money. It would take the rest of the Olympic movement fifty years to catch up.
Today, we get the answers from Eddie Joyce, the author of the novel Small Mercies.
It seemed to happen way too fast. As if time wasn’t meant to unfold this way. As if this was a flip movie in the little red pocket-book whose pages had slipped too quickly from beneath your thumb.
The Sports Museum of Los Angeles is on Main Street.
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You don’t walk through a turnstile but there are turnstiles on display.
Two days have passed since I spent an evening at Estado Alejandro Serrano Aguilar, the home of Deportiva Cuenca, in southern Ecuador. Since then I’ve searched a dozen local retailers for a kit, tried to change the team I support on FIFA16, and spent at least an hour trying to understand the Ecuadorian league and tournament structure.
Today, we get the answers from David Goldblatt, the author of the new book The Games: A Global History of the Olympics.
This softball team runs on sloppy joes and orange cake.
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The coach keeps a bottle of Coke on the mantel, in case of emergency.
It’s the hypotheticals of that moment that haunt me. What if he’d tripped over his legs and blown out his knee, or gone tumbling into the wall and hit his head in a way that triggered bleeding in his brain? At the time, I thought of myself as an activist. Some of my teammates even came to my support—I’d stood up to the coaches. But the self-aggrandizement quickly dissolved into guilt, and six years later it’s more or less remained with me.
Today, we get the answers from Andrew Forbes, whose writing has appeared in Eephus, Hobart, The Classical, and Vice Sports, among other places.
The NBA’s Summer League concludes next Monday with the mini-tournament’s championship game, held at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas, Nevada. So last weekend, as the Summer League was about to kick off, I did what I like to do and embarked on another road trip into the desert to watch some more meaningless exhibition games.
Water! At the square root of sports is water.
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Squirt water on the boxer’s head between rounds. Squirt the water all over his jaws.
If you missed it two weeks ago, the Coastal Carolina Chanticleers earned their first College World Series title in a winner-take-all series against Arizona, 4-3. And your follow-up question may be “The Chanti-who?” According to…
It sounded like bedlam. Shouts. Cheers. Jubilation. The yelling gave way to song. Someone started up his motorcycle and revved his engine in tandem with chants of POR-TU-GAL! POR-TU-GAL! I’ve never been so happy to lose a bet.
Today, we get the answers from the novelist Bruce Bauman. Bruce is the author of And the Word Was, and most recently, Broken Sleep. He is also one of those rare New Yorkers with an allegiance to both the Yankees and Mets, and a contributor to Eephus.
In the past eight days he has already won two Olympic golds, achieving the elusive distance-running double of winning both the 5,000 and the 10,000m. And now he is minutes away from completing a treble which everyone watching must realize will almost certainly never be achieved again. This is, by the way, the first time he has ever run a marathon.
Seesaw is the original sport.
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She learned how to ride a bicycle on this blacktop.
On Saturday, June 11th, I found myself in Northeast Los Angeles with a few hours to kill and made my way to Santa Anita to catch a simulcast of the Belmont Stakes, the Triple Crown’s third and the longest leg, and hardest to handicap. I put down a $50 exacta box on the 7-horse and the 11-horse. I’ll spare you the drama: we didn’t win.
Relocated, renamed, contracted, defunct. The history of professional sports is littered with teams that failed, moved, or slipped quietly away. And I love them.
Tom Thumb had a castle with doors that opened and closed, a ferris wheel that spun, and of course a windmill. A mini-golf course is a kind of fantasy land. The first thing I learned is that rules were probably a good idea to protect people from themselves, or protect them from who they pretended to be.
“The 7 Questions” is a new sports questionnaire — the Eephus way of catching a snapshot of the fan’s life. From writers to artists and beyond, we bring you answers every Monday morning. In this, our…
Maybe, after Sunday, it’s time we realize that J.R., knowingly or not, may have heard us all along. Every word, the forgiving and the flaying, building towards some hellish clamor he couldn’t ignore anymore.
These hot summer days, I go to the shore and hide in the library.
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Look, near the floor, a shelf of miscellaneous sports books.
Minnesota is in the midst of a run that may come to rival any professional team, mens or womens, of this era. Perhaps, with their season-opening winning streak now reaching 13 games and counting, the country will pay even more attention and take that much sought after final step into “crossover story.”
The rough is always the longest, the greens the toughest, whether by severe undulation or speed, or both, and the scoring the highest. The USGA labels such conditions challenging, and they are, I suppose, but when is golf not challenging?
“The 7 Questions” is a new sports questionnaire — the Eephus way of catching a snapshot of the fan’s life. From writers to artists and beyond, we bring you answers every Monday morning. We’re very excited…
On Wednesday, Ichiro stepped up and rapped a double down the right field line. Ichiro then stood on second base the holder of another record, albeit an unofficial one. In sizing up the sheer scale of the accomplishment, cold numbers fall short; it takes a long view to appreciate it. You have to have seen the stoic perfection play out day after day, year after year.
Clayton Kershaw, the Dodger on the mound.
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He of the high-winding high-wired hustle — chain lightening, a hit-preventing kick. He is strict.