Check out NPR’s story on these three excellent baseball books recommended by Alan Schwarz, which all look to be solid shelf companions to Andrew Forbes’s The Utility of Boredom. Just in case you’re into expanding your baseball library this season.
Invisible Publishing is giving away a pair of Jays tickets to celebrate the launch of The Utility of Boredom by Andrew Forbes. And you only need to answer one question to enter. (Okay, two questions if you count the tiebreaker.) Correctly guess what the Toronto Blue Jays’ win-loss record will be at the All-Star Break […]
Two Invisible titles popped up in the Quill & Quire‘s 2016 Spring Previews here and here: Canadian Wonder Tales is Canada’s answer to the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson, while The Utility of Boredom looks at the influence of baseball on and off the diamond. And we’re three for three on 49th Shelf’s spring […]
You have two days left, Jays fans, to click on over to Any Price for David and add your clause to his contract. What would you do to keep David Price with the Toronto Blue Jays? Us, we’ll give him a free copy of The Utility of Boredom: Baseball Essays, when it comes out in […]
I watched the last eleven games the Kansas City Royals played in 2015, and a few others before that, and rooting interests aside, I don’t believe there was a better team in baseball. That statement should be provable merely by the fact that they hoisted the World Series trophy Sunday night in Citi Field after […]
Rewatching the ninth inning of Game 6 is a bit like autopsying the body: at once informative and gruesome, and divorced from the subject’s life in such a way as to do it—the team—a disservice. Those last three outs—grisly, tragic, possibly avoidable—look nothing like the majority of the baseball the Toronto Blue Jays played from […]
I don’t know what it is about Toronto. I think about this from time to time, and come up with nothing bankable. I usually arrive at something not entirely capturable by language. Its Torontoness, finally, exasperatingly; its feel and vibration and smell and the speed and angle at which the wind comes off the lake. […]
The playoffs are a strange prism that can distort and warp and obfuscate, in which Daniel Murphy can look like Babe goddamn Ruth, or at least someone other than Daniel Murphy, and in which the historically torrid Toronto offense can suddenly flag, and wilt, and disappear altogether. If we were to speak disparagingly of bandwagon […]
It’s exhausting, isn’t it? Even if you’re not in the game, even if you’re only watching. Necessarily, you’re invested after so much back and forth, the numbers encouraging, then not, then going your way again. I’m talking about both baseball and the federal election, in case I’m being too opaque here. The campaign, which kicked […]
Sam Dyson, the Texas reliever who surrendered what going forward will likely be viewed as the second-most important home run in Blue Jays’ team lore, reacted to José Bautista’s defiant, celebratory bat flip, and to the Blue Jays’ exuberance in general, by saying “If they want to act like that, it’s whatever.” We’ll have to […]