It was the best of meetings, it was the worst of meetings, it was the usual chit-chat and folderol, it was like nothing before or since, it was the usual GM chow-down and get-together, it was all Little Gato’s show, it was a heady time, it was an assault on the senses, it was the […]
Just two days before PEBA’s annual Winter Meetings, Yuma owner Taffy Slummings called a staff meeting to select a new name for the franchise. Slummings produced a list of approved names nominated by fans and Front Office personnel. He’d already eliminated names he could not bear to adorn his club—like Prisoners and Rattlers—so he was […]
The names rolled in like waves to the shore. Or maybe, the names piled up like bodies during the Black Plague. No, that’s too ominous. How about: the names multiplied like rabbits? Cheerier, but not befitting a ball club. The names filled the box like fans filling a stadium? Better. Keep at it, he thought, […]
Pleased with himself after rolling so many heads, as he put it, Yuma’s owner Taffy Slummings called a local PR agency and got the ball rolling on the selection of a new name for the beleaguered Yuma baseball franchise. “Formerly the Bulldozers,” Slummings said aloud, practicing his speech to season ticket holders when he would […]
Time to shake things up, Yuma’s owner thought. Time to rock some boats and roll some heads. Slummings was home. Slummings was happy. Slummings was in his element. The silver-bearded old man who had once lived on the streets of Yuma was out of jail and back in charge of the ball club he owned, […]
“Please trade me!” When Little Gato burst into the Yuma front office, everyone working stopped and stared. The young man is hardly little—6’3” and nearly 250 pounds, almost 20 pounds over his weight at the start of the season. But that isn’t why they stared. The Yuma staff are accustomed to ballplayers putting on significant […]
“Has Merkle reached second yet?” It was a reasonable question, a pertinent question, even a timely one, and often uttered, you can be sure, during September of 1908. But today, here, now, in the t.v. lounge of a state mental hospital, it seemed, how shall we say … utterly bonkers! Wacko. Completely unhinged, not to […]
When he woke, he expected to see the blue cement walls of his jail cell. Instead, he heard music. It was familiar, but it wasn’t “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”—the only song he knew all the lyrics to—but rather something more somber. Slummings rubbed his eyes, shook his head, and listened to the […]
As Taffy Slummings awoke the next morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into an unrecognizable creature. With no mirror in his tiny cell, Taffy could see only his appendages, no longer resembling arms or legs but something more like … well, like nothing Slummings had ever seen before. Before he […]
It was the best of dreams, it was the worst of dreams, the apex of wisdom, the nadir of foolishness, not the crux of belief but the brink of incredulity, it was his lightest moment, it was his darkest hour, the spring of hope, the winter of despair, and in it he saw everything before […]
