Recruiting stress is making me seek a safe base so I’m taking Ball Four (the book AND the pitch) and jogging to first, where the first base-man AND first base coach will stand in for you, my virtual friends. May I call all of you all that? Because you ARE all that.
When I get this way non-sequiters fly like bald eagles over seas full of ripe salmon ready to be plucked like grapes of wrath. The salmon, kings and queens alike, are oblivious to their impending swoon river, focused only on rippling currents keeping them from their holey, gravelly birth nests, safe from vicious rabbits and enchanting black breasted Tim-mouses, not to mention electric butterflies dreaming of sleeping sheep. When I awaken, my son also rises, ready to face the agony and the ecstasy of the great batsby as he makes his whey to the lighthouse, eating his curds along the weigh-in to a room of his own. Clutching a golden notebook, he goes to the room with the yellow wallpaper that he wishes were the color purple, or red, like a balloon, or white, like the snows of Platypus, somewhere deep in no country for old men.
But I digress.
I had never heard of the writer I’m about to share with you but this piece made me very happy because it has absolutely nothing to do with baseball (except, perhaps, in the most distant, tentatively metaphorical way). Lo, you that are more learned than I, of which I'm sure there are many, if not most, may already be acquainted with Simon Rich and his New Yorker essays. I was not, until today. And I read, and I laughed, and I cried, and now send the link to anyone else who may want a break from the dog days of August and the disgusting performance of my Mariners who somehow lost a game last night that they tied in the bottom of the ninth, still had bases loaded with no outs and could. not. push. the. winning. run. across. In the immortal words of Joe Schultz, the original Seattle manager: "s**tf**k".
https://www.newyorker.com/humo...solo-the-oatsy-story
Read and enjoy. I don't usually make declarative statements on this site because I don't want to alienate any of you with anything but my strain-of-consciousness writing. However, if you like to read, and think you have a semblance of a sense of humor, and you do NOT like this piece, then you, sir or madam, have a problem no doctor can help you with.