Observations on memory, certainty and the 1951 Bowman set I. The Seminar Room Exercises in anamnesia: Inquiries into the value of truth and the architectur...
By the time the Cardinals and Tigers met for Game 1 of the 1968 World Series on October 2, two leading figures had been assassinated, riots had burned dozens of cities, Chicago police had clubbed protestors at the Democratic National Convention on live television, and Soviet tanks rolled through Prague. Inside the ballpark, Bob Gibson struck out 17 Detroit Tigers in a 4-0 shutout in one of the…
I collect the enemy. That's the honest way to say it. I grew up a Yankees fan, and the center of gravity in my collection is the mid-century Bronx. DiMaggio, the dynasty years, the teams that defined what winning looked like for generations. However, you cannot map that territory honestly without understanding what surrounded it. What surrounded it, for most of the twentieth century, was a New…
What has drawn me to mid-century baseball? New York may have been in its prime, but it was also in its prime in the 1980s (financially) and the 2000s (culturally dominant in a different way). In reflecting on the more modern critiques of baseball as a game, I think I am coming away with it being the last moment American cultural authority was geographically concentrated and broadly legible. Three…
I have a strong interest in the year 1962 through the lens of baseball history. As a result, the prospect of picking up a clean 1962 Yankees team signed ball was something of particular excitement. I have procured autographed baseballs through auctions and from eBay, but the provenance of this specific 1962 candidate was uniquely compelling. If the Skeptic and the Empiricist represent the law ,…
I have a room full of autographed baseballs. One of the most asked questions when I talk to people about autographed baseballs is: "How do you know the autograph is real?" It is a critical question question for anyone navigating the curation and procurement of a collection, but I have come to learn that "truth" in collecting is a difficult thing to grasp, let alone explain. Thankfully, I am not…
Billy Martin: Baseball's Flawed Genius Read: Christmas 2025 Caligula Read: Autumn 2018 "Men die and they are not happy." -- Camus Billy Martin loved baseball too much. The soul of the tyrant is defined not by indifference, but by excessive attachment. Plato and Aristotle describe the tyrant not as cold, but hot. The tyrant wants the good—victory, order, love, recognition—but wants it immediately…
Memory is not a junk drawer of past events. It is a construction. What we call remembering...especially deliberate, willful remembering...is often an act of curation rather than recovery of fact. When we try to recall something on purpose, we tend to replace the raw, unruly past with a clean narrative that our present self finds acceptable. We imagine ourselves master of memory. We believe that by…