In the morning, we don’t move. I’m satisfied. I’m easy to love. I’m not freezing and still drunk.

Many languages did not and some still do not include the color word blue. Color words tend to enter languages in the order of black and white (or dark and light), and next red, and next green and yellow, colors that often share one and only one word, and finally blue.

Turns out, we decided later, it was silly to try and sell flowers at all. The user experience of flowers had to be re-tooled.

You are a person who claims you’d rather die young than spend your whole long life in Kansas, but as you hit thirty, you shrink away from this ultimatum.

Throughout our first year in that house you woke feeling this ghost’s breath on your face, and at night, sometimes, you’d jump up frantic, swearing you’d felt its grave-clasp on your ankle or arm.

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my—when the three of us were together I wondered if I should be the tiger. But I did not feel tigerish by any metaphor. I was not sleek.

The night before Easter he ties his belt around my neck and gives it to me to hold.

Come late spring, my dad turned into a man I didn’t recognize. Normally a quiet man who spent his free hours taking a nap on the couch, he morphed into a talkative baseball fanatic. The Philadelphia

Here Comes The King

I was supposed to live at Dad’s the next day, but the Cardinals kept adding innings to innings and who can miss a game like that, the way a city like St. Louis breathes a year

We were allowed to be alone in the stadium, an object which is infinite. Prove it.
I can’t remember if we took the bus. More likely your dad dropped us in traffic and the civic door thunked on our

“The feeling of aluminum ringing up through your wrist
When you hit the sweet spot
Because you can always clip it and get to first
But that vibration, that's the game,”
I say, but Dr. Phil

Somewhere in the archives of Baseball America, there’s a story by an Italian journalist named Giovanna de la something or other, and she attempts to verify, through old box scores and personal

Just ahead is the familiar field, a diamond with rounded corners. I walk up with head down, anticipating that time will drag its feet while I sit and wish I could be attending to other things. But

I think to myself, that must’ve been Kenny’s doing,
and quickly look for a spare centerfield wall nearby,
so I can climb into the sky
and maybe somehow replace what was stolen.

He was black, handsome, and nonthreatening, so white people loved him.

I think I give non-important people dignity. I still believe there is magic in this world.

The paper said my team (Sand Gnats) had a chance this year (second season with the new name), so I opened the fridge, opened a beer, sat down, and turned the TV on to watch the first game of the

My brother and I were standing outside of the 30th street station in Philadelphia.

I forget how old we were but we were old enough that our mom let us take the train alone from Lancaster to

The one and only time I ever met Ken Griffey, Jr. was at a baseball clinic.

I was hitting off a tee when he strolled up behind me. I was 12, and Junior was still in high school, a volunteer, but

On the 20th Anniversary of Randy Johnson Hitting A Dove Mid-Air with A Fastball During Spring Training in Tucson, Arizona

I.

There must be something there
about peace and the odds of it all:
a

I want to give Glenn Burke a high five / I want to give Glenn Burke a high five for seeing Dusty Baker’s raised hand and just hitting it / I want to give Glenn Burke a high five for coming out in 1978

My legs on yours, in the stadium lights,
I have only just learned your name.
You point, across the outfield,
at the worst fight we will ever have.

I can barely make it out in the crowd
of

The boys are back together and everyone's in town except it's desolate and nobody gives a damn

It was the first walk I’ve taken
through the neighborhood
so late in summer without
listening to a ballgame.

Those voices from Toronto,
Cincinnati, L.A.—the waves
of crowd noise

It took me all morning to build the fence.  I used old lawn chairs, cardboard boxes, and rusty sign posts from the dumpster behind 7-Eleven.  I meant for it to look like Camden Yards.  The right field