William Walker, Author
So it took a couple days to get my head around this one.
According to the Seattle Times, Bothell High School football players have a hazing tradition called Rape Squad. Now, yes, today, in 2019. It’s a not-so-secret, boy-on-boy pranking thing, and it’s got the community outraged. The fellas call it “jubies.”
Review of A Soldier’s Journal: Last Supper to No Goodbye
Why is this here? A book review about veterans, combat, and PTSD — on a blog about baseball and sex abuse? It all makes sense if you think about it. The trauma, the stress, the anxiety, depression, even the tragic suicides we see among our returning vets, follow the patterns seen in victims coping and healing from sexual abuse.
A psychologist or a scientist of any training might tell you: The human brain and nervous system form a network like a vast freeway system. A huge, interconnected, fractal-like web takes us wherever we want to go, however we want to get there, with endless choices of routes and where to enter and exit. And a healthy young brain revels, rejoices in the options the road map offers. Ons and offs abound. Freedom awaits. Continue reading “No Off Ramp”
Should have seen this one coming. As soon as Carlos Correa’s bomb cleared the fence last night, before the dance and swagger around the bases, before our man walked dazed from the field… we here at Playin’ in the Dirt should have expected this to pop up.
Baffled. Dude looks like Billy in Beverly Hills Cop after Axel Foley takes him to the strip club: “What the hell did I just see?” (mlb.com)
Yeah, that’s right.
Your Mariners are in the playoffs. Except, these particular Mariners aren’t your Mariners anymore.
Ten teams made the postseason, starting today. 25 former Mariners are on the 40-man rosters of those clubs, and this is one hell of a playoff team. Check it out…
Everybody likes to quote the story’s closing line. It’s a classic, no doubt. But the opener sticks with you. And those first few words stay fresh, forever young, while the part about the baseball gripping you back, well, it gets overdone and worn and cheesy.
“I’m thirty years old and I have these dreams,” Jim Bouton began in 1969. Jim Bouton died this week. The papers said he was 80. But he’s still right there in our memories, in the green shining grass of that one unforgettable season of Pilots baseball, and he’ll never be anything but thirty. Still dreaming. still grousing about Schultz and Milkes, still searching for a place to fit. And we, the lucky fans who saw him pitch, who snuck a peek at his book on the grocery store shelf a year later, who saved our dimes and bought a copy when mom wasn’t looking, well, we still have dreams too. Continue reading “Still 30 years old, still dreaming”
In honor of tomorrow’s “Seattle Pilots Night” at which most attendees will certainly have been born after our first MLB team was long gone to Milwaukee… and in memory of the team’s worst hitter and biggest star, this non-poet offers the following toast to nostalgia and magical childhoods. Enjoy.
Here’s a sports hero for ya. Actually forget the sports part. Just say hero.
A man is a hero when he walks away from the thing he’s longed for all his life, because there’s a greater calling. Something even bigger than his own dreams. A place he knows he’s needed.
Yeah. Exactly like Moonlight Graham.
It’s almost a Hollywood story.
Continue reading “Mike Marjama: 2018 Ex-Mariner of the Year”
Overzealous parents? Seemed like every kid had one in 1965. I don’t care if you’re only eight years old. You wanna be like Mick, you better get up early, boy…
Found this pic on the Pinterest.
“We’re braining our boys and raping our girls.”
That’ll grab your attention at the beginning of a forty-five-minute conversation. Irv Muchnick was asked what drives his passion to report on training deaths in football and sexual abuse in swimming. When you follow Irv’s work, you get used to hard-hitting stuff. But that was an extra level of truth.
Muchnick: Don’t try to hide from this man (Broadsheet)
It’s funny, the things you remember.
Edgar and friends (AP)
When it comes to Edgar Martinez, sometimes what you remember isn’t even about Edgar. Fitting, isn’t it? Even for Edgar himself, he never made it all about Edgar either. Continue reading “It isn’t really about Edgar. Then again…”