Category Archives: Writing

Active Failure snippet

I wrote this as a character sketch for something larger, but I think it’s kind of amusing on its own, so I’m sharing.

I locked my amazingly expensive brand-new car with all the trimmings and the alarm went off instantly, the first tone in the eight-tone series advertised as a scientifically selected, clinically tested arrangement of noises designed to jar, annoy, attract attention, implore for help, and repel intruders, not in that order. I hit the disarm button and left it to walk across the park to find the teenage girl sitting on a picnic table, pounding out text messages or blog entries or something while watching me amble.

Meeting Andrea, I wanted to say “I expected someone taller, or shorter, or thinner, or fatter”, but that’s the whole point of Andrea, proof that eventually if enough domesticated primates swap enough chromosomes you eventually get someone who looks like nothing, and you could name her, say, Andrea. If you averaged all the faces of all the teenage girls in the world with web pages – all the party pictures taken leaning into their friend, flashing the peace sign in front of a statue, holding up a kitten, you would look at the result and say “that’s the girl that stole my wallet”. And having made that positive identification from a computer construct, the cops could put the update on the network and begin the task of hassling every fourteen-to-sixteen year old girl they came across, and the wheels of justice would come grinding to a halt, which happened in Montreal twice and now fourteen-to-sixteen year old girls get away with murder, which is not really that much of a difference.
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I got into Best American Sportswriting 2007

I woke up this morning to an email from the series editor informing me that “Bugs Bunny, Greatest Banned Player Ever” had been selected to go into the 2007 book (covering 2006 writing) and would I please get them contact information, all that good stuff.

It stunned me for a while. For one, I’ve read the anthologies, and while I don’t write like most sportswriters, I’ve been doing baseball stuff for almost ten years, and I’ve written some pretty good stuff but never thought any of it would have a chance. I figured Bugs, though wildly popular for an internet moment (I got linked on woot.com! w00t!) wouldn’t be able to get noticed, much less be selected, in the vast pool of applicants.

I still think that. Print outlets, people who make money at this, ESPN and Slate writers, they often have editorial backing their submissions, and to my knowledge, no blogger has ever been included in an annual and, though I’m even less sure about this, I believe that it not only makes U.S.S. Mariner the first blog to get something in one of the BASWs, it makes us the only what I’d call “non-mainstream” outlet.

It seems like this should have much wider implications, though obviously I’m a little biased – it’s a first, but I feel like it recognizes something that people who read baseball blogs have known for a while – you can get just as good baseball analysis from David Pinto or the other top-shelf sites as you can from national outlet, or writing that’s as insightful, or funny, or well-researched, and as bonus you can get whatever you want that you’re not getting now.

I’m so happy that something I worked that hard on, and that people responded to, made it through the gauntlet, and I hope in some way this helps baseball blogging in general.