Baseball Week: Spectator Sport

Hey, don't end the week just yet, Jeff! There's still the Saturday installment, Spectator Sport. This one happens to be very useful for categorization purposes, since there's football, basketball and hockey in addition to baseball. Part of me wanted to hold onto it for the evitable Football Week later on. (My substitute story would have just involved a criminal in Boston giving his illegal enterprises names that only a Red Sox fan could have come up with. I'll have to pitch a Bahston Week for that.) But we'll cook up an apprpriate amount of ways to kill people via football. Much easier to do with a contact sport. - Sean

Baseball Week: Scalper

We finish up the baseball week with Scalper, one of those tidy stories where the title's pun drives the whole denoument. My job was mostly to make the inflated-price ticket seller as enjoyably loathsome as possible.

I mentioned a few days ago that I needed some special kick-in-the-pants, some liquid Schwartz, a gulp of go juice, to get me really excited about baseball the way I was when I was a child. Well, I'm going to Cooperstown, New York in a few weeks, home of the baseball hall of fame an an extremely dubious baseball origin story involving war hero Abner Doubleday. (I prefer to think of the first game happening right here in New Jersey, over in Hoboken. Hoboken's also home to Big John the ten-story toilet. And Sinatra. Note the order in which I placed those three.)

Next week is Graveyard Week, featuring tales of fog-heavy cemeteries where the tombstones all rattle with the undead forces that claw beneath them, trying to escape. Or one story of that, and six about drunken spectators watching a graveyard. One might actually be a monster truck story about Gravedigger. Can't remember. We'll find out together, next week.

Baseball Week: Stink Barrier

Today's story, Stink Barrier, comes from Canada, the great true north. Do they play America's pastime in Canda? The existence of the Toronto Blue Jays points to yes. The non-existence of the Montreal Expos points to no. For the purposes of not being cultrually inaccurate, I can assume that Kevin and his boys drove up from Seattle if it's only plausible that native Canadians would toss a hockey puck or curling stone around. - Sean

Baseball Week: Seventh Inning Stretch

I have the honor of presenting today's story Seventh Inning Stretch, and have one more lined up for this week. Both of mine are about people attending baseball games, not the game itself. I think this is because however many fantasy scenarios I play in my head about bad people and accidents and ghosts and whatnot, I'm more or less imagining them through me.


And "me" does not include "athlete." I've put on the imaginary athlete shoes (or cleats, or ice skates, or whatever it is boxers wear -- boots? Slippers?), the same I've imagined the vagaries of life as a member of all the people in the world I'm not. And I never really carry myself beyond the initial layers of life as an athlete, which would make for a stereotyped story at best.


Mostly, I think I just don't have a huge interest in it. (Funny, since we're doing a week about baseball, with a football week not that far away.) I have to think a big appeal to the millions of sports fans is that they get to vicariously experience some innings via the pitcher/batter/fielder they're watching. There's no root appeal to me. Give me a choice between a Ghost Rider DVD and a chance to throw a ball from the Yankee mound, and I'd be watching a Nicolas Cage movie.


I did, once. I loved the Red Sox growing up outside Boston, wanted to be an outfielder. But when my family moved to the footballania town of Green Bay (where I'd have to be rooting for the Brewers of today's story) I didn't have the heart. Make that hat: I got a wonderful hat from a baseball clinic in Boston, and lost it in, to quote Anthony Kiedas, the woods of Wisconsin. My dad painstakingly recreated another one for me, but it of course wasn't molecularly identical, so the magic wasn't there.


Maybe, like a cruel adult who starts weeping when Santa gives him his long-lost Duncan Yo-Yo, if someone found that hat I'd develop a huge abiding love for baseball. Anyone in Wisconsin: my hat was maroon, with a white M on it. Carries a piece of soul with it, and twenty-plus years of schmutz.

Baseball Week: Breaking the Wave

Rob in Breaking the Wave is obviously a Yankee fan. In most cities, a quick glance at the map will let you know what your cultural allegiances are to. Not New York. In all four major sports (I'm being generous toward hockey here, which last I checked is aired in the middle of the night on the Taxidermy Channel) New York has a choice of two and sometimes three regional teams. You can't just pick up an Atlanta Braves hat and wear it once a year. You need to choose. For most people,t hat choice was made well before they had conscious thoughts. But for those of us who don't have the hours and hours to devote to various team and league performances, we've got a tough call. Support winning team A and hope no one asks specifics about so and so's recovering knee. Support not-so-hot team B and hope that the team's poopy record is enough to ensure you're dyed in the wool. Or admit you don't have the die-hard interest to read the daily hours of statistics that true fans can't live without, and sign your manhood over to a small box alongside those guys who changed their name when they got married.

Wow, that has absolutely nothing to do with Breaking the Wave. Aside from Red Sox fans really liking this one.

Baseball Week: Extra Innings

Extra Innings is a horror story to certain people. To others, it's the greatest game ever played. My own view on the matter would hinge on the weather, my plans the next day, and how much money I'd care to blow on $4.50 hot dogs. I thought of this during the nicest perk of my old job: once a year, we got to watch a Mets game from a luxury box. Leather couches, air conditioning, great views from the seats outside, free food, free drinks, free caps and programs, and Mr. Met stopping by for a photo op. On that day, Extra Innings would be damn nice.

Baseball Week: Southpaw Conversion

We're approaching the postseason race in baseball. In the Daily Scare neck of the woods, the Mets are chasing away the Phillies for a wild card spot. How did anyone watch this game before the wild card? The Wild Card pushes back the window of mathematical elimination so much the last week before October turns into the joked-about last two minutes of a basketball game--aka the only bits you have to actually watch.

I had unfulfilled dreams of writing a different Daily Scare about each position in a baseball team, and then working all the stories together so that all these horror stories were actually shared by one extraordinarily unlucky team. But the stories I came up with involved the fans too much, or the more writable positions like pitcher. (Quick: tell me one substantive difference between shortstop and second base. I'll wait.)

But I got enough, and Sean has some, so together we're doing a whole week about the great American pasttime. Before that officially switches over to Reading About Starlets in Rehab.

Our leadoff hitter for this week is Southpaw Conversion. Which lets you know if the team I was thinking of was Al or NL.