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NO MORE ROAD APPLES:

Gone in 2.5 pitches: The fleeting life of a baseball in modern MLB (Tyler Kepner, Sept. 18, 2025, The Athletic)

If Lugo gets a ball with a mark on it, he said, he’ll try to use it as long as he can. But the baseball gods almost never bestow such a gift anymore. As soon as a ball touches dirt, it’s tossed out of play before the next pitch.

It’s got to be a rule, right? To root out the trickery that crafty pitchers once mastered?

“No, no, it’s not automatic,” said Marvin Hudson, an MLB umpire since 1998. “If it hits the dirt, catchers will throw it out quicker than I would. If they hand it back to me, I look at it, and if it’s not scuffed, I’ll wipe it off and keep it in my ball bag. But players are a lot different than they were back when I first came in, as far as what type of ball they want. It’s kind of comical, to be honest with you.”

Watch a ballgame today — really watch it — and you’ll be amazed at how often the pitchers, catchers and umpires change the ball. Just how many does it take to get through a game? It’s like trying to guess how many jelly beans are in a jar. You can’t tell on TV, because the ball isn’t always on the screen. And you can’t tell in person unless you commit to looking solely at the ball the entire time.

So that’s what I did. Twice this summer — on July 22 in Philadelphia and August 11 in the Bronx — I tracked the fate of every baseball used in the game.

The first lasted only one pitch…

ABSOLUTION:

The Ledge: How the true story of three lives lost at sea in December 1956 became Maine’s most famous short story. (Edgar Allen Beem, December 2012, Down East)

On December 27, 1956, a hunting party of five set out from Ash Point in South Harpswell to go gunning for ducks between Eagle Island and West Brown Cow Island. Only two made it home alive.

Fisherman Lawrence C. Estes, Jr., known to one and all as Buster, skippered his boat the Amy E. with son Steven, 13, son Maurice, 12, nephew Harry Jewell, 16, and fellow fisherman Everett Gatchell on board. The thirty-seven-foot lobsterboat, named for Estes’ wife, towed a pair of skiffs.

Near Eagle Island, Estes dropped Gatchell and son Maurice off in one rowboat. They intended to row ashore and hunt from Eagle Island, but the rough winter seas made a landing too dangerous, so Gatchell and the boy spent a chilly day shooting from the skiff.

Buster Estes and the other two boys motored on out across Broad Sound, anchored the Amy E. near West Brown Cow, and rowed to the half-tide ledge known as Mink Rock. The seaweed-covered ledge is under four to five feet of water at high tide, but it makes an excellent perch for cormorants, seals, and duck hunters when exposed. After the fact, it became apparent that the Estes’ little skiff must somehow have drifted away, leaving him and the two boys marooned on the ledge as the freezing tide was coming in. All three perished.

No one knows what actually happened on Mink Rock that day, but the late author and Bowdoin professor Lawrence Sargent Hall built his literary career on his imaginings in his short story, “The Ledge,” one of the most famous stories in the annals of Maine writing. First published in the Hudson Review in 1959, “The Ledge” was selected as the best American short story of the year in Prize Stories 1960: The O.Henry Awards and has subsequently appeared in close to forty anthologies.

TV WRITERS SHOULD DO THE SAME:

Rifling Through the Archives With Legendary Historian Robert Caro (Chris Heath, March 2025, Smithsonian)

Students of Robert Caro know of a particularly famous trope of his: In order to write a book, he must first know its final line. Deep into his reporting of The Power Broker, he tells me, “I couldn’t figure out how to write it. It was just such a mass of stuff, and I couldn’t see how it all tied together.” He was, he says, “in a sort of mood of despair.”

Then on June 3, 1967, he attended a dedication ceremony for a park at the site of the 1964 World’s Fair. Moses’ power was waning by then, but the front two rows were stacked with his old-guard loyalists. “All his engineers and architects,” Caro says. “You know, the ‘Moses Men.’ What I remember was they all had gray heads.” Moses alluded to the public’s ingratitude to great men. “And I remember them nodding,” Caro says. Afterward, the men walked past Caro, and he could hear them talking, saying that Moses was right and wondering why people didn’t appreciate what Moses had done. And a phrase stuck in Caro’s head that summed it all up: Why weren’t they grateful?

In that instant, Caro says, everything became clear. “When I heard that line, I said, ‘Oh, that’s what this book is about,’” he recalls. And he didn’t just know how the book would end—with a description of that day’s event, ending with those four words. He could see—“in a flash,” he says—how everything he had learned and everything he was still to write would lead to that point. “I knew in that moment how to do the book. And I remember going back to my office and writing an outline as fast as I could. I was abbreviating words because I wanted to get all the words in there.”

With each subsequent book, Caro has needed to know where he would end before he could launch into writing it. “I mean, everybody has their own way of writing,” he says. He is careful to clarify that knowing a final line isn’t some kind of glib talisman. “Somehow that ending tells you what’s important in everything that’s come before it, even if it’s 1,000 pages that came before it.” He goes on, “Once you have it, everything becomes easy for me.”

The moment he says this, his chosen adjective—“easy”—hangs in the air between us. The first volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, The Path to Power, which is about Johnson’s early life leading up to his first failed campaign for public office, took seven years. The second, Means of Ascent, detailing Johnson’s eventual election to the Senate (an election that Caro’s groundbreaking research definitively established was stolen), arrived eight years later. The third, Master of the Senate, about Johnson’s years as Senate majority leader, came 12 years after that. Then another ten years passed before the publication of The Passage of Power, which ends in 1964 after Johnson has assumed the presidency following John F. Kennedy’s assassination. That book was published nearly 13 years ago.

“Easy,” I point out, doesn’t feel like a sufficient adjective.

FIXING W’S BIGGEST MISTAKE:

Might Iran go soft on the West? (Sophia Burke, 6/20/24, GZero)

The council’s inclusion of reformist Masoud Pezeshkian surprised many, but even more shockingly, he has proven an unlikely but fierce competitor against prominent right-wing opponents. Pezeshkian is drawing support from younger voters and disillusioned Iranians who, in years past, boycotted elections. Meanwhile, the conservative vote is being split among the five other candidates.

On the campaign trail, Pezeshkian has shared his intention of improving relations with the US – namely by reviving the 2015 nuclear deal – and softening Iran’s hijab law, both of which would constitute dramatic shifts in policy.

They’ve been trying to come in from the Cold since at least 9/11.

BUT WHO’S BEHIND THE ILLUMINATI?:

The 1990s card game that ‘predicted’ 9/11, Donald Trump, Covid and the Capitol riot: Illuminati: New World Order continues to attract conspiracy theorists three decades after its launch for its apparently uncanny ability to foretell the future (Joe Sommerlad, 29 April 2021, The Independent)

Illuminati: New World Order was released by Steve Jackson Games and cast the player as a puppet-master pursuing world domination on behalf of their chosen mythic secret society, the game offering a choice of the Bavarian Illuminati, the Discordian Society, the UFOs, the Servants of Cthulhu, the Bermuda Triangle and the Gnomes of Zurich.

The goal of Illuminati – spun off from the same company’s 1982 board game that was in turn inspired by The Illuminatis! Trilogy (1975) fantasy novels by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson – is to develop and consolidate a power structure through which to rule the globe from the shadows on behalf of your chosen order, manipulating society and dealing out apocalyptic blows to your opponents as you go.

“Maybe the Illuminati are behind this game,” Mr Shea wrote in his introduction to the original game’s rulebook.

“They must be – they are, by definition, behind everything.”

While the game’s preoccupation with globalist deep state conspiracy themes was clearly wildly ahead of its time, anticipating our bamboozled, boggle-brained era of fictional election-rigging claims, QAnon, anti-vaxxers, 5G paranoia and seething app-based nonsense cauldrons like Telegram, it’s the 2,000AD, Tarot-style illustrations on the cards themselves that are the real source of fascination. […]

Illuminati has long-since been discontinued and become a collector’s item, with unsealed decks sold on Amazon and eBay for almost $2,000, the wildly inflated price an indicator of high demand among a certain sort of feverish-minded consumer.

In addition to the game’s artwork, a further source of intrigue is the fact that the Secret Service raided the offices of Steve Jackson Games in Austin, Texas, on 1 March 1990 and confiscated hard drives and documents, some of which pertained to the board game.

While conspiracy theorists believe this represented the feds moving in to hastily hush up Illuminati and stop the developers revealing the existence of its secret societies to the wider world (why would you choose to make that information public in board game form, rather than, say, by hosting a press conference?), this is simply untrue.

One of the company’s employees, Loyd Blankenship, was also a hacker who served as the system operator for a messaging board that had published a stolen set of files detailed how America’s 911 emergency response systems worked, a fact the Secret Service had been tipped off to and been a granted a search warrant to investigate.