Topic: Baseball

The jokes are right there when it comes to Jeffrey Loria's recent situationist prank/gutting of the Miami Marlins. But even with baseball's evilest muppet acting his evilest in the middle of it all, it's tough to laugh at the latest bit of avant-garde shamelessness from baseball's worst owner. Tough, but not impossible.

Only two teams remain in the baseball season. Or, more accurately, two teams, an infinite number of likely Brian Wilson-related antics, and a near-infinite number of truck commercials and McCarver-puns. Which is a lot, actually.

Donnie Moore was an all-star pitcher with a long major league career, but he’s best known for surrendering a late lead in what would have been a pennant-clinching game in the 1986 American League Championship Series and for being so haunted by the failure that he ended his life. This latter point is a garish reduction of the complex reality of Donnie Moore’s life and death, and of the complex causes of suicide.

In São Paulo’s Museu do Futebol, is a small, coffin-like room, on one wall of which grainy footage of the final game of the 1950 World Cup is played while an amplified heartbeat pounds. If there is an American approximation of this place, it’s the Baseball Reliquary, which doesn’t physically exist as much more than a peripatetic series of displays in SoCal libraries and occasional gatherings of fans to celebrate everything that makes baseball worth celebrating: Communist agitators, showmen, Jim Bouton teaching the knuckleball to fans, bubblegum cards and above all what it feels like to pick up a ball and throw it.