Author: Brad Zellar

  • The Best Of All Possible Worlds: Get Away Day At The Dome

    If you’re the sort of fan who has an appreciation for both the home team and the history of the sport, today’s Twins/Jays finale was a pretty fabulous proposition all around, particularly if you were one of the 31,038 folks in attendance at the Dome to see Frank Thomas’ 500th home run in an 8-5…

  • A Summer Kind Of Sad

    Good lord, the stars, the dusty, glimmering sprawl above some dark, quiet place in America, the stardust, star-scatter, the worlds stretched up there above this one. Remember? Remember standing on a gravel road in Vermont –along a big river in a Montana valley, on a dock jutting out into a lake in the Adirondacks, at…

  • Ok, I'll Take That: Game Two Vs. Toronto

    How messed up is it that a guy –Pat Neshek in this instance– can come in with runners at second and third and nobody out, give up a sacrifice fly, yet nonetheless retire every batter he faces, and get a blown save out of the deal? That whole game was sort of messed up, really.…

  • Pinebox Purgatory

    John Parizek was standing on a stage in the middle of the Mall of America’s rotunda, waving some sort of a racing flag and speaking into a microphone. Even though he was less than twenty-five yards away, nothing Parizek said was intelligible. Granted, the Malliest Mall of Them All is a noisy proposition on most…

  • Michael Dirda

    Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Dirda is something of an endangered species: a professional book critic. At a time when daily newspapers are shrinking their book sections or eliminating them altogether, Dirda soldiers on at the stalwart Washington Post Book World. His criticism has always been marked by real passion for reading—that’s maybe too fancy; the guy…

  • Jonis Agee

    Agee has always been a fascinating study, as well as refreshingly free of literary conceits and pretension. She has a distinctly Midwestern, blue-collar sensibility, and is fearless (or perhaps heedless) when it comes to her subjects; this is a woman, after all, who somehow managed to publish a collection of stories built around automobile racing,…