PHILADELPHIA, PA — Bryce Harper's white cleat dug into the golden dirt at home plate in south Philadelphia as it had a thousand times before. He cocked his left elbow. The bat curved like a cobra rearing and gently wavering. A sea of red and blue blurred into infinity behind him. He bared his shoulder back over his jaw and he swung.

It was the bottom of the eighth. There was a man on first and the Phillies were losing 3-2. The pitch was a 99 mile an hour fastball from the Padres' Robert Suarez.

He had fallen into the vision of an aspiring ballplayer’s boyhood, of the high drama that has kept children awake in bed since the dawn of baseball, watching their ceilings in the dark and crafting improbable dramas of October nights and autumnal glories on some far away diamond. For Yerkes it had all become real: he was cast in the leading role of what probably felt like the protagonist on one fateful October evening in Boston in 1912.

It was the deciding Game 8 of the World Series, back durin

PHILADELPHIA, PA — It's an age of tribalism, an age of inexorable entrenchment, an age of politics played out in the microcosm of every unlikely chance arena. Days of sunshine, days of rain, a child's schoolbooks and assignments have become so much coinage for bureaucrats and prolocutors seeking pluralities, seeking power.

In the arena of Red October, the carnival of absurdity is stripped away like a Houston hitter's bat zipping the air above a Ranger Suarez sinker. The Phillies are two wins aw

“Of course the girl or woman or whatever she was was an enthusiast,” thinks Gabriel Conroy in James Joyce’s famous short story ‘The Dead,’ trying to dismiss the ardent Irish nationalism of his dancing partner. “But there was a time for all things.”

Cue modern America, and the threat of “the scene” looms over offices and bars and dinner tables all around a tense nation. It’s the unspoken donkey and elephant in every room. And while this phobia of sparking an ill-timed rant from one particular ma

It was late on a bright blue April afternoon with the scent of new grass and baseball essence seeming to ride on streaks of sunshine through the slits of the blinds into the hospice room. The sun lit on motes of dust seemed like the incarnation of all that was being culled forth in the speech of the undaunted man supine on the room’s bed: people, places, events, newspapers, Mayors, barfights, gypsies, wars of morals and guts, Shakespearean tragedy and comedy in micro. Behind him, around him, fro