Baseball

BASEBALL IS HEALING:

One Grieving Mother, Two Mariners Tickets and a Season of New Friends (Tim Arango, Oct. 12, 2026, NY Times)

On the last Sunday afternoon of September, Rhenda Strub was bundled up against the autumn chill for one final day at the ballpark, eating Cracker Jack and sweet and spicy pickles.

Another baseball season was ending as it often does in Seattle: abruptly and too soon. There would be no postseason for the Mariners, the only franchise never to have appeared in a World Series.

A. Bartlett Giamatti, a literary scholar who served as commissioner of Major League Baseball for five months until he died suddenly in 1989, famously wrote that baseball is “designed to break your heart,” because it “leaves you to face the fall all alone.”

Yet this season, Ms. Strub, 71, found that the opposite was also true: Baseball can help heal a broken heart.

After she lost her 27-year-old son, Wyatt, to muscular dystrophy three years ago, she retreated to his room and spent countless hours alone quilting and watching baseball games on television. The constancy of baseball helped to structure her days, but the loneliness only added to her grief.

So at the beginning of this season, Ms. Strub bought two season tickets to the Mariners in Section 120, on the first base side, thinking she would regularly go with her loved ones to T-Mobile Park. But her husband doesn’t like crowds, and the rest of her family has busy lives.

So she wrote a post on Facebook — with some trepidation, she said, because the “internet can be a cruel place” — asking strangers if they wanted to attend games with her.

“This season ticket adventure is part of me finding my way back out — getting out of the house, being around people, and doing something that brings a little joy again,” she wrote. “Baseball helps me heal.”

The post went viral in April, inspiring stories in local newspapers and on the radio.

Her family worried about her meeting up with strangers. Random people also messaged her with their concerns, offering safety tips.

But her inbox was also flooded with messages from people describing their own stories of loss. A child who died. The passing of mothers, fathers and partners. Failed marriages.

And a shared love of baseball.

“I had so many people contact me with remarkably similar stories,” she said. “They have had some sort of life event that left them feeling unbalanced to deeply grieving. And they didn’t really have someone to go to the game with but loved going to the game.”

“Baseball has a calming effect on them,” she added, “and they want someone to share it with.”

THE WEAVING:

How Baseball Marks the Time: The seasons change. Children grow up. Years fly by. Yet somehow you can still remember exactly where you were when the ball cleared the wall. (Mark Hertling, 8/17/26, The Bulwark)

I’ve been a Cardinals fan since I was a boy, and when I think about my life, I can mark parts of it by home runs.

I was listening on KMOX radio as a boy of 11 in 1964 when Ken Boyer hit his grand slam against the Yankees in Game 4 of the World Series, turning a 3–0 deficit into a 4–3 Cardinals victory. Three years later, Bob Gibson—my boyhood hero—did something that somehow seemed perfectly normal for Bob Gibson: He pitched a complete-game victory in Game 7 of the World Series at Fenway Park, struck out ten, and hit a home run, too.

By 1982, I was an Army officer, married with children, when rookie Willie McGee hit two home runs in Game 3 of the World Series—and robbed Milwaukee’s Gorman Thomas of one. Baseball had marked the time.

WE DID:

‘Ya Gotta Believe,’ Revisited: From the depths of despair to the height of elation and back, the 1973 Mets took the “Flushing Faithful” on the kind of roller-coaster ride that is looking all too familiar. (Charlie Vascellaro, June 11, 2023, Village Voice)

In the formative years of my baseball fandom, I spent a lot of time listening to Mets games on a transistor radio tucked under my pillow. Extending my bedtimes were the voices of the Mets’ mighty broadcasting triumvirate of Bob Murphy, Ralph Kiner, and Lindsey Nelson. It was music to my ears. And now, in the gift shop, I could barely believe my eyes. There in front of me was an album cover bearing big yellow letters reading “Ya Gotta Believe.” Underneath, smaller type promised “all the exciting play-by-play action highlights and interviews of the amazin’ Mets 1973 end of season play-offs and World Series Championship Games.”

I had struck gold. “Ya Gotta Believe” was the battle cry of the 1973 Mets. The memories of that season were still fresh in my head — what an opportunity to relive the favorite year of my so-far brief life. If I could have traveled back to any year back then, or even now, it would have to be 1973, the defining season of my life as a Mets fan.

A GIANT STEP:

A Pope From Chicago Was Elected. The White Sox Were Resurrected.: The elevation of Pope Leo XIV, a Chicago native and lifelong supporter of the Sox, was a godsend for a team failing on the field and with fans. (Tania Ganguli, Aug. 7, 2026, NY Times)

On the day the new pope was elected, the White Sox rewarded his enduring faith in them by losing to the Kansas City Royals, 10-0. Still, the pope’s fandom gave the team a new promotional angle, a way to respectfully capitalize on the joy sweeping over the city.

After confirming that Pope Leo was one of theirs, the White Sox made sure everyone knew it. Their social media team cheekily corrected the Cubs’ marquee, posting a photo of the White Sox’ scoreboard with the words, “Hey Chicago, He’s a Sox Fan!” Sales of their primary baseball cap increased by 33 percent in the next week. By the end of the year, three of the 10 White Sox social media posts that got the most engagement had something to do with the pope.

But those were one-offs; gaining an ally in the 266th successor to St. Peter called for grander ideas, so Mr. Downey and his colleagues set to work.

The team’s senior director of design services created a digital mural of the pope for a wall between Sections 140 and 141. In the top right corner is a smaller image — a screenshot from a television broadcast of Game 1 of the 2005 World Series when Pope Leo, then the leader of the Order of St. Augustine, was caught on camera during the final out. The team also added a commemorative plaque to the seat he occupied that day.

The obvious next step was to get the pope back in the stadium, at least in spirit.

Chicago has a large Catholic population, and the Archdiocese of Chicago is the third-largest diocese in the United States. According to the Pew Research Center, 59 percent of adults in the city identify as Christian and 29 percent say they are Catholic, the largest of any denomination. The White Sox have hosted a small Mass for stadium employees for 30 years, when the Bertucci family, which still runs the Patio, the field-level hospitality area where the Mass is held, organized it.

A month after the pope’s election, the White Sox helped the archdiocese schedule a public Mass at Rate Field, where the team plays. About 35,000 tickets were sold at $5 each, during a season when the White Sox averaged 17,849 fans a game. Some tickets wound up on the secondary market for more than $1,000, according to The Chicago Sun-Times.

For Brooks Boyer, an observant Catholic who is the team’s chief marketing officer, having any kind of association with the pope was heady stuff.

“We’ve had sitting mayors of Chicago, we’ve had governors of Illinois that have been avid White Sox fans, we had a president of the United States in Barack Obama,” he said. “I didn’t expect anything bigger than the mayor when I started this job, but we’ve kind of climbed the ladder. What’s next? I mean, I feel like we’re one step away from God.”

YOUR LYIN’ EYES:

How the ‘Moneyball’ Oakland A’s Reinvented Baseball and Beyond: The team showed the sport—and plenty of other businesses—a new way to build a successful team (Jared Diamond, April 16, 2026, WSJ)

Yet for as long as America’s love affair with baseball has lasted, the sport’s practitioners knew shockingly little about how the game was truly played for most of that time. Teams built their rosters while relying on rudimentary statistics like batting average and runs batted in for hitters and win-loss record for pitchers. They deployed strategies like the sacrifice bunt and stolen base with remarkable frequency despite lacking real evidence to justify such usage.

These were simple concepts to understand, but unbeknown to almost everybody for generations, they might have been flawed. Batting average counts every type of hit as equal, even though home runs are clearly worth more than singles. A starter’s record fails to take into account the quality of the teammates around him. Bunting means willingly giving up one of your 27 outs, the most precious resource that exists in the game.

The problem was that until recently, nobody realized that everything they thought they understood about baseball might be wrong.

Analytics removes emotion.

LIES OUR TEACHERS TOLD US:

When Baseball Threw Physics a Curve: Sports, science, and collective delusion. (Brad Bolman, 10.22.25, Pioneer Works)

The first curveball is generally credited to William Arthur Cummings, a star of mid-nineteenth-century baseball, who earned the nickname “Candy” for his sweet mastery of the craft. Using an underhanded motion, Cummings twisted his hand as he released the ball, producing an initially straight pitch that curved away to the side as it reached home plate. He claimed his inspiration was the spiraling motion of tossed clamshells. In September 1875, his “peculiar inside-curving ball” was noted in coverage of a game between the professional squad from Hartford, Connecticut, that Cummings played for and an amateur team from Ludlow, Massachusetts. (The amateurs still won the game, the early equivalent of a local rec team defeating the Yankees.)

As other pitchers began to integrate Candy’s technique, newspaper discussion of “curved ball” pitching spread across the eastern U.S. In 1877, the Evansville Daily Courier of Indiana hailed a new local hurler who pitched “the popular ‘curved’ ball so swiftly that no one in the club was able to strike the balls.” After years of batters’ domination, curving balls rebalanced the scales back in the pitchers’ favor. Within a decade, the curveball was heralded as a revolution—“the greatest change ever introduced into the game,” according to an account from 1883, around the same time that Candy considered retiring to become a house painter.

How the curve worked, however, was initially a mystery. “Please tell me what a curved ball is in playing base-ball,” asked one Cincinnati Enquirer reader in May 1876. That August, another inquired, “What is meant by a curved ball—is it a pitch or an underhand throw, how does it curve, and can you explain how it is done, how the ball is held, etc.?” The curveball was, in the first place, a tactical curiosity for passionate fans and aspiring players. With many men eager to make a nickel on the new national pastime, mastering the pitch promised upward mobility. Yet as the Enquirer’s answers made clear, its exact mechanics were elusive: “A curved ball is one which leaves the hand in a straight line and just before it reaches the home plate suddenly curves out toward the end of the bat…. by a twist or twirl of the ball that can not well be described.” Commonality did not initially mean common understanding.

Originally an art to be mastered, the great curveballers were labeled “artists” for decades. But over time, the pragmatic matter of how to throw a curveball became a scientific problem: Was it even possible to do so? Spectators, after all, had witnessed balls that appeared to contradict the laws of motion. That all this might simply be trickery of the eye accorded with a widespread wariness in the late nineteenth century about fraud and deception. Newspapers of the era abounded with accounts of sleight-of-hand subterfuge: “Pepper’s ghost,” for instance, in which reflective glass panes made an off-stage ghost appear to float before theater audiences, wowed crowds from London to New Orleans. Magic was often just a trick of the eye.

“Why does a ball ‘curve?’” asked Columbus Ohio’s Dispatch in July 1876. Here was a question “our scientific heads can spend a deal of brain power in solution of.” While it was widely accepted that the “laws of motion” made a curving pitch impossible, the Dispatch conceded “it is a fact … that there is such a thing as curved balls. Every base-ballist knows it.” The everyday know-how of players seemed to trump the public understanding of science. Could it be, as one popular theory proposed, that the force of air against the ball slowed one rotating side more than the other and produced a curving motion? The Dispatch granted that “the thinking men among us may ferret out something more probable.” Debates continued: In July 1877, “several young men” wrote the Minneapolis Tribune that they were fully divided on whether it was possible to throw a curving ball. In September, a writer asked the Chicago Inter-Ocean to “Explain the philosophy that governs the curved ball as thrown by some of the professional baseball players of the United States, or as curved on a billiard table by scientific players.” People wanted not just to behold or even throw the curve themselves, but to understand how it could be possible in the first place.

SHE DUG THE LONG BALL:

The surprising feminist history of baseball’s biggest anthem (Chloe Veltman, 4/02/26, NPR: All Things Considered)

“Take Me Out” was not only catchy, “it also had very unusual lyrics,” Clermont said. At a time when women did not yet have the right to vote, but were playing in women’s leagues and filling the stands at occasional “Ladies Days,” “Take Me Out” celebrates a fictional young woman’s deep and abiding passion for baseball:

Katie Casey saw all the games.
Knew the players by their first names.
Told the umpire he was wrong.
All along, good and strong.

“She didn’t want to just go to the ballpark, sit in the bleachers and be silent or whatever,” Clermont said of the song’s hard-hitting protagonist. “She wanted to participate.”

NO THOUGHT TERRIFIES HUMAN BEINGS MORE….:

The Bottom of the Ninth: In baseball and in life, there is a cost to our pursuit of an error-free existence (Elizabeth D. Samet | March 26, 2026, American Scholar)

The 1985 Fall Classic, pitting cross-state rivals against each other, was billed as the I–70 or the Show-Me Series, and it really mattered in Missouri. In the wake of The Call, Denkinger received hundreds of ominous messages and letters. Someone even phoned his house in neighboring Iowa threatening to burn it down. Whether his mistake ultimately affected the outcome of the series became a matter of debate for the participants, too: “If that doesn’t happen,” McRae told reporters, “we probably don’t win.” Jamie Quirk, the Royals’ backup catcher, had a different reaction: “Other things happened, too. … Does a bad call mean you have to lose 11–0 in the next game?” Quirk’s rhetorical question implied that he didn’t want to be remembered as an accidental winner. Although they may readily acknowledge an instance of good fortune, most winners like to believe that they had something to do with their victory. If Orta is out, do the Cardinals win? Who can say? The correct call would have removed only the most egregious mistake from an equation full of mostly hidden variables. Quirk preferred to believe in his own agency rather than imagine himself dependent on what Leo Tolstoy called the unseen “laws of space, time, and cause.” Tolstoy proposed that for winners and losers, belief in autonomy is equally illusory. War and Peace advances a theory of historical causation in which even emperors are powerless: “Napoleon, who seems to us to have been the leader of all these movements … acted like a child who, holding a couple of strings inside a carriage, thinks he is driving it” (tr. by Louise and Aylmer Maude).

…than that no one is in control of events. Free will forces personal accountability.

LOVE LIKE A TIDAL WAVE:

The Green Fields of the Mind (A. Bartlett Giamatti,)

The aisles are jammed, the place is on its feet, the wrappers, the programs, the Coke cups and peanut shells, the doctrines of an afternoon; the anxieties, the things that have to be done tomorrow, the regrets about yesterday, the accumulation of a summer: all forgotten, while hope, the anchor, bites and takes hold where a moment before it seemed we would be swept out with the tide. Rice is up. Rice whom Aaron had said was the only one he’d seen with the ability to break his records. Rice the best clutch hitter on the club, with the best slugging percentage in the league. Rice, so quick and strong he once checked his swing halfway through and snapped the bat in two. Rice the Hammer of God sent to scourge the Yankees, the sound was overwhelming, fathers pounded their sons on the back, cars pulled off the road, households froze, New England exulted in its blessedness, and roared its thanks for all good things, for Rice and for a summer stretching halfway through October. Briles threw, Rice swung, and it was over. One pitch, a fly to center, and it stopped. Summer died in New England and like rain sliding off a roof, the crowd slipped out of Fenway, quickly, with only a steady murmur of concern for the drive ahead remaining of the roar. Mutability had turned the seasons and translated hope to memory once again. And, once again, she had used baseball, our best invention to stay change, to bring change on.

That is why it breaks my heart, that game–not because in New York they could win because Boston lost; in that, there is a rough justice, and a reminder to the Yankees of how slight and fragile are the circumstances that exalt one group of human beings over another. It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised.