Mark Twain’s love of baseball, documented in “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” was the subject of a New York Times profile. He once lost an umbrella at a professional game and placed the following ad in his local paper:
FIVE DOLLARS REWARD
At the great base ball match on Tuesday, while I was engaged in hurrahing, a small boy walked off with an English-made brown silk UMBRELLA belonging to me, and forgot to bring it back. I will pay $5 for the return of that umbrella in good condition to my home on Farmington avenue. I do not want the boy (in an active state) but will pay two hundred dollars for his remains. SAMUEL L. CLEMENS
Speaking of iconic artists, Walkoff Walk shares an old commercial featuring Whitey Ford and Salvador Dali.
Patrick Truby attempts to assemble a fantasy team consisting of only plus-sized players over at No I in Blog. My complaint? Not enough Garces.
Roy Halladay is a hard worker, according to Philly.com’s Rich Hofmann. Is it me, or is it mostly just players who are really good that get called hard workers (David Eckstein excluded)? You could work your ass off, stink, and get no pub for it whatsoever. (Which is probably the way it should be).
It’s an old blog post from last year, but this MLBlog entry from Gordon Beckham feels less PR-filtered than a lot of the player blogs. Plus we get to go back to a time when he was a nervous rookie rather than a quickly rising star.
5. No love for the Western States either. Pitchers & Poets is a Seattle-based blog, written by an Astros fan and a Dodgers fan. As you can imagine, we find the East-Coastiness of ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball lineup objectionable, deplorable, and quite disappointing. (Fanhouse).
I’m really digging this song. Especially the sample.
1. I will jump at any opportunity to promote and preach the gospel of hockey on this blog. So here’s this awesome photo tour of Fenway Park, as of today, America’s largest ice rink. If you’re gonna watch one regular season NHL game this year, make it the Winter Classic on Jan. 1 between the Boston Bruins and underachieving Philadelphia Flyers. It’s hockey at Fenway! (via Puck Daddy)
2. Meet Welby Sheldon “Buddy” Bailey, an American in Caracas, and the manager of Venezuela’s most successful professional baseball team of the last decade. (via NY Times).
4. Josh Wilker nominates the most literary back-of-card bio in the history of baseball cards and in doing so reminds me why his incoming book is my most anticipated of 2010. (via Cardboard Gods).
5. I was at once saddened and amazed by the Walkoff Walk End of Decade Personality Compendium Infocaps. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.
6. Happy New Year from PnP. Big RBI news coming on the flip side.
Edit: Stop reading this post right now! Instead, read Ted and I’s “etherview” with FanGraphs destroyer Carson Cistulli. If you are here for the first time via said interview, then welcome, please make yourself comfortable.
In order to help you through these frozen hours before the World Series does or doesn’t end tomorrow, we bring you some rare weekday reading. And this awesome John Wayne clip from The Longest Day that I hope both managers are showing their teams. “We came here to take something. We’re gonna take it and hold it!”
Google Reader maven Tommy Bennett is taking over the reigns at Beyond the Box Score. Check out his insightful baseball analysis manifesto.
Josh Wilker is at his best this morning with a reflection covering World Series records both glorious and inglourious, Chase Utley’s hair, and the decline and fall of the triple.
Patrick Brown has put together an extended essay on baseball’s place in the sports media industrial landscape for The Millions . His ideas about baseball and the internet are both sweeping and a pleasure to read. (tip of the cap to Reeves W.)
Postseason play is heating up big-time. In the baseball season’s transition from endings to beginnings, a number of people around the game have looked back a ways in this past week:
Artist Thom Ross is on a mission of unforgetting. In this case, he’s toting his mural of the famous Willie Mays catch to the scene of its enactment: he and friends placed the installation on the exact spot that the catch was made. SI.com
Recently undiscovered home video footage of Babe Ruth at the bat confirms that he took his sweet time about it. New York Times
Fangraph’s Dave Cameron ensures surly Cards fans that Thursday’s loss wasn’t all Matt Holliday’s fault. Fangraphs
Paul DePodesta reminds us of the trials and the tears of a career in baseball’s front office. It Might Be Dangerous
Stuart Shea offers a poem to the soon-to-move-on. Bardball
It’s September 11th. Those words mean so much more in New York City today. Here’s an apt new song by the Avett Brothers and some New York baseball reading.
Few people, if anybody, can write about baseball like Roger Angell. His easy, lyrical prose captures the joyful meaninglessness of the game so perfectly. Notice how he refers to a certain Yankee shortstop by his first name in this pleasant little New Yorker essay. It’s as if he is writing about his friends — he respects the ballplayers as humans, not as greater beings on a pedestal.
Todd Drew’s Lasting Yankee Stadium Memory entry on the Bronx Banter Blog has been selected by Leigh Montville as part of the newest edition of Best American Sports Writing. It’s only the second blog entry to be selected for the series, edited by friend of PnP Glenn Stout. Todd isn’t around to see it, but if you read the piece you’ll understand how deserving he is. As Bronx Banter’s Alex Belth put it “To be included in this series–one that he adored to no end–would have knocked him on his ass.”
Jeff Pearlman has had it with the 2009 edition of the New York Mets. He even makes an unfortunate comparison to the awful Bobby Bonilla Mets of 1992. Pearlman writes: “Although these 2009 Mets are not nearly as bad, humanity-wise, as the edition from 17 years ago, the season has been an even greater disaster.
And because much of north Jersey is practically a borough, I include this great story from the New York Times about the Newark Bears and their litany of veteran major leaguers waiting for — and not getting — that big September call up. Keith Foulke. Armando Benitez. Jacque Jones. Carl Everett. The list goes on. (via East Windup Chronicle)
Fernando Perez, new Tampa Ray call up and old school South American poet, has penned a very nice, but slightly sentimentalist essay for Poetry Magazine. Me? Jealous? Nah (via the scoop stealers over at Walkoff Walk)
Lions in Winter: Former Situational Essayist Reeves shares three fantastic profiles of over-the-hill baseball gods over at Meanderings. Go over there, then guess which of the recommendations was mine, then fill up his comment section with odes to my taste when it comes to long form journalism.
Craig Calcaterra has written a moving essay on growing up with Ernie Harwell, who was recently diagnosed with terminal cancer. I really believe that nobody can shape a baseball fan’s experience more evocatively than a broadcaster.
A silly press release arrived in the PnP inbox this morning from the union representing Aramark stadium concession employees. I’d have deleted it right away, but I think they merit attention for creativity, finding the first practical explanation of Pythagorean Luck.
In a comparison between teams with home stadiums that use Aramark and teams with home stadiums that do not, Workers United found that non-Aramark teams’ average luck is 40 and Aramark teams’ average luck is -1.93.”
And some bad news: I accidentally deleted the Pitchers and Poets twitter account. It was a mistake and it should be back up soon. Please don’t tell Ted.
In the midst of various PnP relocations, Weekend Reading directs you to an eternal debate, an eternal great, and some technological mishaps and marvels.
Rick Soisson offers an alternative vision of the eternal question at The Baseball Chronicle: who is the best hitter of all time?
Keith Olbermann explores the form of another baseball great: Christy Mathewson, who pitched in a time before film.
Is John Smoltz the latest All-Time Great to fizzle at the end of his career away from the town where he built his legend? The Sporting Blog discusses, and notes some other late-career faders.
Sons of Steve Garvey found an abbreviationally challenged mini-scoreboard.
If ever technology has raised the stakes of human history, it is in the eminently searchable, enthralling Dressed to the Nines database of baseball uniforms through history. via UniWatch
Some seriously eerie, and even uncanny, 
