Funny

From The New Yorker:

“The robots have become self-aware and self-loathing. Now all they do is write novels.”

Filed under: Graphic Novel/Comics

Reading Some Baseball

I really liked this article in the New Yorker by Ben McGrath about spring training. It centers on two prospects, Jason Heyward and Stephen Strasburg, and the buzz they've been generating in the media. Growing up an Atlanta Braves fan — a byproduct of being overexposed to TBS as a child — it was nice to read about an exciting young player breaking into the big leagues. Not too long after I started reading the article, I saw an ESPN highlight of Heyward homering on his first ever Major League at-bat. 

But what I found most touching about the article was the bit about Mark Zuckerman, a former Washington Times reporter who was laid off in December and has taken it upon himself to cover the dismal Nationals, soliciting small donations from readers to fund his spring training travels and writing passionately on his blog. You gotta love stories like this:

After a few months of job rejections, and with Strasburg Spring looming, Zuckerman asked himself how much it would cost to cover a baseball team solo. He couldn’t bear to miss the possibility of a Strasburg save. He’d start with spring training: six weeks, no planes. He figured if he drove his own Honda (eight hundred fifty miles, with a stopover in Savannah) and got a good deal on a hotel (sixty-nine bucks a night), he could make it work with five thousand dollars. Credentialling was no problem—the Baseball Writers Association covers members who are between gigs for up to a year—so he established a Web site (NatsInsider.blogspot.com), announced his intentions to go it alone, and asked for reader donations. With the help of some timely plugs from former colleagues, he had reached his goal in twenty-nine hours. By the end of the first week, he’d more than doubled it. Zuckerman’s was a grassroots kind of campaign, with contributions averaging forty dollars. To those readers willing to pledge sixty dollars or more, he offered the opportunity to submit a question, through him, to anyone on the team. (For the third baseman Ryan Zimmerman, from Katie Edwards, age eleven, of Herndon, Virginia: “Can you explain the differences in the structure of spring training under Jim Riggleman vs. Manny Acta?”) His target readers knew their baseball.

Filed under: Article