My friend Jamie holds out a thistle bloom, her fingers curved gingerly around the prickles. “Eat this,” she says. 

Anthony was my reason for everything ... for South Park, for Tupac, for horror movies, for music that sounded like screaming, for my parents' vodka, my sister’s mascara, for all the girls I put down.

What we really wanted was to be older.  What we really wanted was for something to happen, take us away from Florida and into the rest of our lives, but that doesn't happen for teenagers, not so much, and so we stood and waited.

i mean, i was black before too.

Civil War Day was a staple at Reginald Middle School, implemented somewhere in the shady patriotism of the Reagan era before carrying through as tradition.

The air before me
is the flavor of
an oat cake popsicle.
Or a shoe box. 
Or the water sports
I’m not doing. 
So I sign for
a prescription
while all the world
is water sporting
in

On my last night in Zhenjiang, the three other laowai and I—each of us western foreigners: three upstaters and a guy from Toronto—walk the condominium-lined miles out to the banks of the Yangtze river.

When it began, he was deep in the hole, backhanding a two-hopper toward left field, and he rushed the throw, scooping it up, a cloud of dirt trailing off his glove like a cape as he raised his left

Fifty cents for tickets in the bleachers—then. Fifty cents a railroad car to Pittsburgh.
A “marvel” they’d called it. Three tiers of steel, the façade terracotta, the balls off
the deck, bouncing.

Summers to Harridge, April 20, 1950: I am writing to inform you of the changes in the Washington ball park. It is rather difficult to explain but I will try to give you a picture.

Maybe you

I hated practice, but I loved you.

Well, if you're reading lips, you'll hear some words that are not necessarily used on family TV.

She grips the bat the proper way, the way Dad taught her. Right over left, the knuckles lined up like railroad tracks or piano keys, two of Dad’s many analogies thought up on the fly. Yet another:

Then she cupped my face in her hands just like my father and said, “You’re missing it!”

It’s good, I think, that we forget.

The year everyone was hitting home runs, Barry Bonds made lunch with his arms.

It was a slow curve—a big bender,
spinning against the trajectory
of the ball. It hung

The victim was the leadoff hitter for the Matsushima Baseball Ocean Temple Gods in the bottom of the first.

Letterman wore khakis and the camera angled up his crotch. I watched every night or set my VCR to record on the rare occasion I left my apartment.

His gravesite at Holy Cross Cemetery brought a lump to my throat.

Because fifteen feet and a quarter-sized hunk of aluminum is nothing against the smell of oiled leather...

Just mid-February but a day like summer

I saw Candy the next time I went out. And the time after that. And the time after that.

I suppose all sports officials are gods of a sort...

After a loss, I’d seen him throw his gear in the garbage and denounce baseball altogether.

Crack! The sound of impact, ball on bat...