Top Play (WPA): Jake Arrieta doesn’t exactly lose his cool with the bases loaded. In fact, coming into play tonight, he’d retired the last 13 batters he’d faced with the bases juiced. And after tonight’s action, you can make it 14. In the top of the seventh inning, with the score still tied at zero and his pitch […]
Day: May 31, 2016
Jake Arrieta Is Full of the Ghosts of Poets Past
“Pitchers are obviously not human.”i Mid-century California poet Jack Spicer wrote this, referring more to poets themselves—who he conceived of as catchers, receiving dictation from an otherworldly muse—than to pitchers, in any kind of baseball sense. As a poet of the Berkeley Renaissance of the 1950s and ’60s, Spicer developed some idiosyncratic theories about poetry […]
Pedro Strop, Satchel Paige, and Being on Baseball’s Bleeding Edge
Pedro Strop is a really fun player. He’s the only relief pitcher in baseball who runs out walk-off home runs like the third member of The Bushwackers. He reacts to putting a cheeseburger in Jorge Soler’s Chinese food container like it was Chris Rock’s closer from Bring the Pain. And he celebrates a strikeout like […]