Despite being physically on break this week, it will not surprise you to learn that this has been a tough time for the famed McKinnon fighting spirit. More on that in a day or two, I hope.

Without further ado, what have friends wrought¹?

On My Beloved Island

I didn’t know Felina (or, as she called herself in the piece I’m about to recommend, “Carmen Sandiegopoulos”) until someone who will not be named, but whose initials are Eephus Tosser, tapped me into a conversation for which I was woefully unprepared.

Humiliating, because the conversation was about where to get good cocktails in Puerto Rico. You know, the place I’m from that’s about 80% of my personality.²

But it does mean that I saw Felina’s piece about her travel to Puerto Rico during the World Baseball Classic, and it was a good read. Among other things, I find it very funny whenever USians discover that basketball is huge back in Borinquen.

As a guy who went to see some game I don’t even remember in 2006, I cannot imagine how electric a refurbished Hiram Bithorn must’ve been for that Darell Hernaiz walk-off.

I could quibble with a couple things (who told y’all to spell tostón like it’s Italian?), but anything that makes me homesick is going to end up on here. Punto y se acabó.

On Unexpected Legacies

Patrick Ellington Jr., who has made it his business to educate us all about the vast variety of Black and Afro-Latino experience in baseball today, has a piece about Rockies infielder Eriel Dihigo.

I’ll let Pat give you the rundown for the people currently feeling that scratch at the back of their heads:

“If Dihigo’s last name rings bell, then it should because the 19-year-old third baseman is a descendant of the legendary Afro-Cuban player-manager Martín Dihigo. The elder Dihigo was a giant of Pre-Integration Baseball who dominated the Negro Leagues and Latin American Winter Leagues from 1923 to 1942. Whenever I attempt to explain Dihigo’s massive array of impressive skills to people who are not aware, I tell folks to imagine if there was an Ohtani-level two-way player who was able to play every defensive position on the field at an above-average level while being the manager of the team he played for.”

Johnny Mize himself called Martín Dihigo the greatest player he ever saw. The idea that one of his descendants is out there playing ball, a century after his ancestor’s career, is proof that not all of history’s cycles are bad.

On Stabbing From Hell’s Heart at Thee

Did you know I have friends in real life?

Well, I do, and sometimes I put up with them even after they manage to get themselves away from the Night’s Plutonian shore (read: leave teaching), especially when they give me good stuff to read.

If there’s as many Moby Dick-heads³ reading this as suddenly surface on BlueSky and Mastodon every time some weirdo with “educator” in their biography complains that high school English curricula aren’t entirely composed of young adult books, like the ones they write, then these stories should, as they say these days, “hit.”

• “Cold Calculus”

• “The Last Harpoon”

My misfortune as a prolix soul is to have surrounded myself with writers who understand the economy of expression I have chased my whole life. Clar, in particular, does it with a rare deftness that betrays the wide range of his influences, from Sallis to Borges. Have fun with both of these.

On Goodbyes

Here’s hoping it doesn’t take long to assemble the next edition. Hasta entonces, gente.