Now that’s a game story
Those of you who recall an era when game strories weren’t mere regurgitations of the box score will enjoy Josh Levin’s game story over at Slate:
On this night, the slim Phillie’s casual brilliance outshines the grunting effort of his hefty ex-Indians teammate CC Sabathia. Despite a recurrent inability to spot his pitches, the Yankees starter kept every Phillie off the scoreboard excepting the brilliant, lefty-hitting second baseman Chase Utley. Down to his last strike in each of his first three plate appearances, Utley coaxed a walk and yanked two solo home runs. Utley’s first shot comes with his left hand off the bat, a looping parabola that drops over Yankee Stadium’s short right field porch. The second, which extends the Phillies’ lead to 2-0, gets half as high off the ground and travels seemingly twice as far to deep right-center, leaving grunts and gasps in its wake.
Since this is grammar day at ShysterBall, he shouldn’t have used variations of “brilliant” and “grunt” twice, maybe not grunt at all. No thesaurus available at NYS?
Sentence 1: night vs. outshines & slim vs. hefty
Sentence 3: coaxed vs. yanked & last vs. first & walk vs. runs
Sentence 4: left hand vs. right field
Sentence 5: half as high vs. twice as far
Overplaying the dualaties? One can’t be sure.
edit dualities
Not to be picky, but those are edits for style, not grammar.
Seems to recalling The Mick with the one-handed bomb.
What, he couldn’t work in “gonfalon”?
This is the first baseball-related article I’ve come across that uses the word “grunt” twice with nary a reference to David Eckstein OR Darin Erstad.
Somewhere, in whatever plane of existence that exists beyond the mortal realm, Grantland Rice just smiled.
dan daniel, fred leib, and damon runyon raise a schooner of ruppert’s brew to young mr levin.