Category: baseball

Two bits of good news

About a recent short story publication and an online interview

We interrupt this month of writing-focused activity to bring you a couple of happy updates from my weekend:

  1. My short story “Lower Strata” was published by the literary magazine Spillwords. This story, which went live Sunday (November 17, 2024), was something I’d written 25 years ago, probably, and shoved away after a few revisions. I reworked it over the summer a few times then sent it on to Spillwords, and last month they let me know they were going to publish it. This was one of those rare occasions in which the one and only litmag I’d submitted a story to accepted it. Like a lot of writers, especially unknowns like me, our stories encounter many rejections before they find a home. (It’s part of the gig. There are a lot of very good writers out there, and only so many places for our work.) So I guess this one hit a responsive chord with an editor or two there. I hope you also like it. I’d love for you to give it a read and share your thoughts. I’m always looking for ways to improve!
  2. I was “spotlighted” by another literary magazine, Bulb Culture Collective. This litmag specializes in republishing pieces that have been published previously by magazines that are no longer in operation. Such was the case with my flash fiction piece, “Baseball 1971,” which I’ve discussed here previously. BCC also selects writers for their “Shine a Light” series of features, and they reached out to me a couple of months ago inviting me to be a part of it. Their e-interview with me went live also Sunday, November 17, 2024.

So that’s the news from these-here parts. If you’re interested in reading some good stuff, I recommend you add Spillwords and Bulb Culture Collective to your reading list.

Image via Spillwords.

A new home for ‘Baseball 1971’

Thank you, Bulb culture Collective

In publication news, I’m thrilled that a flash fiction I wrote back in the ‘90s has found a new home! The story, “Baseball 1971,” was published this week in the on line literary magazine Bulb Culture Collective. The site specializes in publishing works that were published previously in journals that no longer exist. That is the case with this story, which originally appeared in Fan in 1998 (backstory here).

Many thanks to the folks at Bulb Culture Collective for selecting this for their Shine A Light series of writings.

Follow the journal on Twitter (I mean X) at @BulbCultCo.

Image via Bulb Culture Collective.

Friday Five: literary Easter eggs

Some literary morsels to entertain, inform, and possibly inspire.

On this Good Friday, as we enter Easter weekend, here are five literary morsels — little Easter eggs I recently hunted down to pass along for your reading and listening pleasure. May they provide some amusement, entertainment, and even inspiration.

  • 13 Ways of Looking at Socks is one poet’s “meditations on something so deeply mundane that we rarely think about it until we reach into the sock drawer and it’s empty or just sad and disappointing and now you have to do laundry.” The author, Mary Roblyn, wrote it as a riff on Wallace Stevens’ 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. In Roblyn’s case, she accompanies her writing with relevant photos.
  • “Good writers borrow, great writers steal.” We’ve all heard that old saying, right? Writer B.J. Novak (he of “The Office” fame) takes it literally in this short audio piece, which he and actor Aasif Mandvi read to open a recent episode of the podcast Selected Shorts (highly recommended for fans of short fiction). The story is from Novak’s book of short stories, One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories.
  • Vermilion Cliffs is a lovely piece of micro fiction by Allison Field Bell, published in Fractured Lit, the online literary journal devoted to flash and micro fiction.
  • “Far from this foreign Easter damp and chilly/My soul steals to a pear-shaped plot of ground,/Where gleamed the lilac-tinted Easter lily/Soft-scented in the air for yards around;” — begins Claude McKay’s poem/meditation “The Easter Flower.”
  • Here’s the pitch, baseball fans: Some of the greatest books about sports are also about so much more. Just in time for the opening of baseball season, Keith O’Brien, the author of a book about one of the game’s greatest tragic figures, Pete Rose, gives us Greek Tragedy in the Bottom of the Ninth: On Baseball’s High Literary Drama. Play ball!

Photo by Laurentiu Iordache on Unsplash

Facebook, the World Series and combined relevance

Since meeting Dan Zarrella at a social media workshop last June, where he presented his “Science of Social Media” talk, I’ve been experimenting with some of his principles for spreading ideas via social media. One of his principles — that of combined relevance — has been of particular interest to me, and during the World Series, I had a chance to put it into practice on behalf of our university.

I bet you thought I’d shut up about baseball by now, more than a week after my favorite team, the St. Louis Cardinals, won the World Series. But even if you aren’t a baseball fan, I think you’ll find that this topic has a bit of combined relevance for you as a higher ed marketer. So, please bear with me.

Zarrella explains combined relevance as the merging of “two seemingly distinct interests,” and it works in social media because it connects organizations with the interests of their audiences in unexpected ways. Combined relevance finds a connection with audiences that often have little to do with an organization’s brand or sales pitch.

“By combining two apparently unrelated niches,” Zarrella writes, “you can create a piece of content likely to go viral with people who just happen to be into both things.”

In Zarrella’s oft-cited case, the two unrelated niches were “gadgets and Victorian era intoxicants.” (You really need to read his post to fully appreciate where he’s coming from.) For me most recently, the two niches weren’t quite so exotic. I combined professional baseball with a graduate of our university.

After St. Louis’ comeback in Game 6 of this year’s World Series, in which hometown boy David Freese shone by tying the game in the ninth inning, then hitting the game-winning home run in extra innings, our department learned, via our alumni office, that Freese’s father was a graduate of our university. So we decided to test the theory of combined relevance on our Facebook site with the following post connecting our institution with a baseball hero.

Here’s a fun fact for all you St. Louis Cardinals fans out there. David Freese, the St. Louis hometown boy who hit the game-winning home run in last night’s Game 6 of the World Series, is the son of Rolla grad Guy Freese, CE’75. How cool is that?

This single post resulted in a significant spike in activity on our site. As of yesterday (Tuesday) afternoon, the post has garnered:

  • 3,610 impressions
  • 138 likes
  • 10 comments (including one from us)

Here’s what the post looked like:

Using combined relevance -- in this case, the World Series and a Missouri S&T graduate's family connection -- on our Facebook site
Using combined relevance -- in this case, the World Series and a Missouri S&T graduate's family connection -- on our Facebook site

That may not sound like much to some of you, but those numbers represent one of the most viewed postings on our Facebook site. And, according to Facebook’s algorithms, also one of the most viral. It’s virality score of above 11 percent was more than four times higher than the runner-up for the month of October.

Of course, we can’t always make combined-relevance connections to occasions as prominent as the World Series. But we can still find ways to connect our institutions to relevant topics being discussed in the social media sphere. The key is to be attuned to what our audiences are talking about. On one warm October day, quite a few of our Facebook fans were interested in baseball, and they apparently liked that we were interested in it, too.

Are superstars worth it?

So Manny Ramirez of the L.A. Dodgers has been suspended for 50 games — 50 games! — after testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs.

Another Major League Baseball superstar falls from his lofty perch, and joins the all-enhanced team of America’s favorite pastime. And costs his team. Dearly.

The story of Manny — and A-Rod, Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds and several other high-profile players busted for or suspected of using performance-enhancing drugs — should be a cautionary tale for all sectors of business, not just sports entertainment.

The caution is not about using performance-enhancing drugs. I’m not aware of too many higher ed marketing, PR or communications types using performance-enhancing drugs, unless you count Red Bull and strong coffee. No, this cautionary tale is about the price of chasing after superstars.

So many colleges and universities seem to get caught up in the game of trying to attract the superstars of academia. The search committees for endowed chairs seem to always want the highest-achieving superstar in that field — and usually because that’s what the president wants, what the donor wants, or what the development officer has promised the donor. But what happens when that superstar professor turns out to be a complete a-hole? Then you have an expensive liability on your hands.

Sometimes, superstars hurt the team.

Consider the Boston Red Sox. No one would argue that in the late 1990s and early 2000s, their shortstop, Nomar Garciaparra, was one of the best in the game while playing for Boston. But as time went on and the organization changed, Garciaparra felt his role was being diminished — threatened by up-and-coming superstars like David Ortiz and, yes, Manny — and be 2005, he was a malcontent and a liability to the team. He was traded to the Cubs, and a year later, the rejuvenated Red Sox won the World Series.

Consider your own shop. When you’re looking for a new staff member, are you concerned most with someone’s resume? How many awards they’ve won or how prestigious their academic pedigree? Or are you looking for someone who can fit into your team? Are you hell-bent on bringing in someone from the outside — a free agent, so to speak? — or will you also consider promoting from within (from the “farm team,” to stretch the analogy). When the choice boils down to ability versus attitude, which is more important?

P.S. – In case you’re wondering how long it took Manny to reach your annual salary this year, here’s an easy way to find out.

P.S.S. – I’m still in a blogging slump. But the Manny Ramirez story was just too good of a blogging opportunity to pass up. Guest-blogging inquiries are still welcome. See previous post.